My Kindle Clippings/2014

2014

January

Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig)
- Highlight on Page 140 | Loc. 2370-74  | Added on Friday, January 03, 2014, 11:32 AM

In the wake of the Cold War, Cuba became not only one of the last remaining Communist regimes on earth but also one of the few to resist broader economic liberalization. As a result, during a decade where globalization was a buzzword and the spread of global mass commercial culture was celebrated by some intellectuals and denigrated by others, Cuba became a kind of historical artifact, seeming to echo or reinforce idyllic visions of a decommercialized past. Such conceptions fueled not only a significant portion of Cuba’s draw as a tourist destination but also a renewed attraction to Cuban artists and music.
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Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig)
- Highlight on Page 140 | Loc. 2374-79  | Added on Friday, January 03, 2014, 11:33 AM

Moreover, beginning in 1987, a crack in the U.S. information embargo opened up when Congress passed what came to be known as the Berman amendment, for Congressman Howard Berman of California. Crafted to protect the First Amendment rights violated by the ban on American travel to Cuba, the new law allowed Americans to import “informational material,” interpreted as not only printed material but also any form of creative expression, including music, visual art, sculpture, etc. These liberalized cultural exchange policies under the Clinton administration, coupled with the growing power of digital technology, increased access to a veritable treasure trove of past and present Cuban art that had by and large not received significant Western attention.
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Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig)
- Highlight on Page 146 | Loc. 2452-53  | Added on Tuesday, January 07, 2014, 10:56 AM

Today, Cuba spends 43% of its national budget on health, education, and social security.
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Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig)
- Highlight on Page 147 | Loc. 2468-71  | Added on Tuesday, January 07, 2014, 10:58 AM

The UN has recognized the extremely low infection rate in Cuba and in 2006 hailed the island’s program as “among the most effective in the world.” Notably, in Cuba only 29 children have become infected with HIV in the past 20 years as Cuba has effectively prevented mother-to-child transmission of HIV, mainly due to the government’s universal provision of antiretroviral therapy, which became broadly available in 2001.
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Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig)
- Highlight on Page 147 | Loc. 2477-80  | Added on Tuesday, January 07, 2014, 10:59 AM

Those looking for the end of the Cold War to transform Cuba into a western liberal democracy were sorely disappointed. Organized opposition parties and groups remained proscribed, free speech and assembly continued to be repressed, and, although their numbers had vastly diminished, political prisoners still languished in Cuban jails. (By the end of the 1990s, the number of political prisoners hovered in the range of 200 to 300.)
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Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig)
- Highlight on Page 148 | Loc. 2491-93  | Added on Tuesday, January 07, 2014, 11:02 AM

Yet in light of decades of American attempts to unseat the regime, receiving funds from external sources (or simply the perception of being willing to do so) cast a pall of suspicion over their activities, leading to accusations that they were mere lackeys of foreign interests.
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Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig)
- Highlight on Page 150 | Loc. 2518-20  | Added on Tuesday, January 07, 2014, 11:08 AM

In 2002, Payá presented 11,000 signatures backing the Varela Project to the National Assembly of People’s Power in Cuba, coinciding with former president (and human rights champion) Jimmy Carter’s historic trip to the island.
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Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig)
- Highlight on Page 149 | Loc. 2500-2503  | Added on Tuesday, January 07, 2014, 11:08 AM

In March of 2003, for example, human rights activists were dealt one of their most significant blows since the end of the Cold War when authorities arrested some 75 independent journalists, prodemocracy organizers, and other dissidents. In what became known as the “black spring,” Cuban officials targeted those individuals allegedly collaborating with or receiving funds from the U.S. government, Cuban American groups, and/or international organizations agitating for more democracy and human rights.
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Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig)
- Highlight on Page 157 | Loc. 2618-21  | Added on Tuesday, January 07, 2014, 11:19 AM

Cuban authorities viewed the controversy over Elián not only as an indicator of all that was sour in U.S. policy toward Cuba but also as an opportunity to goad the Cuban American community into potentially damaging missteps in its quest to keep the embargo in place. Yet Fidel wasn’t the only one who saw Elián’s story and his ultimate fate as a potent symbol.
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Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig)
- Highlight on Page 158 | Loc. 2640-44  | Added on Tuesday, January 07, 2014, 11:21 AM

With Attorney General Janet Reno’s authorization, federal agents stormed the Little Havana house in a surprise, predawn raid, seized the boy, and quickly ferreted him away to his father. After two months in Washington waiting out a courts appeal process and under 24-hour protection by the ATF, Elián and his father returned to Cuba as national heroes. The entire episode inflicted great damage, first and foremost to the boy and his family, while dealing a withering blow to those in the exile community who attempted to exploit his odyssey.
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Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig)
- Highlight on Page 161 | Loc. 2692-94  | Added on Tuesday, January 07, 2014, 11:27 AM

Yet by and large, in foreign policy, the White House was preoccupied with the consequences of German reunification, the first Gulf War in Iraq, the breakup of the Soviet Union into over a dozen separate countries, and bailing out Moscow. Moreover, the first Bush administration did not put a premium on schadenfreude, at least in public.
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Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig)
- Highlight on Page 162 | Loc. 2701-4  | Added on Tuesday, January 07, 2014, 11:35 AM

Proclaiming that the time had come to “put the hammer down on Fidel Castro,” Clinton endorsed the Cuban Democracy Act, a piece of legislation conceived initially by Mas and sponsored by New Jersey Congressmen Robert Toricelli. Against his better judgment and to no political or electoral benefit of his soon to be one-term presidency, George H.W. Bush endorsed the bill and then signed it into law in October 1992, just before his defeat in the November elections.
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Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig)
- Highlight on Page 164 | Loc. 2725-26  | Added on Tuesday, January 07, 2014, 11:38 AM

As a result of these complex and politicized regulations, actual sales seldom transpired. Indeed, Cuba would claim that the embargo was directly responsible for the death or illness of patients for whom Cuba was unable to purchase key equipment and medicines.
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Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig)
- Highlight on Page 165 | Loc. 2739-41  | Added on Tuesday, January 07, 2014, 11:39 AM

Equally significant, the bill retained nearly full executive privilege over the embargo; if he saw fit, the president could still do away with most sanctions with the stroke of a pen.
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Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig)
- Highlight on Page 167 | Loc. 2774-77  | Added on Tuesday, January 07, 2014, 11:45 AM

Yet even more to the point, because the agreements involved government-to-government cooperation, they compromised many exile leaders’ beliefs in a strategy of complete isolation from the Castro government. In their view, the migration agreements conferred sovereign status on a regime considered illegitimate by the exile leadership.
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Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig)
- Note on Page 167 | Loc. 2777  | Added on Tuesday, January 07, 2014, 11:46 AM

and because the exile community is based in FL... they have disproportionate influence over national politics
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Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig)
- Highlight on Page 168 | Loc. 2786-89  | Added on Tuesday, January 07, 2014, 11:48 AM

Upon coming to office, the Clinton administration moved to signal its embrace of democratic movements, parties, and institutions in Latin America, distancing itself from the Cold War preference for stable authoritarian regimes. Yet when the Republicans swept the 1994 midterm elections (only months after the balsero crisis came to an end), none other than Jesse Helms, a hard-core anti-Communist crusader, became chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, signaling that the Cold War was far from over.
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Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig)
- Highlight on Page 173 | Loc. 2864-67  | Added on Thursday, January 09, 2014, 11:23 AM

the president conceded a degree of executive authority that not even Jesse Helms had expected possible. Helms-Burton codified all existing provisions of the embargo. While the president would retain some authority to tinker with some restrictions on the margins, by and large the executive branch gave up its authority to lift or impose sanctions, turning over to Congress a substantial portion of its power to shape policy toward the island.
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Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig)
- Highlight on Page 173 | Loc. 2876-77  | Added on Thursday, January 09, 2014, 11:26 AM

If ever Castro needed justification for the government’s siege mentality, or proof that he and the revolution were all that protected Cuban citizens from a return to the injustices of the Batista past, Helms-Burton was it.
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Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig)
- Highlight on Page 176 | Loc. 2908-9  | Added on Thursday, January 09, 2014, 11:35 AM

With an eye on the 2000 election, however, the White House ruled out any bolder ventures, lest they damage Al Gore’s chances at the presidency.
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Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig)
- Highlight on Page 178 | Loc. 2943-47  | Added on Thursday, January 09, 2014, 11:45 AM

The pope’s visit to Cuba in 1998 provided the opportunity for reform-minded CANF members, including Mas Santos, to steer the organization away from his father’s rigid isolationist approach by supporting family ties and dissidents on the island. After Mas Canosa, new Cuban American voices and organizations gained some political space in Miami and in Washington. By slowly adapting to a new reality of family ties and more forcefully promoting the potential of a viable opposition on the ground within Cuba, the CANF was able to retain a shot at relevance under a new generation’s leadership.
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Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig)
- Highlight on Page 178 | Loc. 2951-52  | Added on Thursday, January 09, 2014, 11:45 AM

The Elián González episode, followed by the contested 2000 election, dashed any expectation that the end of Clinton’s presidency would bring dramatic moves by the White House toward Cuba.
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Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig)
- Highlight on Page 179 | Loc. 2956-58  | Added on Friday, January 10, 2014, 11:30 AM

Gore knew he would be hard pressed to sustain Clinton’s impressive gains in Cuban American votes in 1996. And he didn’t: Gore lost Florida to Bush by 537 votes, but he lost Cuban American votes by a much wider margin, winning just under 20% to Bush’s 80%, a more than 15% decline relative to the Democrats’ win in 1996.
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Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig)
- Highlight on Page 179 | Loc. 2958-60  | Added on Friday, January 10, 2014, 11:30 AM

Nothing dramatized the political backlash of the Elián affair as much as the spectacle of Cuban Americans participating among the crowd of demonstrators in December 2000 who succeeded in forcing, literally, an end to the Miami-Dade recount, and ultimately to Al Gore’s shot at the presidency.
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Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig)
- Highlight on Page 180 | Loc. 2981-85  | Added on Friday, January 10, 2014, 11:36 AM

they were intent on plugging a leaky embargo even though public opinion (whether nationally, in the business community, or among Cuban Americans) was clearly supportive of the Clinton-era openings. Moreover, the president himself (whose brother, Governor Jeb Bush of Florida, had developed deep political and business ties with Cuban exile leaders) had campaigned on a promise to bring down Fidel. Nonetheless, prior to September 11, 2001, the new government paid scarce attention to Cuba.
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Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig)
- Highlight on Page 186 | Loc. 3061-64  | Added on Friday, January 10, 2014, 07:08 PM

In 1990, following intensive lobbying from the Florida congressional delegation, the first President Bush pardoned long-time anti-Castro terrorist Orlando Bosch, one of the two principal intellectual architects of the 1976 explosion of the Cubana Airline passenger flight that killed all 73 people on board. In 2005, his co-conspirator, Luis Posada Carriles, crossed into Texas from Mexico, and after a period of one month in detention, was released. Both now live in the Miami area.
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Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig)
- Bookmark on Page 187 | Loc. 3079  | Added on Friday, January 10, 2014, 07:10 PM


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Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig)
- Highlight on Page 187 | Loc. 3078-83  | Added on Friday, January 10, 2014, 07:10 PM

The Bush administration largely ignored Venezuela’s extradition request, arguing that Caracas failed to present enough evidence. More likely, given the amount of declassified documentation available on the case, Bush officials bowed to pressure from Posada supporters who claim he would be tortured if returned to Chávez’s Venezuela. Yet neither has the United States endeavored to hold Posada accountable for his crimes. Although the Patriot Act permits the United States to indefinitely detain “excludable aliens” who are authors of terrorist attacks, Posada now lives, and is occasionally and publicly celebrated, in Miami, though generally by an aging group of his peers rather than by the majority of Cuban Americans.
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Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig)
- Highlight on Page 187 | Loc. 3086-88  | Added on Friday, January 10, 2014, 07:11 PM

As the United States entered the new millennium, Elián fatigue, embargo fatigue, and widespread annoyance with the domestic politics of the Cuba issue had helped create a bipartisan consensus in favor of dramatic policy change.
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Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig)
- Highlight on Page 189 | Loc. 3107-10  | Added on Friday, January 10, 2014, 07:14 PM

Havana reasoned that allowing the groups to continue to function could also give an in-road to an enemy whose designs may well turn belligerent. Thus, in the eyes of Cuban officials, the national security prerogatives of cracking down on domestic opposition activists were well worth the near-universal international backlash Cuba was likely to (and did) incur. It is no surprise that the “black spring” arrests of 75 dissidents occurred in March 2003, the day before Bush formally declared war on Iraq.
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Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig)
- Highlight on Page 191 | Loc. 3133-35  | Added on Friday, January 10, 2014, 07:16 PM

Yet as allegations of torture surfaced and the legality of the detentions came into question, Guantánamo became, as it did for many of America’s global critics, a symbol of American imperial hubris, one which in the Cuban case also allowed Havana to highlight the island’s own history of grievances over American violations of its sovereignty.
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Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig)
- Highlight on Page 195 | Loc. 3205-6  | Added on Friday, January 10, 2014, 07:35 PM

After the Cold War came to an end, Castro viewed the emerging liberal democratic capitalist order in Latin America as a threat to social justice and a potential recipe for the political marginalization of the left.
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Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig)
- Highlight on Page 198 | Loc. 3246-48  | Added on Friday, January 10, 2014, 07:42 PM

Between November 2005 and the end of 2006, Latin Americans went to the national polls in 12 countries. Left and center-left leaders were elected or reelected in 8 of the 12—Brazil, Chile, Bolivia, Ecuador, Nicaragua, Honduras, Venezuela, and Uruguay—and came within striking distance of victory in Peru and Mexico.
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Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig)
- Highlight on Page 198 | Loc. 3249-51  | Added on Friday, January 10, 2014, 07:43 PM

these impressive electoral outcomes (and close losses) signaled an increasingly empowered electorate’s demands for public policies to address vast inequality, poverty, social exclusion, and rampant crime.
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Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig)
- Highlight on Page 199 | Loc. 3265-68  | Added on Friday, January 10, 2014, 07:46 PM

through well-funded and fiscally competent institutions, a government’s primary role is to deliver the building blocks of opportunity, dignity, and social rights to populations long excluded from the region’s wealth and resources. By the end of his presidency, even George W. Bush indirectly conceded this point by attempting to frame U.S. policy toward the region as helping Latin Americans achieve social justice, appropriating language once the preserve of Cuba and the region’s Left.
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Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig)
- Highlight on Page 199 | Loc. 3270-71  | Added on Friday, January 10, 2014, 07:46 PM

while Cuba’s international message continues to resonate, its domestic model is largely seen as an anachronistic holdover from a prior era.
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Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig)
- Highlight on Page 201 | Loc. 3293-97  | Added on Friday, January 10, 2014, 07:49 PM

When in April 2002 Chávez was briefly ousted in a coup, the White House and the U.S. embassy in Caracas issued statements indicating that they looked forward to working with the new government. The president of the congressionally funded International Republican Institute even praised the coup attempt. Leaders throughout Latin America were justifiably appalled at Washington’s seeming approval of a fundamentally undemocratic act. Indeed, just months earlier in September 2001, Colin Powell had stood with Latin Americans to sign the OAS’s Inter-American Democratic Charter, which explicitly banned coups from the region’s political playbook.
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Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig)
- Highlight on Page 203 | Loc. 3319  | Added on Friday, January 10, 2014, 07:51 PM

while interests remain permanent, alliances never are.
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Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig)
- Highlight on Page 203 | Loc. 3321-24  | Added on Friday, January 10, 2014, 07:51 PM

With a population of just over 11 million, Cuba’s GDP (roughly $45 billion in 2007) falls closest to neighbors like the Dominican Republic or Ecuador. GDP per capita is comparable to that of Guatemala or Honduras. But unlike any of these countries, Cuba has attempted to shield most of its population from the dynamism and pressures of globalization,
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Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig)
- Highlight on Page 203 | Loc. 3330-32  | Added on Friday, January 10, 2014, 07:53 PM

Although agriculture has been somewhat decentralized and private farmers’ markets are now ubiquitous, Cuba still imports over 80% of the food consumed by Cubans and foreign tourists, with a sizeable percentage from the United States since 2001.
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Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig)
- Highlight on Page 206 | Loc. 3364-65  | Added on Friday, January 10, 2014, 07:57 PM

With the prisons at Guantánamo a daily reminder of the human consequences of one country rewriting the international rules of war, Cuba was able to deflect attention from its own prisons and political prisoners onto those jailed by a foreign power on its own territory.
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Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Julia E. Sweig)
- Highlight on Page 216 | Loc. 3501-2  | Added on Friday, January 10, 2014, 08:13 PM

Though some in the Bush administration dismissed these changes as simply “cosmetic,” other reforms are far less susceptible to this charge.
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February

Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Note on Page 566 | Loc. 11753  | Added on Saturday, February 01, 2014, 12:02 AM

antiwar emonstrations
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Note on Page 565 | Loc. 11726  | Added on Saturday, February 01, 2014, 12:03 AM

hoovers deathand his files
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Note on Page 564 | Loc. 11710  | Added on Saturday, February 01, 2014, 12:03 AM

espionage and anti narcotics plans
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Note on Page 563 | Loc. 11693  | Added on Saturday, February 01, 2014, 12:04 AM

helms nixon reationship warms
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Note on Page 563 | Loc. 11677  | Added on Saturday, February 01, 2014, 12:04 AM

hels pursues spy movies for hunt and cia pr
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Note on Page 562 | Loc. 11660  | Added on Saturday, February 01, 2014, 12:04 AM

helms and hunt
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Note on Page 560 | Loc. 11628  | Added on Saturday, February 01, 2014, 12:05 AM

mccord security cia exiles involve.emt bay of pigs
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Note on Page 559 | Loc. 11613  | Added on Saturday, February 01, 2014, 12:06 AM

fiorini sturgis knew hunt from bay of pigs well before wqatergate
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Note on Page 560 | Loc. 11619  | Added on Saturday, February 01, 2014, 12:06 AM

sturgis met hunt during cia almeida assassination plot
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Note on Page 561 | Loc. 11647  | Added on Saturday, February 01, 2014, 12:07 AM

martinez cia reorting on hunt white house connections activities
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Note on Page 569 | Loc. 11803  | Added on Saturday, February 01, 2014, 12:08 AM

fall and rise o jimmy hoffa book
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Note on Page 571 | Loc. 11857  | Added on Saturday, February 01, 2014, 12:09 AM

chilean embassy plumbers burglary numero uno
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Note on Page 573 | Loc. 11898  | Added on Saturday, February 01, 2014, 12:10 AM

mccrd still oyal to cia. said wh was bugging embassy. knewwhen to burgle and whre.
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Note on Page 575 | Loc. 11931  | Added on Saturday, February 01, 2014, 12:11 AM

fiorini and rosselli both say chilean embassy burglary was abt cuban dosier
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Note on Page 576 | Loc. 11960  | Added on Saturday, February 01, 2014, 12:12 AM

dossier mid 1960-71
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 578 | Loc. 12000-12003  | Added on Saturday, February 01, 2014, 12:14 AM

All Helms would have needed to do initially was to communicate to Nixon that he needed to see him about “the Bay of Pigs thing”—meaning the CIA-Mafia plots—and that would have gotten the President’s immediate attention. That also helps to explain why that term came up on Nixon’s tapes when Hunt’s name surfaced in the Watergate affair, and the term was then thrown back at Helms, to get him to force the FBI to back off on the Watergate investigation.
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 579 | Loc. 12007-10  | Added on Saturday, February 01, 2014, 12:14 AM

It’s not hard to imagine Hunt’s reaction when he heard about the Cuban Dossier, since he’d been involved in attempts to kill Fidel from 1960 to 1965. The same is true for his assistant, Bernard Barker—and for Barker’s longtime boss, Santo Trafficante. The godfather would not only have no objection to Barker and Fiorini’s involvement in trying to get a copy of the Dossier, but would probably have encouraged their participation as a way to know what was going on.
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 579 | Loc. 12019-22  | Added on Saturday, February 01, 2014, 12:15 AM

Nixon would still privately be insisting that legitimate “national security” concerns were behind the Watergate break-ins and the cover-up. Nixon was specifically talking about the highly incriminating “Smoking Gun” tape, in which the President talked about the Watergate cover-up and the “Bay of Pigs thing,” and the fact that “Hunt, ah, he knows too damn much, and he was involved.”
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 580 | Loc. 12029-33  | Added on Saturday, February 01, 2014, 12:16 AM

Nixon never explained—to his aides or in public—just what those “national security reasons” were, and how they related to Hunt and the “Bay of Pigs thing.” Ongoing CIA operations are exempt from some disclosure requirements to Congress, an important consideration since both houses were controlled by the Democratic Party. (Ongoing operations only have to be disclosed to four members, two leaders from each party in each house of Congress, and the CIA’s descriptions can be so vague and general as to be virtually meaningless.)
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 580 | Loc. 12035-43  | Added on Saturday, February 01, 2014, 12:17 AM

But there was an important, ongoing CIA operation that could have been endangered if it were listed in the Cuban Dossier, or if it were uncovered because public exposure of the Dossier led to more investigations. That ongoing operation had involved Richard Helms since its inception, and had also involved E. Howard Hunt and Bernard Barker. It was the JFK-Almeida coup plan, or, rather, what was left of the operation, which was the CIA’s ongoing support for Commander Juan Almeida’s wife and at least two children outside of Cuba. Plus the fact that Commander Almeida—in some ways the No. 3 official in Cuba—could still be favorably disposed to helping the United States if anything should happen to Fidel Castro (who had already ruled longer than most Latin American dictators). There was also the fact that Almeida could always be blackmailed into helping the United States (because of his work for JFK), even if he didn’t want to do so willingly. Hunt and Barker had even handled the $50,000 payment to Almeida in 1963, when they had helped arrange for his wife and two children to first leave Cuba under a seemingly innocent pretext.
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 582 | Loc. 12068-70  | Added on Saturday, February 01, 2014, 12:22 AM

The search for the Cuban Dossier explains why the burglars at the Chilean embassy and the Watergate were all former CIA agents, officers, or assets experienced in anti-Castro operations. The only exception was G. Gordon Liddy, who helped Hunt supervise the Watergate break-ins from across the street.
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 582 | Loc. 12077-78  | Added on Saturday, February 01, 2014, 12:24 AM

Memos concerning Rosselli’s 1974 Watergate Committee staff interview about the CIA-Mafia plots were considered so sensitive that they were kept secret for decades, and are published in this book for the first time.57
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 582 | Loc. 12079-86  | Added on Saturday, February 01, 2014, 12:24 AM

Richard Nixon’s national security rationale/excuse for the Chilean embassy and Watergate break-ins would initially be effective in forcing CIA Director Richard Helms to ask the FBI not to fully investigate the final Watergate break-in. It also kept Nixon’s taped admission about his knowledge of the Chilean Embassy break-in secret until 1999. That was good for Nixon, since in 1976, he provided a written answer to the Senate Church Committee denying any such knowledge, saying that     I do not remember being informed while President, that at any time during my Administration an agency or employee of the United States Government, acting without a warrant, engaged in a surreptitious or otherwise unauthorized entry into the Chilean Embassy in the United States.58
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 584 | Loc. 12112-15  | Added on Saturday, February 01, 2014, 12:27 AM

in May 1972, just prior to the initial unsuccessful Watergate break-in, Hunt and Barker’s team cased and made plans to bug “the offices of McGovern’s two top aides, Frank Mankiewicz and Gary Hart.” (Five years earlier, Mankiewicz had secretly investigated JFK’s assassination for Robert Kennedy, while Hart would soon be part of the Senate Church Committee that first exposed the CIA-Mafia plots.)
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 584 | Loc. 12115-19  | Added on Saturday, February 01, 2014, 12:28 AM

Mankiewicz’s and Hart’s offices on Memorial Day 1972 and told him that photographing documents would be part of the mission. Lukas also pointed out that Barker and the other Watergate burglars were “mentioned in connection with a May 16 burglary of a prominent Democratic law firm in the Watergate, whose members included . . . Sargent Shriver, [Senator Edward] Kennedy’s brother-in-law.” That burglary was discovered when an early-arriving employee “noticed the entry door was . . . taped so the door would not lock,” similar to what happened on the final two Watergate burglaries.
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 585 | Loc. 12123-29  | Added on Saturday, February 01, 2014, 12:28 AM

After the Plumbers failed to obtain a complete copy of the Cuban Dossier at the Chilean embassy, there would be a significant change in mission for the upcoming burglary of the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate. No longer would it be primarily a small bugging operation; now, having a larger crew photographing documents would become its primary goal. One can only imagine the reaction of Nixon, or Helms, if they heard that the Cuban Dossier started in 1960 with a CIA plot to kill Fidel involving a “gangster,” or that the Dossier continued until the December 1971 attempt to kill Fidel in Chile. Hunt had told Fiorini the Dossier was approximately one hundred pages long, yet they only had a piece of it, so they had no way of knowing what was on the other pages that could harm the CIA’s reputation or Nixon’s reelection campaign.
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 586 | Loc. 12143-46  | Added on Saturday, February 01, 2014, 12:29 AM

Some writers have speculated that Watergate was all about the $100,000 cash contribution from Howard Hughes to Nixon, via Bebe Rebozo, and what DNC Chairman Larry O’Brien might have known about the payment. But there had already been two Jack Anderson articles about the $100,000, and it would have been hard—if not impossible—for Larry O’Brien to use that issue against Nixon without opening himself up to charges about his own lucrative work for Hughes.
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 588 | Loc. 12186-90  | Added on Saturday, February 01, 2014, 12:31 AM

The fact that Nixon, Helms, and Hunt were willing to risk several break-ins in the span of just a few weeks shows a level of desperation missing from most Watergate accounts. However, the possibility of the CIA-Mafia plots becoming public during the campaign was simply too great to ignore. Ultimately, in trying to obtain a full copy of the Dossier and learn what the Democrats knew, Nixon would cost himself the Presidency, Helms would end his career, and Hunt would go to prison.
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 590 | Loc. 12222-27  | Added on Saturday, February 01, 2014, 12:34 AM

There were several reasons for targeting Spencer Oliver’s Watergate office and phone. Former Associated Press reporter Robert Parry pointed out that Oliver’s father “worked with Robert R. Mullen, whose Washington-based public relations firm [still officially] employed Hunt,” even as most of Hunt’s time was consumed by his work for Nixon. The Mullen firm, and new owner Robert Bennett, worked extensively for Howard Hughes, and “Oliver’s father had represented Hughes.” That meant in addition to the secret Cuban Dossier, Oliver could have information damaging to Nixon that his father could have gotten from Hughes or his representatives.8
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 593 | Loc. 12298-305  | Added on Sunday, February 02, 2014, 04:23 PM

The first break-in wasn’t scheduled until May 26—so why did Hunt have the men fly into Washington on May 22? It’s possible the extra time was needed to get their cover stories straight, and to make sure the men knew what additional information to look for at the Watergate and McGovern headquarters. As Fiorini told St. George, in addition to their main goal of looking for the Cuban Dossier, they were also keeping their eyes open for other material to photograph, some related to the Dossier and some not: “any document with money on it . . . anything that had to do with Howard Hughes . . . damaging rumors about Republican leaders [and] everything that could be leaked to the press with a damaging effect to the McGovern people.” Those items would be icing on the cake, but they weren’t the kinds of things for which Nixon would have risked his Presidency.15
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 594 | Loc. 12315-18  | Added on Sunday, February 02, 2014, 04:24 PM

The “cover” for the burglary was going to be a supposed “board meeting” banquet and film screening for Ameritas, a real estate company affiliated with Barker. The small banquet would be held in the basement of the Watergate Hotel, which had access—via a corridor and a courtyard—to a garage and stairwell in the Watergate office building where the DNC headquarters was located.17
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 595 | Loc. 12340-49  | Added on Sunday, February 02, 2014, 04:27 PM

The next night, the Plumbers tried a different approach: going in through the main Watergate office building entrance, signing the register (using aliases) indicating they were going to the Federal Reserve offices on the eighth floor, then walking down two flights of stairs to the DNC offices. McCord was with Fiorini and the exiles, while Hunt and Liddy waited with Baldwin across the street. Eugenio Martinez thought the plan strained credibility—what were so many men doing going to the Federal Reserve office at midnight, on Saturday, during the Memorial Day weekend? Still, all went according to plan, until Virgilio Gonzalez was unable to open the doors to the DNC offices with the lock-picking tools he had brought.21 Hunt was furious when he learned of the failure, and he demanded that Gonzalez fly back to Miami, get his tools, and return by Sunday night, for a third attempt. Martinez thought that Hunt was being too hard on Gonzalez, but when he complained, Barker relayed a blunt message from Hunt: “You are an operative. Your mission is to do what you are told and not to ask questions.”
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 596 | Loc. 12359-64  | Added on Sunday, February 02, 2014, 04:28 PM

On Sunday night, May 28, 1972, the burglars tried a different route into the Watergate, and they finally were successful. While Hunt, Liddy, and Baldwin waited in the Howard Johnson’s motel across the street, this time the burglars entered the Watergate office building through the garage, with McCord taping open “the basement stairwell door.” Emery wrote that “once on the sixth floor, Gonzalez . . . used a pressure wrench to twist the lock on the rear door to the DNC and they were in.” As McCord placed the bugs, “Barker and Martinez started photographing documents, while . . . Pico and De Diego served as corridor lookouts.”24
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 597 | Loc. 12382-87  | Added on Sunday, February 02, 2014, 04:30 PM

either McCord’s sense of caution or the former CIA security officer’s possible growing reluctance to be part of such clearly illegal political spying. The break-in at the Chilean embassy was standard CIA fare; in some ways it was a typical CIA security operation to ensure that Agency secrets weren’t in the wrong hands. But the DNC break-in was something else, a grossly illegal political operation with a thin national security cover of protecting CIA secrets and Agency assets like Commander Almeida. After the successful May 28 break-in, Liddy planned for McCord to develop the two rolls of film. But after a week, McCord had made no progress, which could be another sign of his unease about the whole project. Liddy then gave the film to Hunt and asked if Barker could get it developed.
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 598 | Loc. 12388-91  | Added on Sunday, February 02, 2014, 04:30 PM

The fact that McCord was supposed to use his contact to develop the Watergate film raises interesting questions. Who developed the film from the Chilean embassy break-in? The CIA? And who was McCord’s contact who was supposed to develop the Watergate film? Someone with Agency contacts? Those questions would only deepen after Barker had the film developed.
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 599 | Loc. 12406-13  | Added on Sunday, February 02, 2014, 04:32 PM

While making those plans, and dealing with Artime in Miami on the narcotics operation, Hunt gave the DNC film from the third Watergate burglary attempt to Barker to get developed. Hunt later said that somehow Barker didn’t understand the film was from the Watergate job, so Barker took it to a local camera shop to have the film developed and enlargements made. Why Barker wouldn’t realize—or even assume—the two rolls were from the Watergate mission has never been clear. As Hunt and Barker later told the story, once Barker realized it was the Watergate film, he became frantic. To the Hunt/Barker account, Martinez added a scene where an anxious Barker came to his real estate office, where Martinez just happened to be talking to two other Watergate burglars, Fiorini and De Diego. The three supposedly rushed to Rich’s Camera Shop, where the other two covered “each door to the shop” while Barker tipped the owner “$20 or $30” when the owner said about the photos: “It’s real cloak-and-dagger stuff, isn’t it?”29
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 600 | Loc. 12425-30  | Added on Sunday, February 02, 2014, 04:33 PM

The Watergate burglars could have stolen some documents and photographed them later in the Howard Johnson’s motel room. But few papers—and none of importance—could have been taken, since the DNC staff didn’t realize anything had been taken from the office. Some authors, like Hougan, think that McCord could have switched the film canisters and had the real photos developed by the CIA, while giving Liddy and Hunt innocuous files photographed at the Howard Johnson’s. Given McCord and Hunt’s relationship and mutual CIA background, that seems unlikely. Hougan also thinks it’s possible that Hunt himself switched the film, perhaps sending the real film to Richard Helms in “the packages that Hunt was sending to CIA headquarters.”31
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 600 | Loc. 12431-32  | Added on Sunday, February 02, 2014, 04:33 PM

The bottom line for the whole affair is that the photos Hunt gave to Liddy, which Liddy gave to Nixon’s aides, were not the photos Barker had taken at the DNC offices.
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 600 | Loc. 12441-42  | Added on Sunday, February 02, 2014, 04:34 PM

The faked photos, given by Liddy to Nixon’s aides, were destroyed after the Watergate arrests, leaving the camera shop owner’s consistent testimony—about an unusual task and photos that stood out among his usual work—as the only definitive account.
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 601 | Loc. 12461-68  | Added on Sunday, February 02, 2014, 04:36 PM

In June 1972, Richard Helms was all too aware of press reports about the drug trafficking activities of so many of his former—and some said current—agents and assets. The negative publicity for the Agency was the opposite of the positive spin Helms had tried to achieve just a month earlier, when pitching the TV show based on Hunt’s spy novels. More drug activities by CIA personnel were going to be exposed in The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia, a soon-to-be-published book by Alfred McCoy, who had just testified to Congress about the heroin problem. Helms had turned to Nixon to help stop Victor Marchetti’s CIA exposé, but to stop McCoy’s book, Helms unleashed high-ranking CIA official Cord Meyer in June 1972. Meyer tried to prevail upon the head of McCoy’s publisher, Harper & Row, to halt publication of the book because it was “a threat to national security.” Over the protests of McCoy, Harper & Row actually submitted the thoroughly documented book to the CIA for a pre-publication review.35
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 603 | Loc. 12493-502  | Added on Sunday, February 02, 2014, 04:40 PM

Liddy gave Baldwin’s typed summaries to Nixon aide Jeb Magruder, and they eventually covered two hundred calls. Information gets murky after that, in part because of “the federal wiretap statute,” which criminalizes not just listening to a bugged conversation or reading a transcript, but even looking at a summary of the conversation or a memo written about that summary. Because any of those activities is a felony, many Nixon aides, officials, and their assistants have given conflicting accounts about who saw or read the DNC call summaries. Magruder says he passed them on to John Mitchell, and Liddy says he gave some to Mitchell, but Mitchell denies ever seeing them, or knowing about any bugging. Yet Mitchell made what Emery considers a “damning” remark about bugging in general on June 14, when Mitchell was talking to Charles Colson about a Democratic strategy meeting. Mitchell said, “tell me what room they are in and I will tell you everything that is said in that room.” Other Nixon aides who logically should have seen the summaries denied having done so. For example, H.R. Haldeman hedged when he testified to the Senate Watergate Committee that “to the best of my knowledge I did not see any material produced by the bugging,” but when questioned about it in court, “he refused to reply ‘on advice of counsel.’”39
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 606 | Loc. 12542-44  | Added on Sunday, February 02, 2014, 09:47 PM

Nixon seemed to want as much intelligence on his opponents as possible. For example, “the Nixon tapes show that the President urged Colson at this time to get the Secret Service to spy on McGovern. Confidential information was subsequently picked up by an agent on the Senator’s detail and passed to the White House.”43
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 606 | Loc. 12560-65  | Added on Sunday, February 02, 2014, 09:49 PM

Hunt says Liddy told him his superiors “wanted the McGovern office operation completed, too,” either “the same night” or “the night after Watergate.” When Hunt remarked that hitting both the Watergate and McGovern’s office sounded like a lot of work in a short amount of time for his crew, Liddy replied that “The Big Man [Mitchell] says he wants the operation.” Given everything that’s known about the relationship between Nixon and Mitchell, it’s hard to imagine Mitchell would order two risky operations, potentially in one night, without at least the tacit approval of Nixon. Even the usually circumspect Hunt wrote that “Watergate . . . was a political intelligence-gathering operation from start to finish, possibly personally ordered by the president himself.”
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 608 | Loc. 12590-93  | Added on Sunday, February 02, 2014, 09:51 PM

If Hunt’s accounts about his worries and doubts about the operation are true, why didn’t he just refuse, or quit his White House position, since he was still receiving a full-time salary from the Mullen Company? If the pressure for the final mission was coming from Nixon or Helms—or both—the answer is clear. Hunt couldn’t say no; he only had his salary at the Mullen Company because of Helms, who would have also wanted Hunt to stay in the White House. As with the previous Watergate mission, there is no way Hunt—or Martinez—would have participated if Helms hadn’t wanted him to.
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 608 | Loc. 12594-95  | Added on Sunday, February 02, 2014, 09:51 PM

Helms and Nixon stood to lose far more than Hunt if the CIA-Mafia plots were exposed, and Nixon would lose more than Helms. Hence, the operation had to go forward, and quickly, despite the risks and doubts.
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 609 | Loc. 12617-19  | Added on Sunday, February 02, 2014, 09:53 PM

Martinez was getting ready to write a letter of resignation when Barker told him about the new Watergate mission, saying they were to leave for Washington on June 16. Even though Martinez said he “had just gotten my divorce that day,” he complied with Barker’s request and went to Washington with the others.2
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 610 | Loc. 12638-45  | Added on Sunday, February 02, 2014, 09:55 PM

The DNC break-in was originally scheduled to begin at 10 pm on Friday night, June 16, to allow enough time for the break-in at McGovern campaign headquarters a few hours after midnight. However, by 11:30 pm, a light was still burning at the sixth-floor offices of the DNC, so the decision was made to wait until after the midnight guard inspection before beginning the break-in attempt. McCord had already taped open a stairwell door in the garage, by using the same ruse as in the previous successful attempt in May: He’d signed in (using an alias) at the main entrance of the Watergate building as if going to the Federal Reserve office on the eighth floor, and, once there, he had walked down the stairwell to the parking garage, where he’d taped the door. In contrast to latter accounts, Jim Hougan’s research showed that McCord didn’t tape the door locks horizontally, so the tape was obvious, but vertically, so it was almost impossible to see.6
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 611 | Loc. 12646-57  | Added on Sunday, February 02, 2014, 09:56 PM

the various accounts by all of the participants in the break-in, and the cover-up, multiply by almost exponential proportions. As Fred Emery points out, many accounts about the various events are often “totally at odds.” Often, a single participant told different stories about a single event at different times, first as part of the cover-up, then a different version to investigators or at hearings, followed by yet another version in later books or articles, and still another version years or decades later in lawsuits or interviews. The reasons participants gave these different versions include avoiding prosecution, diverting blame, or simply presenting themselves in the best possible light. In addition, the burglars were probably given cover stories by Hunt at the very start of the operation, to use in case any problem arose. After the arrests, all of the participants—the burglars and those in the White House—had months to coordinate further cover stories with each other, and to update those stories to match evidence as it emerged.7 Attempts by journalists and historians to reconcile all of those varying stories with the actual evidence and documentation consumed much of the first two decades of Watergate research, and they continue today. However, as Emery pointed out in his 1994 book and BBC documentary series, many of those discrepancies are “impossible to reconcile” and in any event “are not, in the end, very important.”
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 612 | Loc. 12670-81  | Added on Sunday, February 02, 2014, 09:59 PM

Once the men had climbed the stairs to the sixth floor, locksmith Virgilio Gonzalez had problems opening the locked rear door to the DNC offices. Fiorini decided they should remove the entire door, a drastic step that again shows a sense of urgency or desperation. (Fiorini had not only been told by Hunt about the secret Cuban Dossier, but as a participant in the CIA-Mafia plots, Fiorini might have worried he might be named in the Dossier.) When McCord joined the men at 1:40 AM, he was worried that by removing the door they were making too much noise. But the door was finally dislodged, and they were able to enter the DNC offices.9 In the Watergate building’s garage, guard Frank Wills checked the doors again as ordered by his supervisor and was surprised to find the locks had been re-taped. Realizing it couldn’t be the work of a maintenance man at that hour, he called the Washington, D.C., police at 1:47 AM. A police call went out at 1:52 AM, and a squad car with three plainclothes officers responded. Officer Carl Shoffler, who had almost shoulder-length hair as part of his undercover work, told the dispatcher they were only a block and a half away, and they were soon at the Watergate, talking to Frank Wills. At that moment, the burglars had likely not yet even finished removing the door to the DNC offices.10
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 613 | Loc. 12688-703  | Added on Sunday, February 02, 2014, 10:00 PM

Hunt and Liddy tried to radio a warning to Barker, but there was a problem. Frank Fiorini later told Andrew St. George that Barker’s     job was to keep his ear to that goddamn walkie-talkie, listening to our lookout across from the Watergate in case there was any outside problem . . . But Barker [was] too cheap to install a fresh battery in the thing before an operation; no, he keeps the old battery going week after week by never turning up the volume . . . the night we got arrested, the minute we get safely inside the [Democratic National Committee office at the Watergate,] Macho turns the volume of his walkie-talkie all the way down . . . saving the battery. He also kept us from picking up the first warning calls from the lookout across the street [who] saw the unmarked police car arrive, saw the cops begin turning up the lights on one floor after another . . . we suspected nothing until finally Barker heard the footsteps of the cops pounding outside our door and [he finally] turned up his walkie-talkie. Hunt was stationed in another section of the Watergate complex and his voice came in, squeaky with tension, “Alert! Alert! Do you read me? Clear out immediately” . . . but by then it was too late: the cops were in the corridor. Barker saved his damn walkie-talkie battery and blew our team.* 12 At approximately 2:30 AM on June 17, 1972, Shoffler and the other officers entered the Watergate offices, finding the burglars hiding “behind a desk in the secretarial cubicle adjacent to Larry O’Brien’s office.” McCord radioed to Baldwin, “They got us.”13
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 615 | Loc. 12743-52  | Added on Sunday, February 02, 2014, 10:04 PM

With Hoover no longer running the FBI, cooperation had started to resume between the Agency and the Bureau, which might help to explain the missing evidence.19 For example, Hougan points out that on June 17, 1972, “[James] McCord would be arrested and booked under a Hunt alias, ‘Edward Martin,’ producing a phony ID on which the birth date was identical with Howard Hunt’s own.” What’s also interesting is “that the identification papers in McCord’s possession at the time of his arrest . . . disappeared from police and prosecution files. The false ID was issued by the CIA to Howard Hunt, and vanished immediately after McCord’s fingerprinting by Washington police.”20 The disappearance of the CIA-supplied McCord/Hunt ID was no accident. Hougan found that “a file on Hunt’s activities” using the Edward Martin alias and “maintained ‘outside the normal CIA filing system,’ was [later] requested from the CIA by the [Senate Watergate] committee.”
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 619 | Loc. 12815-26  | Added on Sunday, February 02, 2014, 10:10 PM

There, Woodward happened to encounter one of the two attorneys that E. Howard Hunt had arranged for his crew. When Judge James A. Belson asked the defendants “what they did for a living,” one said they are “‘anti-Communists’ . . . and the others nodded in agreement.” James McCord was the first to be questioned by the Judge, who asked for his occupation. McCord replied, “Security consultant.” Woodward wrote that “in a low voice, McCord said that the was recently retired from government service . . . sending a strong message that he wanted this to be between the judge and him.” However, since “it was an open courtroom,” Woodward said that he “moved to the front row and leaned as far into the conversation as possible without joining in.”28 Woodward wrote that the Judge asked, “Where in government?”     McCord’s “barely audible” reply was “CIA.”         The judge flinched.         Holy shit, I said half aloud. It was like a 10,000-volt jolt of electricity. I was amazed.
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 620 | Loc. 12835-44  | Added on Sunday, February 02, 2014, 10:11 PM

Bob Woodward then called “the White House—and asked for Howard Hunt. There was no answer but the operator said helpfully he might be in the office of Charles Colson, Nixon’s special counsel. Colson’s secretary said Hunt was not there but might be at a public relations firm where he worked as a writer.”     I called the firm, reached Hunt, and asked why his name was in the address books of two of the Watergate burglars.         “Good God!” Hunt shouted, [then] said he had no comment and slammed down the phone.30 The next call Woodward made was to “the president of the public relations firm, Robert F. Bennett.”
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 620 | Loc. 12845-46  | Added on Sunday, February 02, 2014, 10:12 PM

“‘I guess it’s no secret that Howard was with the CIA,’ Bennett said blandly.”31
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 620 | Loc. 12849-52  | Added on Sunday, February 02, 2014, 10:13 PM

Woodward went to work on his next story, which would reveal Hunt’s CIA past and his connection to the Watergate break-in. But after that article, despite the dramatic revelations of the Agency connections of McCord and Hunt, the CIA side of Watergate would soon fade into the background of Woodward’s Watergate reporting, and his subsequent books.32
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 621 | Loc. 12865-72  | Added on Sunday, February 02, 2014, 10:14 PM

It wasn’t just the Post—and the Star and also Newsweek—that Bennett was feeding stories and information to in order to protect his CIA proprietary firm. In the first CIA memo quoted above, from three weeks after the Watergate arrests, his case officer said that “Mr. Bennett related that he has now established a ‘back door entry’ to the Edward Bennett Williams law firm which is representing the Democratic Party . . . to kill off any revelation by Ed Williams of Agency association with the Mullen firm.” At that time, Edward Bennett Williams was working with his partner Joseph Califano on the DNC’s lawsuit against CREEP for the break-in.35 Robert Bennett was probably just one of many CIA assets that Richard Helms had the Agency use to move the news media away from a focus on the CIA.
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 622 | Loc. 12891-93  | Added on Sunday, February 02, 2014, 10:16 PM

Later that day, still on June 17, Liddy used “his White House pass” to get into “the Situation Room in the basement of the West Wing.” There, Liddy “placed a scrambler call through the White House switchboard to [Jeb] Magruder,” who was in California.38
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 624 | Loc. 12923-28  | Added on Sunday, February 02, 2014, 10:19 PM

John Dean and a colleague, wearing surgical gloves to avoid leaving fingerprints, picked over the contents of [Hunt’s] White House safe . . . papers they found . . . would eventually be burned by Nixon’s compliant acting FBI Director, Pat Gray.” John Mitchell told Jeb Magruder “maybe you ought to have a little fire at your home,” and Magruder complied. Even Mitchell destroyed “his campaign correspondence with Nixon and Haldeman,” which could have included information on a wide range of illegal matters. After Haldeman told his aide to “make sure our files are clean,” more files were shredded. It’s impossible to know what paper trails, or evidence of other crimes, literally went up in smoke or through the shredder.42
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 625 | Loc. 12956-59  | Added on Sunday, February 02, 2014, 10:21 PM

Monday, June 19, 1972, was the first in a series of increasingly important days in the Watergate cover-up. That morning, Nixon’s Press Secretary, Ron Ziegler, proclaimed that the Watergate break-in was nothing more than “a third rate burglary,” a term some still use today. Ziegler also cautioned the press, saying that “certain elements may try to stretch this beyond what it is,” and much of the press corps took his caution seriously.
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 626 | Loc. 12977-82  | Added on Sunday, February 02, 2014, 10:23 PM

“bugging of U.S. citizens in internal security cases must be first authorized by a court-ordered warrant.” Basically, Nixon and Mitchell had argued that if the President wanted someone bugged, the President had the “inherent power” to do so, which the Supreme Court rejected. Hence any contact with the bugging results was now even more clearly a felony, which helps to explain why so many White House aides and officials who probably saw bugging transcripts later denied doing so. The Supreme Court’s ruling also meant that any “national security” justification Nixon felt he could use to ultimately cover his political bugging was no longer valid, a concept that Nixon would still be struggling to accept until his resignation.
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 628 | Loc. 13015-21  | Added on Sunday, February 02, 2014, 10:26 PM

In Watergate lore, however, June 20, 1972, is mainly remembered as the date of the infamous “eighteen-and-a-half-minute” gap in one of Richard Nixon’s White House tapes, which later investigations proved was a deliberate erasure. Many authors have speculated as to why that portion of that particular tape, a conversation between Nixon and H.R. Haldeman, was erased when other very incriminating tapes were not, such as the June 23, 1972, “Smoking Gun” tape, whose release forced Nixon’s resignation. A close look at all of Nixon’s activities that day, and what he would have been talking about to aides, helps to show why that tape was probably erased—and why it isn’t the only record of Nixon’s talks that day that is missing.
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 629 | Loc. 13037-42  | Added on Sunday, February 02, 2014, 10:28 PM

Nixon may have decided to tell John Ehrlichman a little about the CIA-Mafia plots, because after his time alone, Nixon met with him. Nixon later wrote that Watergate wasn’t talked about at the meeting, but Ehrlichman says it was briefly discussed, along with wiretapping. As Summers points out, “no tape of that meeting has ever been produced. The tape of the President’s next meeting that morning, with Haldeman,” contains the eighteen-and-a-half-minute gap. Prosecution and White House experts “would later conclude that the tape’s long stretch of buzzing, clicks, and pops reflected a series of overlapping erasures. Someone had manually set the machine to erase at least five times, suggesting that tape was intentionally wiped.”
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 630 | Loc. 13053-59  | Added on Sunday, February 02, 2014, 10:29 PM

In a matter that has never been explained, Dan Moldea found that just “fifty-three minutes” after the eighteen-and-a-half-minute gap, “Nixon placed a long-distance call to . . . an associate of Anthony Provenzano . . . that lasted only one minute.” Provenzano had been part of both Nixon-Mafia-Hoffa bribes, for Jimmy Hoffa’s December 1971 release and also in September 1960 (at the same time the CIA-Mafia plots with Johnny Rosselli were beginning).56 Nixon and Haldeman had another conversation four hours after the one with the eighteen-and-a-half-minute gap, which Nixon started by asking, “Have you gotten any further on that Mitchell operation?” That remark demonstrates that Nixon felt John Mitchell was really running, at a high level, the Plumbers operation.
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 631 | Loc. 13068-78  | Added on Sunday, February 02, 2014, 10:31 PM

That evening, “Nixon spoke on the telephone with John Mitchell,” the first officially documented “contact between the two since the Watergate arrests.” Nixon said they discussed Watergate, and Mitchell essentially apologized, saying that he was “terribly chagrined that the activities of anybody attached to his committee should have been handled in such a manner and that he only regretted that he had not policed all of the people more effectively.” However, no recording was made of the call, supposedly “because the call had been placed on a line from the president’s private quarters, one that was not hooked into the recording system”—at least, that was what Nixon later told one of his attorneys. Eventually, it was discovered “that Nixon had made a note of the [unrecorded Mitchell] conversation on the Dictabelt machine on which he recorded his daily diary.” Even in Nixon’s own summary of his conversation with Mitchell, “there is a forty-two-second break in the dictation,” and the Watergate Special Prosecution Force stated that Nixon’s “Dictabelt appears to have been tampered with” at the time of the break. The tampering was likely because Mitchell’s apology—or Nixon’s comment about it on the Dictabelt—might have included a reference to the fact Nixon had ordered a reluctant Mitchell to approve the whole political espionage plan in the first place.58
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 632 | Loc. 13092-97  | Added on Sunday, February 02, 2014, 10:32 PM

Nixon’s evening call to Haldeman then veered into “the Bay of Pigs thing” again, in a way that left Haldeman perplexed. The President ordered Haldeman to “tell Ehrlichman this whole group of Cubans is tied to the Bay of Pigs.” A confused Haldeman asked, “The Bay of Pigs? What does that have to do with this?” Nixon simply said, “Ehrlichman will know what I mean.” This might help to explain Nixon’s unrecorded call to Ehrlichman earlier that day. Recall that Ehrlichman had taken the lead in trying to get Helms to give Nixon the Bay of Pigs material starting in 1969, soon after Nixon’s Assistant Attorney General had checked out the Justice Department’s file on the CIA-Mafia plots involving Johnny Rosselli.61
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 633 | Loc. 13112-19  | Added on Sunday, February 02, 2014, 10:59 PM

A review of all of Nixon’s known comments and meetings yields clues about what might have been talked about during the eighteen-and-a-half-minute gap on June 20. The press’s naming of Hunt, particularly his leading role in the Bay of Pigs operation, seems to have been a concern for Nixon that day. In addition, two of the unrecorded calls from that day involved Mitchell, who knew about the CIA-Mafia plots, and Ehrlichman, who apparently knew more about the Bay of Pigs matter—a euphemism for the CIA-Mafia plots—than Haldeman. The call to the Provenzano associate less than an hour after the eighteen-and-a-half-minute gap also raises the possibility that the gap concerned one or both of the Nixon-Mafia-Hoffa bribes, which were known by John Mitchell. So, it appears likely that the eighteen-and-a-half-minute gap—like other conversations that day—involved some discussion about Hunt and something about the Bay of Pigs (which to Nixon meant the CIA-Mafia plots); it could have also included a reference or allusion to one or both of the Nixon-Mafia-Hoffa bribes.
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 636 | Loc. 13177-87  | Added on Sunday, February 02, 2014, 11:05 PM

On June 23, 1972, in three meetings, Richard Nixon and H.R. Haldeman discussed the Watergate cover-up extensively on what has come to be known as the “Smoking Gun” tape. Nixon was very receptive to using the CIA to block the FBI investigation because he knew secrets about the CIA, Hunt, and Richard Helms that his aides like Haldeman and Dean didn’t know or only suspected. In a way, we’re lucky that the “Smoking Gun” tape exists at all, and that it involved a conversation with Haldeman—as opposed to the more-informed Mitchell, who already knew about the CIA-Mafia plots. Nixon, not wanting to spread the knowledge of those plots further than it already had been disseminated, kept having to repeatedly imply things about Helms, Hunt, and the plots to Haldeman, leaving a revealing audio trail. Dean and Gray’s suggestion was to use the protection of a possible Mexican CIA operation as the excuse to have the CIA limit the FBI investigation, but Nixon quickly went in a very different and telling direction. Nixon’s comments on the tape about the CIA weren’t fully appreciated when it was finally made public on August 5, 1974, because just the fact that it showed Nixon was actively involved in the cover-up forced the President to resign three days later, on August 8. In addition, the CIA-Mafia plots wouldn’t become widely known and documented until the year after the tape’s release, and the CIA would continue to withhold important information about the plots for decades after that.70
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 637 | Loc. 13194-211  | Added on Sunday, February 02, 2014, 11:07 PM

    PRESIDENT NIXON: All right, fine . . . you call him in, I mean you just—well, we protected Helms from one hell of a lot of things.     PRESIDENT NIXON: Of course, this Hunt will uncover a lot of things. You open that scab, there’s a hell of a lot of things and that we just feel that it would be very detrimental to have this thing go any further. This involves these Cubans, Hunt, and a lot of hanky-panky that we have nothing to do with ourselves.     PRESIDENT NIXON: When you get these people [Helms and Walters] say: “Look, the problem is that this will open the whole, the whole Bay of Pigs thing and the President just feels that . . . The President’s belief is that this is going to open the whole Bay of Pigs thing up again. And, because these people are plugging for, for keeps and that they should call the FBI in and say that we wish for the good of the country, don’t go any further into this case,” period . . .     PRESIDENT NIXON: Hunt . . . knows too damn much and he was involved, we have to know that. And that it gets out . . . this is all involved in the Cuban thing, that it’s a fiasco, and it’s going to make the FB—ah CIA—look bad, it’s going to make Hunt look bad, and its likely to blow the whole, uh, Bay of Pigs thing, which we think would be very unfortunate for the CIA and for the country at this time, and for American foreign policy and he’s [Helms] just gotta tell ’em “lay off.”     PRESIDENT NIXON: I would just say, “Look it’s because of the Hunt involvement.”72 Clearly, Nixon has his own agenda here, one to pressure Helms by using Hunt’s involvement in “the whole, uh, Bay of Pigs thing.”
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 638 | Loc. 13211-13  | Added on Sunday, February 02, 2014, 11:07 PM

Of course, Hunt’s leading role in the actual Bay of Pigs invasion and even his cover identity as “Eduardo” had already been announced in The New York Times three days earlier, so that wasn’t a secret any more. What was left to “blow” about “the whole Bay of Pigs thing” that involved Helms (and Nixon) except the CIA-Mafia plots?
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 639 | Loc. 13226-31  | Added on Sunday, February 02, 2014, 11:09 PM

Nixon apparently wanted Helms to help him solve two problems. First, to use the CIA to limit the FBI’s investigation. The second problem was that Nixon no longer had a way to find out more about—or stop the leak of—the Cuban Dossier and anything it might say about Nixon’s role in the CIA-Mafia plots. That could still be devastating if it came out before the election, especially if it caused journalists and investigators to look for other ties between Nixon and the mob. Nixon seemed to want Helms to take responsibility for the Cuban Dossier matter as well, and appears to be trying to convey that through Haldeman.
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 640 | Loc. 13237-41  | Added on Sunday, February 02, 2014, 11:10 PM

As for Nixon’s comment that “we protected Helms from one hell of a lot of things,” Nixon later said he was referring to his help for Helms regarding suppressing parts of Victor Marchetti’s book. But Nixon didn’t say “one thing” on the tape, he said “one hell of a lot of things,” which led investigators to wonder what else Nixon could have been referring to. Helms’s Chilean and domestic spying operations had all been done for Nixon, so those hardly seem like instances in which Nixon “protected” Helms. Congressional investigator Michael Ewing looked at the matter in a report for the House Select Committee on Assassinations in the late 1970s.
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 642 | Loc. 13283-88  | Added on Sunday, February 02, 2014, 11:14 PM

Helms went along with Nixon’s request, writing a memo to Walters saying that the CIA was requesting the FBI to “confine themselves to the personalities already arrested . . . and that they desist from expanding the investigation into other areas which may well, eventually, run afoul of our operations.” In later years, Richard Helms would make a point of telling journalists that he had never succumbed to pressure to get the FBI to back off from its Watergate investigation, something repeated by many journalists and several historians. But the record clearly shows Helms did call off the FBI, at least for a time.
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 645 | Loc. 13343-48  | Added on Monday, February 03, 2014, 09:34 PM

In a June 30, 1972, meeting, the President told Haldeman “About this fellow [Hunt]—I mean, after all, the gun [found in Hunt’s White House office safe] and the wiretapping doesn’t bother me a bit with this fellow. He’s in the Cuban thing, the whole Cuban business.” In transcripts of Nixon’s taped conversations days after the Plumbers’ arrests, when Colson told Nixon on July 1, 1972, that Hunt had “certainly done a lot of hot stuff . . . Oh, Jesus. He pulled a lot of very fancy stuff in the sixties,” that was followed by a notice from the National Archives: “[Withdrawn item. National security.]” After the censored portion, Nixon then said, “If anything ever happens to him, be sure that he blows the whistle, [on] the whole Bay of Pigs.”4
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 645 | Loc. 13349-54  | Added on Monday, February 03, 2014, 09:35 PM

In addition to the hush money flowing to Hunt and the others from Kalmbach and White House operatives, there was also another channel of money. Nixon had wanted Bebe Rebozo to set up a fund for “the boys,” but it had to be done in a deniable way that could not be traced to the President. That task fell to Manuel Artime, an office tenant in Rebozo’s mob-built shopping center. Lukas wrote that Artime “formed an informal committee to aide the Miami defendants.” He pointed out since Artime was “a leader of the Cuban exile community and the godfather of Hunt’s youngest son, he was an ideal man to assume the role” of a hush money paymaster without arousing suspicion.5
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 646 | Loc. 13359-63  | Added on Monday, February 03, 2014, 09:36 PM

Artime’s assistant at the time, Milian Rodriguez, said that the amounts Artime distributed to Barker and the others were much larger than most investigators realized. As documented by PBS, Milian Rodriguez later used the skills he first learned with Artime by handling the Watergate hush money to become one of Miami’s largest drug traffickers. Artime would have to testify to the Watergate grand jury, but he would never be charged for his Watergate involvement or for his drug trafficking (documented in earlier chapters).6
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 646 | Loc. 13364-67  | Added on Monday, February 03, 2014, 09:36 PM

It was initially difficult to get the Watergate defendants’ attorneys to take the envelopes stuffed with cash. Finally, after two weeks, Hunt’s second attorney—William Bittman—“accepted a bizarre delivery of $25,000 in an envelope left on a ledge in the downstairs lobby of” his law firm. Bittman had been a Mafia prosecutor for Robert Kennedy’s Justice Department before leaving in 1967 to enter private practice.
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 646 | Loc. 13367-68  | Added on Monday, February 03, 2014, 09:36 PM

Liddy had no qualms about accepting the hush money, and a money drop for him was arranged “at National Airport, where the cash was in a luggage locker.”7
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 646 | Loc. 13369-71  | Added on Monday, February 03, 2014, 09:36 PM

Hunt’s wife, Dorothy, gave the White House money courier “a five-month ‘budget’ for all seven men involved [that] totaled $450,000,” while Hunt sent Colson a personal note saying that “re-electing the President” was of “overwhelming importance [and] you may be confident that I will do all that is required of me toward that end.”
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 650 | Loc. 13446-49  | Added on Monday, February 03, 2014, 09:43 PM

British researcher John Simkin compiled a list of the mistakes committed by each of those involved with the burglaries, which showed that while McCord committed seven critical errors, so had G. Gordon Liddy, who had no connection to the CIA. Simkin listed Barker as committing six critical errors, along with eight by Hunt. Fiorini himself committed several key errors, including the final taping of the garage stairwell door and insisting the burglary go forward even if it required the time-consuming step of removing the rear door to the DNC offices.
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 652 | Loc. 13483-84  | Added on Monday, February 03, 2014, 09:45 PM

In that same conservation with Dean, Nixon revealed his own thinking that played a role in the Watergate scandal, when he said that “Espionage and sabotage is illegal only if against the government.”19
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 655 | Loc. 13548-50  | Added on Monday, February 03, 2014, 09:49 PM

However, Walter Sheridan didn’t release or leak any of the Hoffa information during the campaign, and it’s not known why. In addition, Walter Sheridan was spectacularly unsuccessful in bringing media attention to the Watergate story.
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 655 | Loc. 13554-55  | Added on Monday, February 03, 2014, 09:50 PM

Regardless of the reason, a huge opportunity was lost for Watergate and the Nixon-Mafia-Hoffa relationship to become issues in the final months of the 1972 campaign.
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 663 | Loc. 13709-10  | Added on Tuesday, February 04, 2014, 04:40 PM

Now that Nixon had won reelection and faced no more campaigns, his fears about whatever Helms could release about his past were greatly diminished.
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 664 | Loc. 13729-31  | Added on Thursday, February 06, 2014, 11:13 AM

his firing of CIA Director Richard Helms meant that the dark undercurrent of crime and corruption just below the surface of Nixon’s carefully crafted public image would soon start to become exposed.
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 664 | Loc. 13733-38  | Added on Thursday, February 06, 2014, 11:14 AM

His approval rating in a Gallup poll was 68 percent, and three days after he took his second oath of office, his peace deal for Vietnam became final. The settlement was reached after a massive bombing campaign of North Vietnam that Nixon had begun in December, along with intense pressure from Nixon on President Thieu, still the U.S.-backed dictator of South Vietnam. Lyndon Johnson had died the day before the peace deal took effect, and Nixon could claim public credit for ending what he liked to depict as Johnson’s war. Henry Kissinger was awarded a joint Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts (with North Vietnam’s Le Duc Tho), an honor Nixon might have shared had he not withdrawn his name from consideration.
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 665 | Loc. 13743-44  | Added on Thursday, February 06, 2014, 11:14 AM

Alexander Haig returned to the Pentagon, as the Army’s Vice Chief of Staff, where he was said to have been “catapulted by Nixon over the heads of two hundred senior officers.”
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 665 | Loc. 13745-47  | Added on Thursday, February 06, 2014, 11:15 AM

As a result of all those shifts, John Dean became a “central figure” in Nixon’s second-term White House. After only having three meetings with Nixon in the first eight months of 1972, Dean would soon have “31 meetings and telephone calls with Nixon” in less than a one-month span, starting in late February.
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 666 | Loc. 13767-72  | Added on Thursday, February 06, 2014, 11:17 AM

In a bizarre scenario that brought together Watergate and Nixon’s Hoffa bribes, “on February 10-11, 1973 . . . two meetings were held simultaneously on the grounds” of the La Costa Country Club in Southern California: one for Nixon’s aides plotting their Watergate cover-up strategy and the other between Teamsters President Frank Fitzsimmons and several Mafia leaders. One of the owners of the 5,600-acre posh La Costa resort was mobster Moe Dalitz, who had sold Howard Hughes his first Las Vegas casino in the deal brokered by Johnny Rosselli (see Chapter 19).
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 667 | Loc. 13782-87  | Added on Thursday, February 06, 2014, 11:20 AM

Moldea interviewed “two former Nixon aides” who “confirm[ed] that the La Costa meetings were regarded as ‘very strange’ even by other members of the Nixon staff.” One aide explained that “the meetings were going on in a setting which obviously had the Secret Service, FBI, and Justice people climbing the wall . . . I say it was no secret. What I still don’t know is if it was no accident.” Another aide said that “Word came down from Haldeman to the Secret Service to make sure the agents for that trip kept their mouths shut—about the appearance of impropriety of these [meetings] being held in the midst of Fitzsimmons’s Apalachin affair”—a reference to the historic mob conference described in Chapter 4.
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 667 | Loc. 13800-13803  | Added on Thursday, February 06, 2014, 11:21 AM

However, the Fitzsimmons-Mafia meeting, followed by the Nixon-Fitzsimmons Air Force One meeting and Nixon’s Attorney General ending the surveillance on the company involved in the new multimillion-dollar fraud scheme, raises the possibility that Nixon’s January 1973 $500,000 payment was also part of a new deal between Nixon, Fitzsimmons, and the Mafia.9
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 668 | Loc. 13806-14  | Added on Thursday, February 06, 2014, 11:23 AM

Frank Fitzsimmons then pressured the Teamsters’ current attorney—Edward Bennett Williams, Califano’s partner—to drop the DNC lawsuit against CREEP. When Williams refused, Fitzsimmons “fired Williams and gave the $100,000-a-year business to Colson” and his law partner.10 Was Nixon being arrogant in continuing his illegal dealings with Fitzsimmons and the Mafia in his new term, since he would not have to face another election? Was the relatively young President simply interested in accumulating as much money as possible, looking ahead to his post-Presidency years? According to the Time article, Nixon might have just been being practical. It pointed out the “crucial timing” that just three days before Colson received the $500,000 authorized by Fitzsimmons, Dorfman, and Provenzano, there had been a meeting between [E. Howard] Hunt’s lawyer and Colson” regarding “demands for payoffs by [the] Watergate” figure.”
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 668 | Loc. 13817-22  | Added on Thursday, February 06, 2014, 11:24 AM

Though Helms had been of little help to Hunt since the burglaries, the possibility of help had remained as long as Helms was Director, plus Hunt knew enough about Helms that he could always force the issue, if need be. Now, that possibility no longer existed. Hunt had been trying to exert pressure on the White House and Charles Colson since November, in an attempt to have them live up to their promises of hush money, expense money, and lawyers’ fees for himself and the other defendants. His wife, Dorothy Hunt, played a major role in helping to solicit and distribute funds, often giving money to Manuel Artime so he could disburse it to the Cuban exile defendants and Frank Fiorini.
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 669 | Loc. 13822-26  | Added on Thursday, February 06, 2014, 11:25 AM

On December 8, 1972, Dorothy Hunt had flown to Chicago, carrying $10,000 in cash in $100 bills, the same type of money she’d been distributing to the other defendants “for more than four months.” On its approach to “Chicago’s Midway Airport through drizzle and fog . . . the plane suddenly nose-dived into a neighborhood . . . a mile and a half short of [the] runway . . . Forty-three of the fifty-five people on board were killed, including Mrs. Hunt.”
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 669 | Loc. 13836-40  | Added on Thursday, February 06, 2014, 11:26 AM

Some have thought it suspicious that Egil Krogh moved to the Department of Transportation as an Undersecretary a month after the crash. The same might apply to Alexander Butterfield’s appointment in March 1973 to become Administrator of the Federal Aviation Administration, where The New York Times reported that Butterfield “read all the accident reports himself.” However, Nixon probably just wanted his people in place so he could know immediately if information about his hush money surfaced in the FAA’s crash investigation.
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 670 | Loc. 13856-59  | Added on Thursday, February 06, 2014, 11:28 AM

According to Dean, “on January 5 Colson met with him and Ehrlichman . . . and reported that the had indeed given Bittman a ‘general assurance’ that Hunt would get clemency” from Nixon. The next day, according to the FBI, Colson got the Mafia-Teamsters bribe of $500,000 for Nixon.16 The
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 670 | Loc. 13862-68  | Added on Thursday, February 06, 2014, 11:28 AM

It’s interesting that Hunt received special treatment from Nixon over the other defendants, with the President saying in a conversation with Colson on January 8, 1973, that when it came to clemency, “I would have difficulty with some of the others.” Nixon agreed with Colson’s line of reasoning that the others “can’t hurt us [but] Hunt and Liddy [had] direct meetings, discussions [that] are very incriminating to us.”17 Colson was wrong when he said the other Watergate defendants “can’t hurt us,” because the firing of CIA Director Richard Helms had apparently been the last straw for Agency veteran James McCord. Unlike Hunt, McCord was strongly resisting the White House pressure to plead guilty to avoid a trial.
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 672 | Loc. 13889-92  | Added on Thursday, February 06, 2014, 11:31 AM

Along with Liddy, McCord stood trial in front of Judge John Sirica—a conservative Republican judge known for his harsh sentences—who seemed determined to get to the bottom of the Watergate morass. “At a pretrial hearing [Judge Sirica] put the prosecutors on notice that they had to get to the bottom of who had hired the men to go into the Watergate. ‘The jury is going to want to know: . . . What did these men go into that headquarters for?’”
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 673 | Loc. 13906-10  | Added on Thursday, February 06, 2014, 11:32 AM

Helms didn’t destroy the only copy of the IG Report because it had left out so much crucial information, and all of its supporting files had already been destroyed in 1967. When coupled with that earlier file destruction, Helms’s 1973 housecleaning put some details about the CIA-Mafia plots permanently beyond the reach of easily documented history. However, some top secret operations that involved Helms—like AMWORLD—were so large that many related files probably still exist.
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 673 | Loc. 13917-20  | Added on Thursday, February 06, 2014, 11:33 AM

It was perhaps poetic justice for Richard Helms that on February 7, 1973—five days after he finished destroying files and had stepped down as CIA Director—Helms found himself testifying to Congress when the subject of Chile came up. Helms lied when asked if the CIA had provided help to those who opposed Allende in Chile. Helms had lied to Congress before, about Chile and other matters, but it would be that particular false statement that would eventually bring him a criminal conviction.
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 673 | Loc. 13923-24  | Added on Thursday, February 06, 2014, 11:33 AM

Helms’s testimony about Barker’s mob ties would not be released for more than a year, after All the President’s Men had been completed, which kept Barker’s criminal connections from becoming part of the conventional story of Watergate.
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 674 | Loc. 13945-47  | Added on Thursday, February 06, 2014, 11:35 AM

as the scandal unfolded, only one largely ignored article mentioned an important part of Hunt’s back-ground that Helms had withheld from investigators: Hunt’s work on the plots to assassinate Fidel Castro in the mid-1960s. Tad Szulc’s February 1973 Esquire magazine article—on the stands in January, before Helms began his housecleaning—briefly described those operations.
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 675 | Loc. 13959-64  | Added on Friday, February 07, 2014, 11:43 AM

In the interview, Haynes told Sprague that “A meeting was held on Nov. 22, 1963 in Wash[ington] D.C. to discuss plans for Cuban operation . . . it was the most important meeting they had . . . at [the] meeting were [CIA Executive Director Lyman] Kirkpatrick, Helms, Hunt, and Williams. Word of [JFK’s] assassination came in [during the] meeting.” Haynes knew something had been about to happen with Cuba, but he hadn’t been told about Almeida or the coup plan. If any of Haynes’s information involving Hunt and Helms had become widely known at that time, it would have radically changed the Watergate investigations. Instead, when some of the interview was finally published in a small newsletter in 1975—after Watergate had faded from the headlines—it passed without notice.30
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 676 | Loc. 13975-79  | Added on Friday, February 07, 2014, 11:44 AM

In the ten years since JFK’s murder, Williams had learned about Barker’s ties to godfather Santo Trafficante and had come to believe that Barker had sold out the coup plan to Trafficante, and that both men had played a role in JFK’s assassination. Now, Williams saw that Barker was involved with Hunt, James McCord, and other notable Cuban exiles in Watergate. Williams also heard in Miami’s Cuban exile community about the efforts of his former friend and rival, Manuel Artime, to provide financial assistance to the burglars. Hunt, McCord, Barker, Artime, and Watergate—it seemed beyond coincidence.
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- Highlight on Page 678 | Loc. 14010-15  | Added on Friday, February 07, 2014, 11:47 AM

In addition to Joseph Califano’s DNC lawsuit against CREEP being overseen by Judge Richey, Califano also had to represent The Washington Post when Nixon had CREEP try to subpoena Woodward, Bernstein, Post editor Howard Simons, and Post owner Katherine Graham. CREEP also demanded all of “their notes, internal memoranda, and phone logs,” since “CREEP wanted to uncover the identity of the reporters’ anonymous source or sources.” Nixon and Haldeman already knew that Mark Felt was providing information to the Post, but they couldn’t be sure of how much or if other officials might be doing the same.38
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 679 | Loc. 14042-53  | Added on Friday, February 07, 2014, 11:50 AM

McCord might have felt free to act because of Richard Helms’s firing from the CIA. Helms was preparing to assume his post as Ambassador to Iran, and an outsider, loyal to Nixon, now ran McCord’s beloved Agency. There were still many CIA secrets McCord would protect, but McCord viewed Watergate as a Nixon White House operation, “not a CIA operation.” As McCord would later testify, he “believed that President Nixon gave the final approval, and set the Watergate operation in motion.”42 It’s not known what other Nixon crimes McCord may have become aware of or suspected, or heard about from Hunt. McCord wrote in his book that Hunt had “information which would impeach the President.” In his Watergate book, McCord did go out of his way to decry “the volume of heroin illegally entering the U.S.,” but there is no indication if he ever learned about or suspected the Trafficante-linked money that Al Haig’s Army investigation would uncover the following year. McCord saw himself as different from his fellow ex-CIA officer Hunt, and certainly from Fiorini and Barker, and seems to have resented having to work with—and being lumped in with—the latter. In his letter to Sirica, McCord was careful to stress that “my motivations were different than those of the others involved, but were not limited to . . . those offered in my defense during the trial.” In his book, McCord doesn’t make clear exactly what those motivations were, or why he got involved in a seemingly purely political operation.43
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- Highlight on Page 681 | Loc. 14070-75  | Added on Friday, February 07, 2014, 11:52 AM

However, Nixon’s main focus the following day was on E. Howard Hunt, and making sure Hunt had enough hush money to remain silent even after he was sentenced. On March 21, 1973, Nixon talked with John Dean about the matter, in the famous conversation that began with Dean telling Nixon, “We have a cancer—within—close to the Presidency, that’s growing.” As mentioned earlier, this is the conversation where Nixon told Dean that “Your major guy to keep under control is Hunt. Because he knows . . . about a lot of other things.” The two discussed the fact that some of the money had gone through “the cover of a Cuban Committee,” the one Nixon had planned to use Rebozo for but that had actually been implemented by Cuban exile Manuel Artime.
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
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Dean told Nixon that keeping Hunt and the others quiet will “cost money. It’s dangerous. Nobody, nothing—people around here are not pros at this sort of thing. This is the sort of thing Mafia people can do: washing money, getting clean money, and things like that . . . we just don’t know about those things . . . we are not criminals.” The irony of the last statement is lost on Nixon and Dean, who then told the President, “these people are gong to cost, huh, a million dollars over the next, uh, two years.”47 After a pause, President Nixon told Dean: We could get that . . . if you need the money . . . you could get the money . . . What I mean is, you could, you could get a million dollars. And you could get it in cash. I, I know where it could be gotten . . . I mean it’s not easy, but it could be done.”
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
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McCord’s revelations invigorated the recently created Senate Watergate Committee investigation and gave the Committee its first star witness. Suddenly, the entire American press corps was putting the Watergate story on its front pages, and the drumbeat of pressure on Nixon would continue to mount over the coming months. Now that McCord had made it clear that higher-ups were involved, some of Nixon’s aides began reassessing their own positions. On April 12, 1972, there was another breakthrough when former Nixon aide Jeb Magruder confessed to U.S. Attorneys that he had committed perjury in his earlier testimony. Just four days prior to that, John Dean had begun talking to Watergate prosecutors. The day after Dean met with the prosecutors, Nixon told Haldeman they ought to get rid of the White House tapes, but nothing was done and Nixon continued his recording. However, Nixon greatly increased his use of the tapes to try to spin or simply lie about past events to new and old aides.
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
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To divert blame and responsibility from himself, Nixon had to use the strategy of essentially blaming Watergate on his staff, implying they might not have supervised their underlings properly. To make that approach work, he would have to take dramatic action by shaking up his staff and top officials. After much soul-searching and emotion, Nixon told H.R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman they would have to go. On April 30, 1973, in a dramatic speech, Nixon announced their resignations, while calling them “two of the finest public servants it has been my privilege to know.” That same day, Nixon also announced the resignations of John Dean and Attorney General Kleindienst. L. Patrick Gray had resigned three days earlier, so William Ruckelshaus left the Environmental Protection Agency (the creation of which was one of Nixon’s most notable domestic achievements) to become the new FBI Director.
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
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Haig would play a crucial role in essentially running the country in Nixon’s last months in office, before helping to engineer the President’s resignation.1
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
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Hunt was still torn between wanting a reduced sentence from Sirica and wanting his promised clemency from President Nixon, so in his testimony he only implicated Nixon aides, not the President.3
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
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The same day as McCord’s explosive testimony, Archibald Cox was chosen by acting Attorney General Eliot Richardson to be the Watergate Special Prosecutor; both Cox and Richardson were sworn in the following week. Cox had been the Solicitor General during John F. Kennedy’s administration, and the tapes show that Nixon soon regarded Cox as “an adversary,” and the President had no intention of cooperating with Cox’s investigation.4
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
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Bernard Barker testified to Ervin’s Watergate Committee on May 24, 1973, but he was not asked anything about his Mafia ties. The Senate and House Watergate Committees only had access to some FBI information, not the Bureau’s full file, so the subject of his organized crime ties wasn’t raised to Barker, and the same was true when the Committee questioned Frank Fiorini. That meant that organized crime was completely missing from the public Watergate hearings, which was ironic, since the chief investigator for Ervin’s Watergate Committee was Carmine Bellino, who had worked on organized crime cases for Robert Kennedy’s Justice Department. Before that, Bellino had been an investigator for the Senate crime hearings in the late 1950s that had propelled John F. Kennedy to prominence (Senator Sam Ervin had been on that committee with JFK). In the mid-1950s, Bellino had also been partners for a time with Robert Maheu, which would put him in an unusual and potentially awkward position the following year, once Maheu—and the CIA-Mafia plots with Rosselli—became a quiet subject of investigation by the Watergate Committee.
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
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The day before Butterfield’s testimony, Thompson admitted in his own autobiographical Watergate book that “‘Even though I had no authority to act for the committee, I decided to call Fred Buzhardt at home’ to tell him that the committee had learned about the taping system. ‘I wanted to be sure that the White House was fully aware of what was to be disclosed so that it could take appropriate action.’” In contrast to that questionable act, Thompson would later take the lead in investigating the CIA’s withholding of important information from the Committee, which raised important unanswered questions about the CIA,
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
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The battle for the tapes that pitted the Senate Watergate Committee and Special Prosecutor Cox against the White House intensified, and would last for another year. In response, Nixon tried to counterattack in various ways. Haldeman, still apparently hoping for clemency from Nixon in the future, was still not being honest in his testimony and claimed “that the tapes he had listened to proved that Nixon was telling the truth” about his lack of involvement in Watergate and the cover-up.
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
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In a matter that didn’t involve Watergate, Nixon had been told six months earlier that Agnew was under investigation by the Justice Department. In August, “The Wall Street Journal [had] reported that Agnew was suspected of extortion, bribery, and tax evasion [involving] kickbacks paid by contractors architects and engineers” to Baltimore and Maryland officials. As noted earlier, when Nixon had chosen the racially divisive Agnew as his running mate, he knew “that his running mate was corrupt,” so the news of Agnew’s crimes should have been no surprise. On October 9, 1973, Vice President Agnew told Nixon that he was resigning, after striking a “deal with the Justice Department [to plead] nolo contendere to one count of having knowingly failed to report income for tax purposes.” Agnew would get “three years probation and a $10,000 fine [and] no further prosecution.”21 On October 12, 1973, Nixon chose House Minority Leader Gerald Ford as his new Vice President.
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
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To Nixon’s way of thinking, Agnew’s resignation somehow gave him an excuse to fire Special Watergate Prosecutor Archibald Cox, so the President said, “Now that we’ve taken care of Agnew, we can get rid of Cox.” The Special Prosecutor had been pressing for the tapes for several months, and he was reported to be investigating Nixon’s financial affairs with Bebe Rebozo, so Nixon felt he had to be removed.22 On Saturday, October 20, 1973, a critical part of the Watergate saga began. Richard Nixon ordered Attorney General Elliot Richardson to fire Special Prosecutor Cox. However, Richardson resigned rather than obey Nixon’s orders. Richardson’s deputy, former FBI Director William Ruckelshaus, also resigned. That left “Solicitor General Robert Bork . . . temporarily promoted to acting Attorney General, [to] obediently [send] the letter of dismissal” to Cox. The dramatic resignations and the firing of Cox became known as “the Saturday Night Massacre.”23
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
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However, because Jaworski emerged with more power than Cox, his appointment marked another milestone. Nixon had lost control of the Watergate investigation, which was now centered on the tapes. If he lost control of the tapes, Nixon knew his Presidency was over. That process began three days after the Saturday Night Massacre, when Nixon agreed to comply with an appeals court ruling to turn over seven tapes that had been subpoenaed by Sirica’s court, for the grand jury.26
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
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There are several reasons why the Nixon-Rebozo financial entanglements didn’t become a huge scandal in the following months. An investigative report in Rolling Stone reported that “Bebe Rebozo escaped indictment in Watergate despite strong circumstantial evidence of tax evasion and bribe taking. One reason, according to CIA sources, is that CIA officials sanctioned his plea of ‘national security’ when the Special Prosecutor’s office began investigating Rebozo’s” business affairs. (Rebozo’s only real “national security” activity had been money laundering for the Bay of Pigs.) In addition, Rebozo sued The Washington Post for “ten million dollars in damages” for its stock story, and he then dragged the case out for a decade, until a settlement was reached (in which the Post paid Rebozo no damages). Rebozo’s suit eventually had a chilling effect on other news outlets, so his financial crimes and Mafia ties were soon rarely mentioned in the press. In short, Rebozo and Nixon had enough money to make reporting the Nixon-Rebozo story very expensive for media outlets—at a time when there was plenty of other Watergate news to cover.
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
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A new Watergate scandal erupted on December 7, 1973, when the public learned about the eighteen-and-a-half-minute gap on Nixon’s June 20, 1972, tape. Though Nixon had turned over the seven subpoenaed tapes, only three had been sent to the grand jury, since he was claiming executive privilege on four, which remained with Sirica. Nixon knew that other tapes would be subpoenaed, so he was having them transcribed for his own use and reference. As part of that process, Nixon’s lawyers had first learned about the mysterious gap on November 14, and they waited a week before telling Judge Sirica.
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
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The Committee investigators concluded their memo by saying that “the obsession of the Administration . . . on Larry O’Brien in 1971 and 1972 . . . was in part motivated by a fear that Maheu would impart some of this sensitive information about the plot to O’Brien . . . and these concerns could have been a possible motivation for the break-in to the office of the DNC and Larry O’Brien . . . especially since their directions were to photograph any documents relating to Cuban contributions or Cuban involvement in the 1972 Democratic campaign.” Clearly, the investigators were getting very close to uncovering the Plumbers’ goal of the Cuban Dossier, which could easily fall into the category of “Cuban involvement in the 1972 Democratic campaign.” They end the memo by saying “it is for these reasons that we wish to question John Rosselli about the nature and scope of his activities with Robert Maheu in the early 1960s.”38
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
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As a result, the fact that Rosselli had been interviewed by Watergate investigators at all—let alone the fact that he was viewed as key to the Watergate burglar’s motivation—remained largely unknown. Woodward and Bernstein had finished the manuscript for All the President’s Men the previous month, so it contained nothing about Rosselli or the Mafia.
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
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By the spring of 1974, the battle over Watergate had become a battle for the tapes that would decide Nixon’s fate, since impeachment was now a very real possibility. Earlier in the year, Special Prosecutor Jaworski had “requested twenty-two more tapes,” but Nixon had turned him down. (Unknown to Nixon, on February 25, after the President had refused to talk to the Watergate grand jury, it had named Nixon as an “unindicted co-conspirator,” though that wouldn’t become public for almost four months.) Jaworski soon subpoenaed “sixty-four more tapes,” and he included in his request the June 23, 1972, “Smoking Gun” tape. Naturally, Nixon didn’t comply.
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
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To deal with legal, Congressional, press, and public pressure, Nixon decided to release edited transcripts of forty-six of his White House tapes. The effort became an intense, mad dash by Nixon and his aides to release enough to make it look like a good faith effort, without revealing anything criminal. Worried about the outcome, Press Secretary Ron Ziegler “assigned his two personal assistants—Diane Sawyer and Frank Gannon, to review the editing and report back to him.” Diane Sawyer was “dismayed at the sloppy presentation [where] lines spoken by the President were mistakenly divided and attributed in part to Ehrlichman.” Much worse was the fact that “certain passages referred back to matters that had been excised [and] could not fail to convey the impression that the really damaging parts had been eliminated.” Sawyer and Gannon “pleaded for more time” to prepare things more properly.
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
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When Nixon revealed the tape transcripts to the nation in a televised address on April 29, 1974, they were in neat, uniform, nicely bound volumes that belied the problems within. Criminal references had been removed, and some tapes—like the June 23 “Smoking Gun” tape—were withheld entirely. So the tape battles continued, and pressure continued to mount on Nixon to release more.
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
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As the House Judiciary Committee began to consider impeachment more seriously, it hired additional staff. One of those added was twenty-six-year-old Hillary Rodham, thanks to a recommendation by one of her professors, Burke Marshall, who had served in Robert Kennedy’s Justice Department.
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Watergate: The Hidden History: Nixon, The Mafia, and The CIA (Lamar Waldron)
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she was responsible for drawing up highly restrictive rules of procedure that were to govern the impeachment process.” In addition, she helped “to oversee the preparation of a confidential history of Presidential abuse of power.” The thinking was “that Nixon would mount a defense to the effect that actions in the Watergate affair were not inconsistent with those of many previous administrations.”
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April - May 2014

The Wars of Watergate: The Last Crisis of Richard Nixon (Stanley I. Kutler)
- Highlight on Page 84 | Loc. 1873-74  | Added on Tuesday, April 01, 2014, 01:32 AM

A decade earlier, Nixon had acknowledged the difficulty, even the impossibility, of certain administrative functions. For those, he said, “you need a son-of-a-bitch in it.” 
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The Wars of Watergate: The Last Crisis of Richard Nixon (Stanley I. Kutler)
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Alexander Butterfield, a Haldeman aide who monitored the paper and staff flow to the President and set his schedule each day, saw the President as much, if not more, than Haldeman did. 
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The Wars of Watergate: The Last Crisis of Richard Nixon (Stanley I. Kutler)
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The Haldeman directives, whether written memos or shouted instructions to awed subordinates, are legendary for their authoritativeness. Even when the staff characterized them as “Mickey Mouse” orders—such as harassing a senator who had said something critical about the President the day before—they knew, as Dent remembered, that the instructions really came from the President. The authority was Nixon’s, that “one well, one spring,” as Dent said. Butterfield vividly recalled how Haldeman regularly emerged from the Oval Office with his yellow legal pad, reading directives to others or going to his “dictating machine [to] spit out instructions to the staff members.” Presidential commands, both important and trivial, were often formulated as the President sat alone at night in his Executive Office Building hideaway or in the Lincoln Room in the White House residential quarters. 
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The Wars of Watergate: The Last Crisis of Richard Nixon (Stanley I. Kutler)
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Haldeman was only “an implementer,” who did “nothing without the knowledge of the President”; “he was not a decision maker,” Butterfield later told House and Senate investigators. “Haldeman’s preoccupation [was] … to see that things went in accordance with the President’s likes and dislikes.” To that, Haldeman was “dedicated … in a very selfless way.” Inadvertently, Butterfield confirmed the danger that Reedy had sighted four years earlier. The President’s staff, Butterfield thought, sometimes mirrored his personality too readily, and even accentuated his weaknesses rather than compensating for them. 
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The Wars of Watergate: The Last Crisis of Richard Nixon (Stanley I. Kutler)
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The Wars of Watergate: The Last Crisis of Richard Nixon (Stanley I. Kutler)
- Highlight on Page 87 | Loc. 1939-41  | Added on Tuesday, April 01, 2014, 01:42 AM

Harry Dent, on the other hand, remembered that he and others would simply ignore some of the more outrageous or silly orders. Stephen Bull, who also worked in the Oval Office and later assumed many of Butterfield’s duties, thought that Haldeman occasionally ignored Nixon’s instructions or allowed others to ignore them. 
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The Wars of Watergate: The Last Crisis of Richard Nixon (Stanley I. Kutler)
- Highlight on Page 87 | Loc. 1951-52  | Added on Tuesday, April 01, 2014, 01:43 AM

“Most of us operated in watertight compartments, unaware of what Nixon was ordering our colleagues to do,” Ehrlichman wrote. 
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The Wars of Watergate: The Last Crisis of Richard Nixon (Stanley I. Kutler)
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Compartmentalization ensured fragmentation of power, precisely what Nixon desired. (Of course, the technique was not new; Franklin D. Roosevelt was a past master at such administrative dealings.) 
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The Wars of Watergate: The Last Crisis of Richard Nixon (Stanley I. Kutler)
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“Things didn’t happen around that White House willy-nilly,” Dent insisted. “The man on top was on top.” 
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The Wars of Watergate: The Last Crisis of Richard Nixon (Stanley I. Kutler)
- Highlight on Page 88 | Loc. 1971-73  | Added on Tuesday, April 01, 2014, 01:46 AM

Kissinger claimed that he could recognize an “impulsive instruction,” and thought it wise to have the “reflective Nixon” go over it before taking any action. 20 The observation is instructive for its insight into personality; more important, it demonstrates a president in command—with whatever personality was momentarily dominant in his psyche. 
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The Wars of Watergate: The Last Crisis of Richard Nixon (Stanley I. Kutler)
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“I’ve always thought this country could run itself domestically without a President,” Nixon said in 1967. “All you need is a competent Cabinet to run the country at home. You need a President for foreign policy; no Secretary of State is really important; the President makes foreign policy.” This oft-repeated remark implied that Nixon really had little interest in domestic affairs and was prepared to allow a “competent Cabinet” to run its own course. Nothing was further from the truth. In his eyes, the Cabinet was only an extension of Richard Nixon and the Oval Office; he well realized how domestic affairs intersected with political and public-relations considerations which in turn vitally affected his public standing. As a result, Nixon intimately involved himself in overseeing Cabinet activities, once again using his trusted staff to determine and protect his interests. His interests, as usual, were political and personal rather than those of substantive policies. 
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The Wars of Watergate: The Last Crisis of Richard Nixon (Stanley I. Kutler)
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Henry Kissinger, who worked within both the White House and the Cabinet, saw the President’s relations with his Cabinet as psychologically complex. He thought “students of psychology” could explain why every President since Kennedy trusted his immediate aides more than his Cabinet. 24 The answer, of course, lies in presidential perceptions of political and personal needs, the need to enhance his image and power, as well as to protect his public standing. 
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The Wars of Watergate: The Last Crisis of Richard Nixon (Stanley I. Kutler)
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By mid-1971, with little more than a year remaining before the next presidential election, the public-relations groups seemed concerned that the nation did not view the President as “being personally involved in domestic issues.” One staffer thought it important that the President, not Attorney General Mitchell, speak out on drugs; that President Nixon, not the Environmental Protection Agency’s William Ruckelshaus, talk about pollution; and again, that President Nixon, not Secretary of the Treasury George Shultz, discuss the economy. Ehrlichman and Haldeman agreed that the President must be more involved—or, at least, more visible—in domestic matters. 
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The Wars of Watergate: The Last Crisis of Richard Nixon (Stanley I. Kutler)
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Now, ten months into his presidency, Nixon wanted someone to develop his philosophy. Safire’s observation was revealing, however inadvertent: “Strange, fitting a philosophy to the set of deeds, but sometimes that is what has to be done.” 
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The Wars of Watergate: The Last Crisis of Richard Nixon (Stanley I. Kutler)
- Highlight on Page 93 | Loc. 2098-2100  | Added on Tuesday, April 01, 2014, 02:02 AM

Connally stirred his audience most when he urged that someone do something about the President’s awkward thrusting up of his arms and giving the V-for-Victory signal with his fingers. The other presidential aides thought Connally was the only one who could tell Nixon to stop the gesture. 
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The Wars of Watergate: The Last Crisis of Richard Nixon (Stanley I. Kutler)
- Highlight on Page 94 | Loc. 2125-30  | Added on Tuesday, April 01, 2014, 02:06 AM

John F. Kennedy’s aide and biographer, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., recalled many instances of his and Kennedy’s frustration in getting the bureaucracy to respond to policy directives. Schlesinger claimed that he spent three years unsuccessfully trying to persuade the State Department to stop using outmoded references to the “Sino-Soviet Bloc.” More generally, he observed that “the President used to divert himself with the dream of establishing a secret office of thirty people or so to run foreign policy while maintaining the State Department as a facade in which people might contentedly carry papers from bureau to bureau.” (Ironically, that was precisely the system that Nixon and Kissinger installed.) 
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The Wars of Watergate: The Last Crisis of Richard Nixon (Stanley I. Kutler)
- Highlight on Page 96 | Loc. 2162-66  | Added on Tuesday, April 01, 2014, 02:11 AM

As a practical matter, however, bureaucrats under Nixon did what they always did, even when not ideologically hostile to the Chief Executive: they fought for position and a share of power and often settled on the basis of mutually satisfactory group bargains. 38 That was not the game favored by the President and his men. And as the White House staff grew, that bureaucratic structure, with its own subunits, confronted the myriad of established bureaucracies scattered throughout the government, giving a new dimension to jurisdictional warfare. 
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The Wars of Watergate: The Last Crisis of Richard Nixon (Stanley I. Kutler)
- Highlight on Page 99 | Loc. 2225-31  | Added on Tuesday, April 01, 2014, 02:17 AM

Much of the difficulty probably was due to Hoover’s declining energies; he preferred to consolidate his empire and not open it to further assaults. Hoover no longer could be counted on to meet CIA or White House demands for actions that, if carried out and subsequently revealed, might have irreparably harmed his beloved Bureau. Consequently, he refused requests for mail openings, break-ins, wiretaps, and campus infiltrations. Hoover’s finely attuned political antennae remained intact; indeed, they operated far better than those of the White House. Given the heightened judicial and public consciousness of the importance of maintaining rigorous constitutional standards, Hoover recognized that the operations favored by the White House threatened problems for the President—and not least of all, for “his” Bureau and for himself. 
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The Wars of Watergate: The Last Crisis of Richard Nixon (Stanley I. Kutler)
- Highlight on Page 100 | Loc. 2255-59  | Added on Tuesday, April 01, 2014, 02:21 AM

Hoover was more direct: he warned Mitchell that he would insist on the President’s signature for any activity that might be illegal. Mitchell saw the danger and informed the President. Two weeks after his initial approval, Nixon ordered the plan scuttled. And in the meantime, Hoover remained free to conduct the “dirty war” against subversion, in a fashion not too different from that proposed by Huston, but on J. Edgar Hoover’s terms. Hoover’s victory only heightened the White House antagonism toward him. 
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The Wars of Watergate: The Last Crisis of Richard Nixon (Stanley I. Kutler)
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Nixon returned from the funeral, announced that the new FBI building would be named in Hoover’s honor, and ordered the Acting Director, L. Patrick Gray, to bring Hoover’s files to the White House. It developed that they were gone; supposedly, Hoover’s secretary got there first. 
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The Wars of Watergate: The Last Crisis of Richard Nixon (Stanley I. Kutler)
- Highlight on Page 98 | Loc. 2217-20  | Added on Tuesday, April 01, 2014, 10:48 AM

LBJ told Nixon that he must depend on “Edgar” to “maintain security.” Put your “complete trust” in him, Johnson advised. Nixon needed little prompting, for he had forged a close bond with Hoover since his service on the House Un-American Activities Committee in the 1940s. Hoover had kept up the contact, providing Nixon with information throughout the latter’s “wilderness years.” 
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The Wars of Watergate: The Last Crisis of Richard Nixon (Stanley I. Kutler)
- Highlight on Page 97 | Loc. 2192-96  | Added on Tuesday, April 01, 2014, 10:48 AM

Huston pushed hard for an interagency working group, “chaired by the White House,” to coordinate intelligence in the internal-security area. Huston told Egil Krogh, another young lawyer concerned with law-and-order issues, that the “President’s interest” in discrediting Students for a Democratic Society, the Black Panthers, and other activist groups simply was not being served by the Department of Justice—which meant the FBI. 
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The Wars of Watergate: The Last Crisis of Richard Nixon (Stanley I. Kutler)
- Highlight on Page 98 | Loc. 2203-7  | Added on Tuesday, April 01, 2014, 10:50 AM

On June 5, 1970, Nixon met with the directors of various intelligence agencies: the FBI, the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and the National Security Agency. He criticized their overlapping activities and jurisdictions, and he demanded that they reorganize to provide him with one informed body of opinion on domestic political intelligence. He named Hoover as Chairman of the group—first among equals, so to speak—and installed Tom Huston as “staff director.” 
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The Wars of Watergate: The Last Crisis of Richard Nixon (Stanley I. Kutler)
- Highlight on Page 102 | Loc. 2294-96  | Added on Tuesday, April 01, 2014, 10:50 AM

As 1970 drew to a close, Richard Nixon, as was his custom, prepared a list of goals for the future and made random notes that left tracings of his moods. His writing offered an idealized version of himself and his Administration, a view he ardently sought to impose on the nation, his entourage, and history. 
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The Wars of Watergate: The Last Crisis of Richard Nixon (Stanley I. Kutler)
- Highlight on Page 103 | Loc. 2324-28  | Added on Tuesday, April 01, 2014, 10:53 AM

Less than three months into the first term, John Ehrlichman had hired John Caulfield, a former New York City policeman, to establish a White House “investigations unit.” Caulfield had been a Nixon bodyguard in 1968, and Haldeman assigned him to Ehrlichman after the election. Caulfield’s ostensible job was to serve as liaison with the Secret Service and local police units, but he eagerly plunged into the task of investigating Senator Edward Kennedy and the Chappaquiddick accident of 1969, in which Kennedy drove a car into the water, drowning a female companion. 
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Nixon later candidly acknowledged his own involvement in such harassment. He “hit the ceiling,” he recalled, when he learned that the IRS had audited John Wayne and Billy Graham. He told his aides: “Get the word out, down to the IRS, that I want them to conduct field audits of those who are our opponents, if they’re going to do in our friends.” He immediately suggested Democratic National Chairman Larry O’Brien as a target. 
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- Highlight on Page 106 | Loc. 2379-80  | Added on Tuesday, April 01, 2014, 01:26 PM

The White House strongly believed that IRS commissioners could not be trusted to carry out its will and assigned John Caulfield to work with Vernon Acree, the IRS Assistant Commissioner for Inspection, to stimulate activity. 
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- Highlight on Page 106 | Loc. 2394-98  | Added on Tuesday, April 01, 2014, 01:28 PM

The Service had been too “unresponsive and insensitive” to the White House. Commissioner Walters, Caulfield noted, appeared “oversensitive” in his concern that IRS actions might be labeled political. That had to change, Dean said. Specifically, Dean told Haldeman that Walters “must be made to know that discreet political actions and investigations on behalf of the administration are a firm requirement and responsibility on his part. We should have direct access to Walters for action in the sensitive areas and should not have to clear them with Treasury.” Finally, the inevitable rationale: the Democrats “used [IRS] most effectively. We have been unable.” 
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- Highlight on Page 107 | Loc. 2406-12  | Added on Tuesday, April 01, 2014, 01:30 PM

President Nixon and his men also considered direct action, less subtle and including physical force, against “enemies.” During antiwar demonstrations in Washington in May 1971, Haldeman told the President that Charles Colson would use his connections with the Teamsters’ Union and hire some “thugs” to attack the protesters. Haldeman’s enthusiasm was unmistakable: “Murderers. Guys that really, you know, that’s what they really do. Like … the regular strikebusters-type and all that … and then they’re gonna beat the [obscenity] out of some of these people. And, uh, and hope they really hurt ’em.” Nixon enthusiastically chimed in: those “guys” would “go in and knock their [the demonstrators’] heads off.” His contempt was obvious: “These people try something, bust ’em,” he added. 
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- Highlight on Page 107 | Loc. 2415-17  | Added on Tuesday, April 01, 2014, 01:30 PM

“Aren’t the Chicago Seven all Jews?” the President asked. (They were not.) The two men had a wide-ranging discussion of political “dirty tricks” that various aides had organized. 
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- Highlight on Page 107 | Loc. 2419-22  | Added on Tuesday, April 01, 2014, 01:31 PM

Senator Muskie, then considered to be Nixon’s most likely opponent in 1972. Nixon and Haldeman were particularly pleased and amused by Colson’s attempts to disrupt Muskie’s campaign. Haldeman, with obvious relish, reported that Colson had “got a lot done that he hasn’t been caught at.” Nixon and Haldeman laughed throughout the exchange. But in that compartmentalized White House world, Haldeman was equally glad to report that “we got some stuff that he [Colson] doesn’t know anything about, too.” 
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- Highlight on Page 108 | Loc. 2432-36  | Added on Tuesday, April 01, 2014, 01:33 PM

Charles Colson reported the President as saying: “I don’t give a damn how it is done, do whatever has to be done to stop these leaks and prevent further unauthorized disclosures; I don’t want to be told why it can’t be done. This government cannot survive, it cannot function, if anyone can run out and leak whatever documents he wants to…. I want to know who is behind this and I want the most complete investigation that can be conducted…. I don’t want excuses. I want results. 1 want it done, whatever the cost.” 
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- Highlight on Page 108 | Loc. 2436-37  | Added on Tuesday, April 01, 2014, 01:33 PM

Haldeman assigned Caulfield to find the source of leaks to columnist Jack Anderson. 
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- Highlight on Page 108 | Loc. 2444-47  | Added on Tuesday, April 01, 2014, 01:35 PM

In and out of office, Richard Nixon consistently was preoccupied with his place in history. To him, the control of information and documents was then—and continued to be—essential for ensuring a satisfactory standing at the bar of history. Perhaps nothing illustrated this better than the 1971 episode involving the White House’s response to the publication of the Pentagon Papers. 
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- Highlight on Page 109 | Loc. 2447-53  | Added on Tuesday, April 01, 2014, 01:35 PM

On Sunday morning, June 13, 1971, the New York Times carried a frontpage photograph of the President and his daughter Tricia, standing together in the Rose Garden following her wedding ceremony. The other side of the page carried the first installment of the “Pentagon Papers,” a 7,000-page document commissioned by Robert McNamara, Defense Secretary under Kennedy and Johnson. The study traced the origins of the American involvement in Vietnam and offered significant insight into decision-making processes in the foreign-policy and military establishments. Nothing better revealed how secrecy had served the cause of deception than the revelations in these papers. Melvin Laird, Nixon’s Secretary of Defense, told the President that 98 percent of the Pentagon Papers could be declassified. But Nixon responded that “the era of negotiations can’t succeed w/o secrecy.” 
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- Highlight on Page 110 | Loc. 2470-72  | Added on Tuesday, April 01, 2014, 01:37 PM

Two weeks after publication of the papers, he acknowledged his complicity in their release. That admission put the issue of the war—its necessity, its wisdom, as well as its morality—squarely at the center of public attention. 
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- Highlight on Page 110 | Loc. 2475-76  | Added on Tuesday, April 01, 2014, 01:37 PM

Nixon told Ehrlichman at one point that he would go “an extra mile to defend the security system to reassure China and friendly governments.” 
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- Highlight on Page 110 | Loc. 2476-77  | Added on Tuesday, April 01, 2014, 01:37 PM

Both Nixon and Kissinger realized the personal danger if any president lost control over classified documents and allowed them to be used to smear his predecessors. 
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- Highlight on Page 111 | Loc. 2494-96  | Added on Tuesday, April 01, 2014, 01:39 PM

Eventually, the Administration brought criminal charges against Ellsberg (against Griswold’s recommendation), but the proceeding ended in a mistrial—ironically, because of the Administration’s own illegal behavior. 
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- Highlight on Page 111 | Loc. 2497-99  | Added on Tuesday, April 01, 2014, 01:39 PM

One of the more bizarre by-products of the Pentagon Papers affair was a plan either to raid or to firebomb the Brookings Institution and to pilfer papers there belonging to Leslie Gelb and Morton Halperin, former National Security Council aides. These papers allegedly represented a Pentagon Papers analogue for the Nixon years. 
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- Highlight on Page 111 | Loc. 2511-13  | Added on Tuesday, April 01, 2014, 01:41 PM

Thus, the Pentagon Papers incident intensified the adversarial relationship between the Administration and the media, a relationship that was to deteriorate still more sharply. These developments, together with a failure of the courts to provide the desired protection and relief demanded by the Administration, led directly to one of the most fateful decisions of the Nixon presidency: the creation of the Plumbers. 
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- Highlight on Page 112 | Loc. 2528-33  | Added on Tuesday, April 01, 2014, 01:42 PM

And thus the President of the United States called into being the Plumbers, a group specifically created to do what J. Edgar Hoover would not do without the validation of Nixon himself. According to Harry Dent, Lyndon Johnson told Nixon to rely on Hoover to cope with enemies within; but Hoover had failed his longtime friend Nixon. Five men connected to this group would go to jail for a specific crime committed in fulfillment of the President’s wishes. One of them, Egil Krogh, later recalled being told by Ehrlichman (another of those convicted) that the President suggested he read the Hiss chapter in Nixon’s book Six Crises. Dutifully carrying out the assignment, Krogh concluded that the President wanted him to proceed “with a zeal comparable to that he [Nixon] exercised … in investigating Alger Hiss.” 
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- Highlight on Page 113 | Loc. 2545-49  | Added on Tuesday, April 01, 2014, 01:44 PM

Krogh, a lawyer and an Ehrlichman protégé” from Seattle (he viewed Ehrlichman as a “father-figure”), had served in the White House in a variety of posts, chiefly centering on the Administration’s antidrug measures and on District of Columbia affairs. Young had served with Kissinger as a Rockefeller retainer, and the two worked together on the National Security Council before Ehrlichman peremptorily recruited Krogh for his own needs. 
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- Highlight on Page 113 | Loc. 2554-55  | Added on Tuesday, April 01, 2014, 01:44 PM

(The group’s quaint name was coined when one member, David Young, told his mother-in-law that he was plugging leaks of sensitive information. She thought it was nice to have a plumber in the family.) 
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- Highlight on Page 113 | Loc. 2557-60  | Added on Tuesday, April 01, 2014, 01:45 PM

Ehrlichman also told Krogh that the Administration would not use the CIA, because its jurisdiction was legally limited to operations abroad, and this was a domestic matter. (A somewhat exceptional adherence to scruples given the President’s entanglement of the CIA with the Huston Plan and the collection of domestic intelligence. In fact, the CIA did get involved in the Plumbers’ operations, by aiding its notorious alumnus Howard Hunt.) 
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- Highlight on Page 114 | Loc. 2578-81  | Added on Tuesday, April 01, 2014, 11:21 PM

When Nixon and Ehrlichman had their last official meeting on May 2, 1973, the President asked if he, Ehrlichman, had known about the Fielding break-in earlier. Ehrlichman noted that he silently nodded, and Nixon replied: “If so, it made no impression.” Colson indirectly supported Ehrlichman’s claim that Nixon knew. Colson assumed, he testified, “that John Ehrlichman wouldn’t take something like that upon his own shoulders.” 
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- Highlight on Page 116 | Loc. 2609-12  | Added on Tuesday, April 01, 2014, 11:25 PM

When Attorney General Richardson reviewed the Fielding operation in May 1973, he immediately recognized that it would be impossible to make any public distinction between it and the Watergate break-in. Both events, he realized, involved Hunt and Liddy, both were illegal, and both could be traced to the White House. He favored prompt disclosure if “the trail” led no further than Krogh and Young. Richardson had good reason for making that qualification. 
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- Highlight on Page 116 | Loc. 2627-31  | Added on Tuesday, April 01, 2014, 11:28 PM

The White House ordered the FBI to tap Radford’s telephone, hoping to uncover his ties to Anderson. Instead, the wiretap disclosed that Radford had been pilfering documents from Kissinger and the NSC files and turning them over to the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Radford eventually confessed that he had stolen perhaps a thousand documents from NSC files and bum bags and then delivered them to Welander, who served as middleman for Admiral Thomas Moorer, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs. Radford steadfastly denied he had leaked to Anderson. 
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- Highlight on Page 117 | Loc. 2633-35  | Added on Tuesday, April 01, 2014, 11:28 PM

He saw Radford’s revelations as “an extremely serious matter.” The Seven Days in May scenario of a military coup crossed his mind. “It was a question whether there was an actual move by the military into the deliberations of the duly-elected and appointed civilians to carry out foreign policy.” 
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- Highlight on Page 117 | Loc. 2647-49  | Added on Tuesday, April 01, 2014, 11:30 PM

To be sure, someone—the President? Ehrlichman?—had ordered a Department of Defense investigation of Radford and one within the White House carried out by the Plumbers. Those reports remain buried. 
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- Highlight on Page 117 | Loc. 2649-54  | Added on Tuesday, April 01, 2014, 11:31 PM

The only public discussion of the Radford affair came in a desultory Senate Armed Services inquiry in 1974, artfully managed by Senator John Stennis (D–MS) to produce the least possible information. None of the principal investigators testified. Senator Stuart Symington (D–MO) wanted Ehrlichman called as a witness, but Stennis dodged on this. Defense Department Counsel J. Fred Buzhardt filed a report on the affair, but none of it was discussed. The hearing, in sum, dealt with few substantive issues, although several interesting tidbits filtered out. For example, Admiral Welander testified that Haig had arranged his meeting with David Young, indicating Haig had knowledge of the Plumbers. (Curiously, according to Ehrlichman, Young thought Haig was behind the whole spying effort.) 
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- Highlight on Page 120 | Loc. 2719-21  | Added on Tuesday, April 01, 2014, 11:37 PM

Unhappily for Nixon, after admitting he approved the tap on Morton Halperin, a Kissinger aide, he became the first president ordered to pay damages—a $5 award, meant to be symbolic—to a private citizen for acts committed by the Chief Executive while in office. 
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- Highlight on Page 122 | Loc. 2756-65  | Added on Tuesday, April 01, 2014, 11:40 PM

Some twenty months later, in the summer of 1972, the pending case had moved to the Supreme Court. Ervin put in an appearance to argue against the government’s policy, describing the Army’s action as a “cancer on the body politic.” Chief Justice Burger led a five-man majority which specifically followed Rehnquist’s formulation that the mere existence of governmental surveillance activities was not a violation of First Amendment rights. Rehnquist, now an Associate Justice, refused to disqualify himself in the case, claiming—in the face of his public testimony—that he had no personal knowledge of the case itself. He also insisted that he had never acted in an advisory role for the government in the case. Rehnquist’s vote, of course, was crucial; a tie vote would have sustained the lower-court ruling against the government. Fourteen years later, in 1986, Rehnquist faced the issue again during hearings on his nomination to be Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court. He reiterated that he had “no recollection” of participating in the formulation of Army surveillance or intelligence policies. But earlier testimony from the Army’s General Counsel clearly contradicted Rehnquist. 
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- Highlight on Page 124 | Loc. 2791-92  | Added on Tuesday, April 01, 2014, 11:44 PM

The case now took on the paradoxical title United States v. United States Court for the Eastern District of Michigan , but is more simply known as the Keith Case. 
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- Highlight on Page 124 | Loc. 2797-2801  | Added on Tuesday, April 01, 2014, 11:45 PM

In the Keith Case, the government strikingly ignored the Steel Seizure Case of 1952, though this was the leading case on inherent presidential powers. There, the Supreme Court had rejected President Truman’s claims of inherent powers to nationalize the steel mills because of the Korean War emergency. The Court of Appeals in the Keith Case thought it odd that the President of the United States should claim the sovereign powers of George III, whose authorization of indiscriminate searches and seizures had been a vital issue in the Revolutionary Era. 
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- Highlight on Page 126 | Loc. 2822-25  | Added on Tuesday, April 01, 2014, 11:49 PM

Richard Nixon’s assuming office marked the first time since Zachary Taylor’s election in 1848 that a first-term president failed to meet a Congress controlled by his own party. The Democratic majority, however, represented only part of the problem. Nixon confronted a Congress sympathetic to ideological and institutional forces increasingly resistant to presidential wishes. 
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- Highlight on Page 127 | Loc. 2837-39  | Added on Tuesday, April 01, 2014, 11:50 PM

Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “Hundred Days” in 1933 is often cited as a standard for demonstrating modern-day presidential leadership, but a close examination of the legislative process in this case reveals, as in so many others, that partnership between President and Congress which must prevail in American political life. 
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- Highlight on Page 127 | Loc. 2839-41  | Added on Tuesday, April 01, 2014, 11:50 PM

John F. Kennedy remarked after two years in office that “Congress looks more powerful sitting here than it did when I was there in the Congress.” Nixon apparently never shared that insight. 
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- Highlight on Page 127 | Loc. 2844-47  | Added on Tuesday, April 01, 2014, 11:51 PM

Richard Nixon’s experience in both the legislative and executive branches for fifteen years must have made him mindful of political reality. Nevertheless, he directed his staff toward a policy that alternated contempt for Congress with a belief that, through the borrowed techniques of advertising and public relations, the White House could sell its program directly to the public and so make Congress irrelevant. 
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- Highlight on Page 128 | Loc. 2865-68  | Added on Tuesday, April 01, 2014, 11:52 PM

In foreign-policy matters, Eisenhower respectfully regarded Congress’s role, whether consultative or formal. He carefully touched congressional bases during the tense moments surrounding the French collapse in Vietnam in 1954, the Formosan Straits crisis in 1955, the Suez invasion in 1956, and the civil war in Lebanon in 1957. Nixon, on the other hand, discussed his Cambodian invasion plans with Congress in 1970 only after the decision had been reached. 
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- Highlight on Page 129 | Loc. 2879-83  | Added on Tuesday, April 01, 2014, 11:54 PM

Special combinations of man and times—a Franklin D. Roosevelt or a Dwight D. Eisenhower—followed the unpopular tenures of Herbert Hoover and Harry Truman. The nation waited in 1969 to see what it had chosen. It soon became clear that the election had not stilled any of the nation’s civil strife; most significantly, Nixon’s installation as President only widened the chasm and conflict between the executive branch and Congress. Moreover, that conflict had taken on a new character in recent years. 
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- Highlight on Page 129 | Loc. 2896-97  | Added on Tuesday, April 01, 2014, 11:55 PM

A distinguished political scientist, James MacGregor Burns, summarized the deadlock-of-democracy notion in a book by that title in 1963. 
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- Highlight on Page 130 | Loc. 2905-7  | Added on Tuesday, April 01, 2014, 11:55 PM

believed that we had allowed the Madisonian system of checks and balances to thwart and fragment “leadership instead of allowing it free play within the boundaries of the democratic process.” The result was a political system divided along both partisan and institutional lines—and, all too often, a paralysis of governmental will and power. 
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- Highlight on Page 131 | Loc. 2931-36  | Added on Wednesday, April 02, 2014, 04:51 PM

The Nixon speech sounded as if it had been crafted by speechwriter Theodore Sorensen in the Kennedy style. Nixon spoke of presidential involvement in the “intellectual ferment” of the time. He recognized that “the lamps of enlightenment are lit by the spark of controversy.” The President, Nixon noted, was both “a user of thought” and a “catalyst of thought.” He talked of attracting “the ablest men” to his Cabinet, and he promised “a reorganized” executive and “a stronger White House than any yet put together.” Finally, there was a Kennedyesque call for elevation of the crusade: “Our cause today is not a nation, but a planet—for never have the fates of all the people of the earth been so bound up together.” 
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- Highlight on Page 132 | Loc. 2965-67  | Added on Wednesday, April 02, 2014, 04:54 PM

That faith rested on Theodore Roosevelt’s concept of a president free to do anything except what was expressly prohibited in the Constitution. Now Nixon was telling the people the same thing. In Alexander Bickel’s well-chosen metaphor, Richard Nixon caught the liberals bathing, and walked off with their clothes. 
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- Highlight on Page 133 | Loc. 2985-92  | Added on Wednesday, April 02, 2014, 04:56 PM

In 1803, President Thomas Jefferson matter-of-factly reported to Congress that he had not spent a $50,000 appropriation for Mississippi River gunboats because “the favorable and peaceful turn of affairs … rendered an immediate execution of the law unnecessary.” 11 Thus began the history of presidential impoundment of duly authorized funds. Impoundment had always posed practical constitutional problems, but these seemed of minor consequence until the Nixon Administration (with an important precedent from the Johnson years) transformed an occasional practice into a special test of wills with Congress. For Nixon, the exercise of impoundment also became part of his constitutional responsibility. In a January 31, 1973 press conference, he announced “the Constitutional right for the President of the United States to impound funds[,] and that is not to spend money, when the spending of money would mean … increasing prices or increasing taxes for all the people, that right is absolutely clear.” 
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- Highlight on Page 135 | Loc. 3028-33  | Added on Wednesday, April 02, 2014, 05:00 PM

Congressional inertia on impoundment amounted to benign acquiescence, which in turn emboldened the Administration to expand impoundment actions. Cost-cutting activities most often involved programs that the White House wanted eliminated and replaced with state initiatives financed by revenue-sharing measures. Altogether, Nixon impounded more than $18 billion in his first term. 15 Unlike the impoundments of his predecessors, none of his involved defense expenditures; the impounded funds consistently affected pet pork-barrel projects and traditional liberal causes. Impoundment became an instrument serving preferred presidential policies, policies that aided fiscal restraint and at the same time frustrated congressional wishes. 
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- Highlight on Page 137 | Loc. 3067-68  | Added on Wednesday, April 02, 2014, 05:03 PM

the fact that impoundment had risen to the respectability of being considered grounds for impeachment measured the furies Richard Nixon aroused in Congress. 
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- Highlight on Page 138 | Loc. 3089-91  | Added on Wednesday, April 02, 2014, 05:05 PM

“We’re going to reorganize the government come hell or high water,” he told Nelson Rockefeller in 1971. But Leonard Garment recognized the dangers of making a “lunge at the private parts … of all the different establishments in Washington.” 
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- Highlight on Page 139 | Loc. 3113-16  | Added on Wednesday, April 02, 2014, 05:07 PM

The President subsequently named John Ehrlichman to head the Domestic Council, and the aide soon confirmed the fears of both Cabinet and congressional critics. Ehrlichman seemed less interested in broad policy formulation than in making the council into an operational agency. By all accounts (except Ehrlichman’s, of course), the Cabinet became increasingly isolated, even irrelevant, as contacts increased between the White House and middle-level bureaucrats. 
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- Highlight on Page 143 | Loc. 3209-14  | Added on Wednesday, April 02, 2014, 11:47 PM

Court-watchers knew, however, that Warren Burger stood out as the exception who proved the rule. Burger, a former Assistant Attorney General, had been appointed to the Circuit Court by Eisenhower in the late 1950s. He consistently took issue with his liberal colleagues, often sarcastically berating what he considered their activism, elitism, and excessive concern with the rights of defendants at the expense of social order. In 1967, U.S. News & World Report published excerpts from some of Burger’s dissents and speeches, emphasizing his law-and-order themes. The article caught the attention of then-candidate Richard Nixon, and he used some of the ideas in his presidential campaign. Impressed with Burger’s “moderate conservatism,” Nixon nominated Burger as Chief Justice on May 21, 1969. 
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- Highlight on Page 144 | Loc. 3229-33  | Added on Wednesday, April 02, 2014, 11:50 PM

Black’s definition in its own way departed from the original understanding of the term. In the early nineteenth century, strict construction was advocated by those who opposed what they regarded as the overly broad interpretations of the Constitution by Chief Justice John Marshall. But at that time, Marshall was regarded as the consummate conservative. His opponents, particularly Thomas Jefferson (who on occasion found it convenient to discard his own notions of strict construction), were the liberals of their day. 
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- Highlight on Page 144 | Loc. 3237-40  | Added on Wednesday, April 02, 2014, 11:51 PM

Perhaps nothing with the exception of the ever-growing interinstitutional conflicts of the Vietnam war so poisoned the relations between Nixon and Congress as the Senate’s rejection of his successive nominations of Clement Haynsworth and G. Harrold Cars-well to the Court. A failure to confirm a presidential nomination is rare enough, but for it to happen with two successive nominees was truly extraordinary. 
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- Highlight on Page 144 | Loc. 3248-49  | Added on Wednesday, April 02, 2014, 11:52 PM

As the pressure intensified against Fortas, Attorney General Mitchell visited Chief Justice Warren and briefed him on the department’s evidence; shortly afterward, Fortas submitted his resignation. 
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a Life magazine article charged that Fortas had accepted improper fees and had intervened with a federal regulatory agency in behalf of a former client whose foundation he served as a paid consultant. And Department of Justice investigators reportedly turned up more incriminating evidence. 
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- Highlight on Page 145 | Loc. 3264-66  | Added on Wednesday, April 02, 2014, 11:54 PM

The President’s selection of Burger had obvious political motivations. His next choices for the Court offered payment on his obligation to key Southern supporters, particularly Senator J. Strom Thurmond, to appoint a man from the South—presumably a judge who would be less amenable to pressures to uphold desegregation measures. 
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- Highlight on Page 146 | Loc. 3289-90  | Added on Wednesday, April 02, 2014, 11:57 PM

For the first time since 1930, the Senate had turned down a presidential nomination to the Supreme Court. The Haynsworth defeat demonstrated the fragility of Richard Nixon’s congressional support only one year after his election. 
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- Highlight on Page 151 | Loc. 3392-97  | Added on Thursday, April 03, 2014, 12:06 AM

Ehrlichman had his protégé Egil Krogh devise procedures to tighten the White House grip and influence on Court nominations, primarily at the expense of the Justice Department. Krogh told Ehrlichman that the President could not again “play catch up ball with a nomination.” Conceding initial selection and checkout procedures to Justice and the FBI, Krogh suggested that a White House unit be established to oversee the proceedings—with John Ehrlichman at the helm. Krogh devised roles for the President’s key men in securing future nominations: Clark MacGregor and William Timmons to handle Congress, William Safire to deal with the press, Charles Colson to brief various interest groups, and John Dean to coordinate the 
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- Highlight on Page 151 | Loc. 3391-99  | Added on Thursday, April 03, 2014, 12:07 AM

By late 1971, with two new nominations to submit and an election only a year away, the Administration could no longer afford mistakes. Ehrlichman had his protégé Egil Krogh devise procedures to tighten the White House grip and influence on Court nominations, primarily at the expense of the Justice Department. Krogh told Ehrlichman that the President could not again “play catch up ball with a nomination.” Conceding initial selection and checkout procedures to Justice and the FBI, Krogh suggested that a White House unit be established to oversee the proceedings—with John Ehrlichman at the helm. Krogh devised roles for the President’s key men in securing future nominations: Clark MacGregor and William Timmons to handle Congress, William Safire to deal with the press, Charles Colson to brief various interest groups, and John Dean to coordinate the others. Krogh urged that David Young, his fellow Plumber—whom Krogh called “the one independent mind, very facile and penetrating”—should be heavily involved. Krogh also did not trust the FBI. 
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The White House knew that numerous members of the Court were in precarious health. Shortly after his sharp attack on the Nixon Administration for its attempts to censor the press in the Pentagon Papers case, Justice Hugo Black became gravely ill. He submitted his resignation in September 1971. A week later, Justice Harlan, nearly blind and debilitated by bone cancer, also resigned. It was a golden opportunity for the President, but he came perilously close to opting for mediocrity and confronting the Senate once more. 
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Those names might have provided some short-range political mileage for Nixon, but their obscurity belittled the Court’s significance as an institution, and their mediocrity only signaled the President’s willingness to devalue the Court’s role in the governmental apparatus. 
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Congress’s customary behavior had permitted an extravagant growth of executive war powers. Perhaps Congress had been overwhelmed by a “cult of executive expertise”; perhaps there was a residue of guilt left over from the Senate’s 1919 rejection of the League of Nations and American international responsibilities; or perhaps, as a Senate committee suggested in 1969, Congress found itself “unprepared” to assert its constitutional role as the United States suddenly found itself in a new and dangerous world after 1945. 50 In any event, for better than a generation, presidents generally dealt with tame, pliant congresses in foreign-policy matters. The frustrating obstacles Congress regularly had imposed on presidential domestic policies simply were absent in foreign affairs. With cause, Richard Nixon thought he had a “free hand” in the international arena. 
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In a rare moment, however, detachment prevailed as Kissinger clearly stated the ironic, tragic nature of the conflict between the President and Congress over foreign policy. The Vietnam debate, Kissinger later wrote, “represented a flight into nostalgia,” a notion that America had somehow lost its way and desperately needed to recover its moral purity. Kissinger dismissed the confusion and debate over the war as an expression of self-indulgence that “opened the floodgates of chaos and exacerbated … internal divisions.” 
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Nixon sensed the new mood. Just a few weeks earlier, he attacked critics of American foreign policy as “neo-isolationists.” Yet several months later he effectively neutralized his critics with his response to the massive protests in October 1969. In a national television address, he appealed to the “Silent Majority,” confidently asserting that they outnumbered the protesters and supported his goal of “peace with honor.” North Vietnam, he insisted, could not defeat or humiliate the United States; “only Americans can do that.” 
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congressional restlessness gave rise to a gesture of rebellion. As part of a defense-authorization bill, Congress called on the President to terminate military operations in Indochina and provide for withdrawal within nine months, subject to the release of prisoners of war. In a bold fashion of his own, Nixon said he would ignore the proviso, since it did “not reflect my judgment about the way in which the war should be brought to a conclusion,” adding that he considered the statement “without binding force or effect.” The next year a federal court repudiated the President: “No executive statement denying efficacy to the legislation could have either validity or effect,” the court’s decision said, and the court characterized Nixon’s statement as “very unfortunate.” 
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- Highlight on Page 159 | Loc. 3587-94  | Added on Thursday, April 03, 2014, 12:28 AM

Modern presidential-congressional relations have a checkered history. Some observers have been critical of an altogether too compliant Congress. Carl Vinson, who first arrived as a Georgia Congressman in 1914, sadly lamented in 1973 that Congress was a “somewhat querulous but essentially kindly uncle who complains while furiously puffing on his pipe but who, finally, as everyone expects, gives in and hands over the allowance, grants the permission, or raises his hand in blessing, and then returns to his rocking chair for another year of somnolence broken only by an occasional glance down the avenue and a muttered doubt as to whether he had done the right thing.” Indeed, even Richard Nixon could be a beneficiary of that kindly old uncle. Congress passed the Economic Stabilization Act in 1970, which gave the President sweeping authority to regulate wages and prices—a domestic equivalent to the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, as one writer remarked. 
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- Highlight on Page 161 | Loc. 3631-35  | Added on Thursday, April 03, 2014, 09:00 AM

The Nixon Administration mounted an unprecedented, transparent assault on the media and individual reporters; yet that Administration, like others, went to extraordinary lengths to cultivate the press. And for good reason: the media had become an essential component in the task of governance in late-twentieth-century America. Mastery of it, or at least maintaining its goodwill, became a recognized, desirable prize as presidents sought to reach and shape public opinion and to build constituencies for their programs and future campaigns. 
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- Highlight on Page 162 | Loc. 3648-51  | Added on Thursday, April 03, 2014, 09:01 AM

Nixon and Haldeman installed Ronald Ziegler as Press Secretary. This was apparently a conscious move to diminish, certainly to subordinate, the position. Ziegler had been a Disneyland guide and a Haldeman aide in an advertising agency. Not to name a working reporter for the post marked a dramatic departure for a new Administration, although LBJ had done the same late in his presidency. 
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- Highlight on Page 167 | Loc. 3750-57  | Added on Thursday, April 03, 2014, 09:13 AM

Emphasizing the “enormous responsibilities” of the presidency, Nixon insisted that the Chief Executive “must not be constantly preening in front of a mirror, wondering whether or not he is getting across as this kind of individual or that.” He had no truck with the public-relations types “constantly riding me, or they used to in the campaign, and they do now. ‘You have got to do this, that, and the other thing to change your image.’ I am not going to change my image, I am just going to do a good job for this country.” The facts were otherwise. Nixon was constantly concerned and preoccupied with image; and it was the President himself, not “spinmakers” and public-relations men, who set the agenda for this concern. Just prior to his Today appearance, Nixon told Haldeman that it was time to use a “full-time PR man to really convey the true image of a President to the nation.” 
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The presidential press conference has come to be the most visible point of public contact between presidents and the media. It is often said that this is the closest American approximation to the British parliamentary practice of periodically questioning government ministers. The comparison pales. The British system is institutionalized and works on a regular basis, operating between assumed equals in status, if not quite in power. All questioners are members of Parliament, standing in deference to their monarch but not to the Prime Minister. The questioners stand forth openly as political opponents, with the opportunity to coordinate and focus a series of questions designed to secure political advantage for themselves. Above all, parliamentary examination is a vital component of ministerial accountability. Presidential press conferences simply have lacked those qualities of tradition and institutionalization. 
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Roosevelt, like Wilson, believed that if he made page one, the editorial pages were of minor consequence. FDR’s first press conferences in 1933 (fashioned after those he had held as Governor of New York) marked a new stage in presidential relations with the press, one in which the President personally assumed control to manage the news flow. FDR largely succeeded, through a combination of charm, guile, cajolery, and flattery. He was, a recent biographer noted, “a picture of ease and confidence.” Without television to convey a visual image of himself, the President nevertheless portrayed himself to the press—and hence to the public—as “unprecedentedly frank, open, cordial, personal.” 
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Eisenhower held 193 press conferences in his eight years in office, far more than any other president, before or since. Sophisticated audiences often responded contemptuously to the President’s jumbled syntax, his rambling, “often inappropriate or impossibly confusing answers,” and his confessions of “I don’t know.” But his style was effective, and the press conferences contributed to Eisenhower’s continuing extraordinary popularity. Eisenhower cultivated good relations with reporters, regularly inviting them to cook-outs during his vacations, playing golf with them, and treating them as “quasi members of his staff.” Occasionally, he might betray some anger or annoyance at a particular incident involving the press, but he never permitted or fostered open antagonism.’ 
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Press conferences are not as spontaneous as they seem. The live televised proceedings dictate careful preparation on the part of the President, including briefings and even rehearsals. Good staff work usually ensures that there are no surprises. The likely questions are obvious and generally are confined to issues of the moment. 
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Given their numbers and differences, reporters at press conferences have no opportunity for coherent questioning. Thus control of the event usually belongs to the President. His problem is to guard against the infrequent slip of the tongue, the inadvertent remark. Nevertheless, control can on occasion slip from his hands: witness Nixon’s experience on June 1, 1971. A reporter raised a question regarding alleged civil liberties violations surrounding the mass police arrests of the May Day antiwar demonstrators that year. (Charges already had been dropped against more than two thousand arrested individuals.) Nixon’s reply focused on the danger of the demonstrations to the government, ignoring the civil liberties question. What followed was unusual, as one reporter after another rose to bore in on the same issue, pressing hard on the question of improper police tactics. Nixon evaded them, finally finding a “safe” reporter who invariably strayed from the pack to ask irrelevant, obscure questions. She did not disappoint him in this case, dropping the dangerous line of questioning to inquire about a surplus of telephone poles in Vietnam. The President, visibly relieved as the press conference quickly returned to its familiar anarchy, nevertheless realized the danger. He did not hold another televised press conference for nearly thirteen months. 
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- Highlight on Page 176 | Loc. 3953-56  | Added on Thursday, April 03, 2014, 09:34 AM

The President’s anger focused in a particularly vicious manner in November that year, when Haldeman, at Nixon’s direction, called J. Edgar Hoover and asked for “a rundown on the homosexuals known and suspected” in the Washington press corps. Hoover confirmed he had the material and noted that he would not need to make any specific investigation. The Director sent the files to the White House. 
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- Highlight on Page 176 | Loc. 3966-69  | Added on Thursday, April 03, 2014, 09:36 AM

Haldeman had his man. It was a perfect match: Magruder was pliant, reliable, and obedient. In time, Haldeman dispatched Magruder to Herb Klein as the “Deputy” in the White House Office of Communications, and fatefully, in 1972 he became Mitchell’s “Deputy” at the Committee to Re-elect the President. Klein was my “nominal boss,” but Haldeman was his “real boss,” Magruder acknowledged. 
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The Agnew speech in Des Moines had been nurtured in the darker moments of the Goldwater candidacy in 1964. The Vice President offered the nation, particularly its heartland, a conspiracy theory that blamed the anti-Nixon bias of the media on an Eastern liberal establishment. “A small group of men, numbering perhaps no more than a dozen anchormen, commentators, and executive producers, settle upon twenty minutes or so of film and commentary that’s to reach the public… . [They] live and work in the geographical and intellectual confines of Washington, D.C., or New York City… . They draw their political and social views from … one another, thereby providing artificial reinforcement to their shared viewpoints.” It was time, he said, to question the power of this “small and un-elected elite.” Given the government’s role in regulating the broadcast networks, Agnew’s threat was only thinly veiled: “the people,” Agnew warned, “are entitled to a full accounting of [the networks’] stewardship.” Agnew had struck the sensitive nerves of the media and liberal intellectuals, but he also won the hearts and minds of those who already believed the notions he espoused. They responded with passionate support for the Vice President. Antisemitic letters constituted II percent of one network’s mail, while tirades against blacks made up another 10 percent. In an ABC poll, 51 percent of the respondents agreed with Agnew. 
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When he returned, he planned to do a documentary on his visit, but Richard Salant, head of CBS News, “cross-examined” him at length over his inability to get more information on the POWs and his failure to report more unfavorably on the North. Instead of doing a documentary, Hart appeared on only a few late-night spot reports. He believed that he had lost the confidence of his bosses. He later realized that he had covered the story as a journalist, not as an “American journalist.” One of his colleagues emphasized how important it was to preface or conclude his reports with reminders that “these people were Communists.” 
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- Highlight on Page 187 | Loc. 4151-58  | Added on Thursday, April 03, 2014, 07:26 PM

Several hours later, in the early morning of the seventeenth, police arrested five men in the Watergate offices of the Democratic National Committee in Washington. A security guard discovered an apparent burglary in progress and notified the local police. When captured, the suspects had several cans of Mace, carried lock-picking devices, and wore surgical gloves. One had a portable radio receiver. The police also found camera equipment and telephone-bugging devices. Because of the possibility that the federal Interception of Communications statute had been violated, the D.C. police called in the FBI. Preliminary investigations on the scene led Bureau agents to believe that the burglars were in the process of installing the listening devices in the Democratic offices. Shortly after the arrest, an attorney showed up at police headquarters, stating that he represented the men in custody. The suspects, however, had refused to make any telephone calls, and the lawyer would not tell agents how he had learned of their arrest. 
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Four of the men in custody were identified as Cubans, although they gave aliases at first. They had with them when they were arrested $2,400 in cash, including thirteen new hundred-dollar bills. Later that day, FBI agents obtained warrants and searched the suspects’ hotel room. They discovered a sealed envelope with a check written by E. Howard Hunt. Hunt’s name, along with the notations “W.H.” and “W. House,” appeared in the address books of two suspects. Bureau records revealed that Hunt had been the subject of an inquiry a year earlier when he was hired for a White House staff position. Hunt’s file also showed that he had listed Douglas Caddy, a local attorney, as a reference. Caddy was the same lawyer who had appeared at police headquarters, after—it was later discovered—Hunt and the wife of one of the defendants had called him. FBI agents further learned that the Cubans had previously been employed by the CIA. 
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What the FBI did not immediately learn was that Howard Hunt and G. Gordon Liddy, the then-counsel for the re-election committee, with another operative, had observed the whole arrest procedure at the Watergate from a room in a nearby hotel. One of those arrested, however, had a key to that room, and eventually police searched it and discovered that Hunt had been present. 
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Alexander Butterfield told FBI agents that Hunt had been a consultant for the White House on “highly sensitive confidential matters” less than a year earlier but had not been used since. But by June 19, agents had learned that Hunt had been a longtime CIA agent and that he had worked for the White House in late March, directly for Charles Colson. That day, the FBI requested permission to interview Colson. On June 23, less than a week after the arrests, FBI Acting Director L. Patrick Gray ordered the “highest priority investigative attention” for the Watergate case. Meanwhile, the President and Haldeman made a desperate gamble to curtail the Bureau’s investigation and enlisted Gray and the CIA in their effort. 
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By the twentieth, Colson’s and Hunt’s names, as well as McCord’s employment at the re-election committee, had become public knowledge. O’Brien called a press conference and announced that the Democrats had filed a $1 million damage suit against CREEP. Citing the involvement of Colson, O’Brien charged that the case had developed “a clear line to the White House.” 
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Meanwhile, Colson assured Nixon that “we won’t let this one bug us.” For himself, the President concluded that “I [will] just stonewall it.” 
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Nixon met reporters on June 22, telling them that the “White House has had no involvement whatever in this particular incident.” On June 25, Lawrence O’Brien challenged the President and called for the appointment of a “special prosecutor of unimpeachable integrity and national reputation.” He claimed that abundant evidence now existed linking the White House to the Watergate burglary. Six days later, John Mitchell announced his resignation as the President’s campaign manager, claiming that he wanted to spend more time with his family. Before he left, however, Mitchell dismissed Gordon Liddy when he learned that the CREEP aide had refused to cooperate with the FBI. Within several weeks, the FBI found that Liddy had been employed by the White House and the Treasury Department for several years. Eventually, the Bureau also discovered that Liddy had worked for John Ehriichman on “law enforcement matters.” In fact, Liddy had been in the Special Investigations Unit, better known as the Plumbers. His colleagues had included Howard Hunt and several of the Watergate burglars. The Watergate break-in was part of a seamless web. 
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The conversation established the foundation for a strategy that Nixon and his top aides pursued for nearly a year: John Mitchell would take the fall. 
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Late in October, after CBS had devoted extensive attention to Watergate, the President complained at length to Haldeman. He ordered Kissinger to do nothing with the network for a week. Ziegler was not to talk to CBS reporters or to the Post. Colson upbraided CBS’s top executives and succeeded in having the network reduce a promised follow-up program. 
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Nixon recalled in his memoirs that he had “insisted to Haldeman and others … that in this campaign we were finally in a position to have someone doing to the opposition what they had done to us. They knew that this time I wanted the leading Democrats annoyed, harassed, and embarrassed—as I had been in the past.” The rationale always centered on retaliation: “I told my staff that we should come up with the kind of imaginative dirty tricks that our Democratic opponents used against us and others so effectively in previous campaigns.” He acknowledged that he ordered “a tail on a front-running Democrat” (without saying for what purpose) and directed that federal agencies’ files be checked for suspicious or illegal behavior by Democrats. 
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- Highlight on Page 199 | Loc. 4428-31  | Added on Friday, April 04, 2014, 01:46 PM

John Mitchell reportedly listened to the proposal of Gemstone, puffed on his pipe, and told Liddy that it was “not quite what I had in mind” and that he was to devise more “realistic” and less expensive plans. The entry and bugging of the Watergate offices of the Democratic National Committee was the more realistic plan concocted by CREEP’S “security” forces. 
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Mitchell later ruefully reflected that he should have thrown Gordon Liddy and his entire plan out the window. As Attorney General—which he was until March 1972—Mitchell might have done better to arrest Gordon Liddy for his proposed conspiracy. 
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- Highlight on Page 200 | Loc. 4442-47  | Added on Friday, April 04, 2014, 01:47 PM

At the time, the certainties of the Watergate break-in were three: the burglars were real; they had entered the office complex; they had bugging devices with them. The five perpetrators eventually were convicted for breaking and entering and for violating laws prohibiting unauthorized wiretaps. Hunt and Liddy were also found guilty. As the prosecutors developed their case, they discovered, as did subsequent investigations, that the seven men had important links to CREEP and the White House; in particular, all had received money from questionable campaign contributions. But what was the purpose of the break-in? Clearly, the operation was political. But what had been its end? For what specific gain had the break-in been planned? 
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- Highlight on Page 201 | Loc. 4459-67  | Added on Friday, April 04, 2014, 01:49 PM

Arthur Kinoy, the lawyer who successfully challenged the Administration’s broad claims for inherent presidential powers to wiretap without warrants, offered a second hypothesis to account for the break-in. Earlier in the spring, Kinoy had represented federal judge Damon Keith, who had ordered the Administration to disclose wiretaps in a case involving alleged White Panther members. Throughout the proceedings, the Justice Department attorneys had pressed luxuriant claims of inherent executive powers to wiretap. If the Supreme Court had accepted the government’s position, the Administration would have had a perfect cover for wiretaps and “black” operations already underway or planned. The Watergate break-in occurred, Kinoy suggested, because the Administration was privy to the Court’s adverse decision and someone ordered that the phone taps be removed before the Court gave its ruling, scheduled for announcement the Monday after the break-in. Why were so many men caught at Democratic headquarters if their mission was only to repair one faulty tap? Kinoy theorized that the burglars were removing equipment. 
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- Highlight on Page 201 | Loc. 4475-76  | Added on Friday, April 04, 2014, 01:50 PM

Haldeman also endorsed Senator Howard Baker’s 1973 comment: “Nixon and Helms have so much on each other, neither of them can breathe.” 
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- Highlight on Page 202 | Loc. 4483-87  | Added on Friday, April 04, 2014, 05:29 PM

Haldeman later argued that the CIA and the Democratic National Committee knew about the first Watergate break-in and that, singly or together, they sabotaged the second. He claimed that the Cubans, Hunt, and McCord remained on the CIA payroll. The CIA’s animosity toward the Administration, its fear that after his re-election Nixon would move decisively to bridle its power, and its determination to protect an old ally, industrialist and financial manipulator Howard Hughes, Haldeman argued, explained the failure of the break-in. 
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- Highlight on Page 202 | Loc. 4494-98  | Added on Friday, April 04, 2014, 05:30 PM

Jim Hougan’s book, Secret Agenda, fleshes out Haldeman’s claims for a pervasive CIA role in Watergate. Hougan has established the most thorough reconstruction of the crime. As evidence of the CIA’s involvement in the events of May-June 1972, Hougan traced the Agency’s dealings back to Howard Hunt’s roles in the Pentagon Papers case and the break-in of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office. Throughout this period, Hougan argues, Hunt was a CIA operative and regularly reported on Administration doings, particularly the sexual peccadillos of various politicians. 
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- Highlight on Page 203 | Loc. 4507-11  | Added on Friday, April 04, 2014, 05:31 PM

Questions regarding the CIA appear in various segments of the Watergate story. The Agency’s role, however, seems destined to remain shadowy. Such CIA principals as Helms, Deputy Director Vernon Walters, and future Director William Colby have adamantly denied any CIA role in initiating any Watergate events or in implicating the White House. But Assistant U.S. Attorney Earl Silbert charged, and Colby admitted, that the CIA had withheld cooperation with the investigation. What eventually emerged from the inquiries into Watergate—wholly apart from the events of the break-in and subsequent cover-up—was the CIA’s changed relationship to other power centers in the government. 
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- Highlight on Page 204 | Loc. 4532-36  | Added on Friday, April 04, 2014, 05:36 PM

Dean turned the O’Brien matter over to John Caulfield, Ehrlichman’s in-house private detective. Caulfield found little on O’Brien, but he kept running into more details of the Hughes-Nixon connection and warned Dean that it might be dangerous. Nevertheless, the IRS began a tax audit of Robert Maheu, Hughes’s ousted chief aide. Maheu retaliated with a leak to columnist Jack Anderson about a reported $100,000 Hughes payment to Nixon through Bebe Rebozo. Las Vegas journalist Hank Greenspun told Herb Klein that he had information the money had been used to furnish the President’s San Clemente estate. 
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- Highlight on Page 205 | Loc. 4554-59  | Added on Friday, April 04, 2014, 05:38 PM

The so-called “Greek Connection” provides yet another theory for the Watergate break-in. Once again, there is a link to Lawrence O’Brien, and the motive may, like the O’Brien-Hughes theory, lie in G. Gordon Liddy’s contention that the Watergate break-in “was to find out what O’Brien had of a derogatory nature about us, not for us to get something on him or the Democrats. “ James McCord also testified that the purpose of the June 17 break-in was “to do photocopy work of documents” as well as to install new listening devices. The story has its origins in a September 1968 campaign speech delivered by vice-presidential candidate Spiro Agnew. 
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- Highlight on Page 205 | Loc. 4563-69  | Added on Friday, April 04, 2014, 05:39 PM

What had happened? According to Demetracopoulos, the Greek KYP—the intelligence service which had been founded by the CIA and subsequently subsidized by the Agency—had transferred three cash payments totalling $549,000 to the Nixon campaign fund. The conduit was Thomas Pappas, a prominent Greek-American businessman with close links to the CIA, the Colonels, and the Nixon campaign. (Agnew insisted that he “had absolutely no knowledge” of such money.) The charges that KYP money had come into the presidential campaign, with CIA knowledge, were circulated in the United States and in Greece. CIA Director Richard Helms commented with studied ambiguity: “Even if somebody suggests they would like to do it, I would insist that they don’t tell me about it because that is dynamite.” 
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- Highlight on Page 208 | Loc. 4686-87  | Added on Friday, April 04, 2014, 08:50 PM

James McCord, Watergate burglar, former CIA agent, and Chief of Security for CREEP, testifying before the Senate Select Committee.( 
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- Highlight on Page 212 | Loc. 4761-66  | Added on Friday, April 04, 2014, 08:55 PM

Nixon met with Haldeman in the late afternoon of September 15. Watergate was very much on their minds, as was the young lawyer in charge of damage control. Haldeman congratulated himself on having designated John Wesley Dean III for that task. While Dean would not “gain any ground for us,” Haldeman told the President, he would make “sure that you don’t fall through the holes.” Haldeman knew the way to Richard Nixon’s heart. Dean, he noted, was “moving ruthlessly on the investigation of McGovern people, Kennedy stuff, and all that too.” Altogether, Haldeman reported, Dean had turned out to be tougher than he had anticipated. 
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- Highlight on Page 212 | Loc. 4766-74  | Added on Friday, April 04, 2014, 08:56 PM

Such a performance apparently merited a presidential audience. It was close to 5:30 P.M. when the President summoned the White House Counsel. Nixon greeted Dean rather casually. “Hi, how are you?” “Yes sir,” Dean responded. The President wasted no time in coming to the point: “Well, you had quite a day today, didn’t you? You got, uh, Watergate, uh, on the way, huh?” 1 September 15 was an important day for the President’s growing involvement in the cover-up of any White House connection to the break-in. For John Dean, especially, it was a red-letter day, for now he was about to receive official recognition, even blessing, for his direction of the cover-up campaign. He had worked hard for three months to keep the President from falling through the holes. Dean thought he was on his way to the top. From another perspective, at another time, he saw his life that day as “touching bottom.” 
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Dean’s modest experience typified the Nixon White House; the essential qualifications for important positions consisted of loyalty and subordination. 
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After he had applied unsuccessfully for a clerkship with District Judge John Sirica, Dean had worked in staff positions in Congress and the Justice Department. Richard Kleindienst, his immediate superior, learned to dislike Dean, yet acknowledged that he had performed with “great distinction.” Kleindienst also claimed that he had warned Dean against moving to the White House, telling him that he would only be “a runner for Ehrlichman”; being “counsel to the President,” he said, was only an illusion. But John Dean—the WASP Sammy Glick—was an adaptable young man: he would move from being John Mitchell’s “boy” to become Haldeman’s, not Ehrlichman’s. 
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Solicitor General Erwin Griswold, well acquainted with ambitious young lawyers from his days as Dean of the Harvard Law School, considered John Dean a “nice young man” but nevertheless “was astounded” when he heard of his appointment as White House Counsel. Griswold believed Dean unqualified by either ability or experience. The position, Griswold said, “required a more mature person, with the fiber and strength to stand up to the President and to other people in the White House, and to do it gracefully so that you avoid head-on collisions.” Neither Nixon nor Haldeman included those qualities in their job description, however. 
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The new Counsel shrewdly sensed that handling what seemed to be the dull, routine matter of interest conflicts offered a key to advancement. He realized that by knowing a man’s financial situation he could gain his confidence. And winning confidence, Dean knew, would bring more “business”—contacts and chores that would make Dean more visible and ever more valued. 
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Dean’s desire for visibility reaped big dividends following the Watergate break-in. The White House Counsel had just returned from a trip to the Orient, but at Ehrlichman’s instructions he lost no time in talking to a variety of Administration principals regarding their knowledge of the burglary. Dean interviewed Colson, Magruder, Mitchell, Kleindienst, Liddy, and Gordon Strachan, a Haldeman aide. From Strachan, Dean learned that Haldeman had received logs from the wiretaps of the Democratic National Committee. If Haldeman were implicated, Dean realized, the President could not be far behind. 
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Dean’s role in Watergate began, in his words, as that of a fact-finder. From there, he worked his way up to idea man, and “finally to desk officer.” He met with involved officials, advised them, and made recommendations as to the disposition of evidence. He shuttled between the warring camps in the White House and the Committee to Re-elect the President. John Dean did not initiate the Watergate cover-up, but in time he came to be the orchestrator of the various disparate parties to the cover-up. 
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The first step in the cover-up belonged to Mitchell and was taken several hours after the news of the burglars’ arrest broke, when he denied any involvement by CREEP officials. On June 19 Colson urged that Howard Hunt’s White House safe be confiscated. Mitchell suggested to Magruder that he “have a little fire” at his house with the Gemstone files. The next day, Haldeman ordered Gordon Strachan to “make sure our files are clean.” Strachan promptly shredded numerous documents. Later that afternoon, Dean and his Associate Counsel, Fred Fielding, sifted the contents of Hunt’s safe, finding evidence of more “dirty tricks,” including an attempt to fabricate a direct link between President Kennedy and the assassination of South Vietnamese President Diem. The safe also contained memos between Colson and Hunt regarding the Plumbers. Dean informed Ehrlichman about the materials, and Ehrlichman told him to “deep six” them. Dean instead gave them to FBI Acting Director L. Patrick Gray. 
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Haldeman later expressed surprise when he discovered on June 23 that Dean was the “‘project manager’ on the Watergate problem.” He thought Ehrlichman was in charge, but “my crafty friend,” as Haldeman characterized Ehrlichman, had managed to fade out of the picture for the current business. Ehrlichman hastily informed other relevant parties, such as Gray, that Dean had White House responsibility for an “inquiry” into the break-in. Ehrlichman scrambled for distance. 
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Petersen liked Dean and even confided in him, quite unsuspecting of Dean’s role. Petersen later bitterly recalled that Dean had become the “linch pin” (a term Dean himself used) of the conspiracy, acting through Haldeman and Ehrlichman. He grudgingly recognized that Dean was a splendid choice to direct the cover-up. Because Dean had worked in Congress on the committee to reform the criminal laws, and because he had been in the Justice Department, Petersen said, “we trusted him. We thought he was one of us. He had a degree of rapport with us that an ordinary counsel who just came in out of the political hinterlands never would have had with the Justice Department.” 
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Helms remembered that he immediately thought Haldeman’s concerns amounted to “baloney,” but he did not know “what the baloney was.” Gray himself testified that Helms told him on July 22, and again on July 27, that the CIA had no concern about the FBI investigation of the burglars’ money. Helms claimed to be mystified about a current White House notion that an FBI investigation would uncover the Agency’s “money-laundering” operation in Mexico; “we never used the term,” he insisted. The CIA, Helms revealed, had no need to operate in such a fashion: “We could get money any place in the world. We ran a whole arbitrage operation. We didn’t need to launder money—ever.” 
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- Highlight on Page 220 | Loc. 4942-46  | Added on Friday, April 04, 2014, 09:09 PM

A couple of weeks later, on July 6, the President telephoned Gray from San Clemente. Gray told Nixon that he and Walters believed that “people on your staff are trying to mortally wound you by using the CIA and the FBI and by confusing the question of CIA interest in, or not in, people the FBI wishes to interview.” The President, Gray reported, paused slightly, and then urged Gray to continue his “aggressive and thorough investigation.” After the call, Nixon advised Ehrlichman not to “raise hell” with Gray or Walters, adding that the White House could take the heat. 
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“I was being set up by the President of the United States to take a fall.” Thus Richard Helms made his assessment of the President’s political tactics as the summer of 1972 wore on. But Helms was determined not to be the “goat” of the affair. Helms knew that Walters had been a longtime Nixon loyalist and that the President could have his way with him. Helms believed that Nixon intended to “embroil the Agency … and use the Agency as the cover for the cover-up.” Although he later resisted further demands from the White House, however, Helms at first cooperated in allowing the Agency to be used accordingly. His resistance eventually cost him his standing with the President, and his cooperation exposed his treasured organization to unprecedented public scrutiny. The Watergate affair was a disaster for Richard Helms and the CIA. 
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He pointed to the FBI’s investigation, one by the House Banking and Currency Committee, and John Dean’s “complete investigation” as ample evidence that “we are doing everything we can to take this incident and to investigate it and not to cover it up.” Dean’s investigation had satisfied him, Nixon insisted. “I can say categorically that his investigation indicated that no one in the White House staff, no one in this administration, presently employed, was involved in this very bizarre incident.” Charitably, the President said that “overzealous” people often do wrong things in campaigns. But his charity had limits. “What really hurts” in dealing with wrongdoing, he remarked, “is if you try to cover it up.” 
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Richard Nixon claimed that his diary entry for September 15 only briefly alluded to the grand-jury indictment of the Watergate burglars. “We hope,” he wrote at the time, “to be able to ride the issue through in a successful way from now on.” For Nixon, this meant that the incident was of only minor concern to him and that the trial of the burglars would end the matter. 
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Dean left the Oval Office shortly after the remarks about the newspapers. He had his orders; he did not talk to the President again until February 28, 1973. The mood then would not be so confident. 
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Patman, by now, was playing for the historical record. On October 31 he released the House Banking and Currency Committee’s staff report linking CREEP officials to the burglars and charging that the White House had authorized the most effective “curtain of secrecy ever erected.” Ford remained faithful to the Administration, demanding dismissal of the staff members. He derided the report and the Chairman for “last-minute smear tactics.” 42 Just as predictably, the report had no influence on the electorate. 
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Patman’s inquiry accomplished nothing in the immediate sense, but its encounters with CREEP and the White House had some important consequences. Patman’s pressure required that the cover-up be intensified and expanded, thus widening chances for error and eventual exposure. Meanwhile, Patman had perceived the cover-up. He was a formidable enemy, with a long memory and a penchant for settling scores. Several months later, he ordered his staff to share its materials and findings with Senator Sam Ervin and the newly created Senate Select Committee, named to probe 1972 campaign financing. Patman himself wrote to Ervin, urging that Dean be questioned closely on his interference with the House Banking and Currency Committee. 
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Richard Nixon and his campaign managers pursued Lyndon Johnson’s 1964 prescription of isolating the opposition and persuading the nation that it had no real alternative to “four more years” of the incumbent. 
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The President consistently talked about the opportunity to forge a broad mandate. The campaign of 1972 was to be very different from the calculated divisiveness of 1968. Now, the President assiduously courted Democrats, labor, blacks, Jews, and the young, while expecting (quite correctly) that his 1968 constituency would remain with him if only because it had nowhere else to go. 
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John Dean still had his tasks, busily trying to keep the ball of yarn tightly wrapped. His “firm” was esteemed in inner circles—and was ever more indispensable. “John Dean is handling the entire Watergate matter now,” Haldeman told Colson in March 1973, “and any questions or input you have should be directed to him and to no one else.” For the President, John Dean was “a superb young man.” Later, others would, with anger and bitterness, argue that Dean had “organized and directed” the resistance to the Patman hearings, miraculously absolving anyone else of responsibility and culpability—the incontrovertible evidence of the Oval Office tapes notwithstanding. 
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In March 1973, Colson told the President that Dean had “done a spectacular job. I don’t think anybody could do as good a job as John has done.” From the other side of the fence, Dean also received lavish praise when FBI investigators later acknowledged “that the President’s most senior associates at the White House conspired for nine months to obstruct our investigation.” 55 The President’s Counsel had not yet fallen from grace. On September 15, 1972, John Dean had promised the President fifty-four days; he had delivered more. 
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Meanwhile, the President’s familiar enemies-Congress, the government bureaucracy, and the media—began to look beyond the White House version of Watergate as a “third-rate burglary.” New wars seemed in the offing. For good reason, a channel of apprehension paralleled the confident course of the Nixon White House after the November election. 
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The Gray nomination went to the Senate on February 17. It was the President’s most fateful and disastrous decision in this crucial period, for Gray’s confirmation hearings offered the Democratic Congress an immediate opportunity to raise questions about Watergate. 
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But the writer offered several items for consideration, including a reminder that the defendants had been involved in “highly illegal conspiracies … at the behest of senior White House officials.” The warning was blunt: the Administration had been “deficient” in living up to its commitments for financial support and pardons. “To end further misunderstandings,” the defendants set 5:00 P.M. on November 27 as a deadline for the White House to meet financial requirements and offer “credible assurances” that other commitments would be honored. “Loyalty,” they said, “has always been a two-way street.” Liddy, meanwhile, told Dean that he needed money for his lawyer. 
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Given the times, suspicions were aroused, and some linked the crash to the Watergate case. Dorothy Hunt had traveled with an unusual amount of money. Talk circulated that allegedly she had the same CIA links as her husband, and there was shadowy talk of “hush money.” In any event, the final report of the National Transportation Safety Board on August 29, 1973, found no evidence of “sabotage or foul play” in connection with the accident. Meanwhile, the White House was aware of Mrs. Hunt’s importance in the cover-up. Three months after her death, Dean told the President that she “was the savviest woman in the world. She had the whole picture together,” he said. 19 
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- Highlight on Page 251 | Loc. 5639-47  | Added on Saturday, April 05, 2014, 12:12 AM

Nixon knew that his aides had paid money to Hunt and the defendants, but he only worried about finding new donors for “hush money.” “Goddamn hush money,” the President complained, “uh, how are we going to [unintelligible] how do we get this stuff….” In a February 14 conversation with Colson, he talked about maintaining the cover-up: “The cover-up is the main ingredient,” he told Colson. “That’s where we gotta cut our losses; my losses are to be cut. The President’s losses gotta be cut on the cover-up deal.” The day before, Nixon bluntly told Colson that the cover-up must be maintained: “When I’m speaking about Watergate,” the President said, “that’s the whole point of the election. This tremendous investigation rests, unless one of the seven begins to talk. That’s the problem.” But the President had confidence in his old friend John Mitchell, as he was pleased that Mitchell had “stonewalled it up to this point.” Colson and Mitchell were adversaries, but Colson admiringly told the President in response: “John has one of those marvelous, ah, memories.” 
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He told Colson he knew it was “tough” for him, Haldeman, Ehrlichman, and the rest. But, he promised, “[W]e’re just not gonna let it get us down. This is a battle, it’s a fight, it’s war and we just fight with a little, uh, you know, uh remember, uh, we’ll cut them down one of these days.” In March, both John Dean and Charles Colson advised the President to retain Colson as a consultant without pay in order to maintain a curtain of executive privilege around him. 
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On January 6, Senator Mike Mansfield had called for a full investigation of Watergate, by a select committee armed with proper funds, staff, and subpoena powers. The time had come, Mansfield said, “to proceed to an inquiry into these matters in a dispassionate fashion.” The Senator thought that his North Carolina colleague, Sam Ervin, was the man to head such an investigation. 
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- Highlight on Page 252 | Loc. 5664-67  | Added on Saturday, April 05, 2014, 12:15 AM

Nixon was defensive once more about the press, complaining that L. Patrick Gray was often described as his “political crony.” They had never met in a social situation, Nixon insisted. But the talk of Gray made the President nostalgic for J. Edgar Hoover. “[H]e’d have scared them to death. He’s got [sic] files on everybody, God damn it,” meaning, it seems, that Hoover would have called off the dogs for Nixon. 
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He emphasized that Dean must get through to Kleindienst—he was the “man who can make the difference,” Nixon said; moreover, Kleindienst “owes Mitchell” for his position. Finally, Nixon again raised the Hiss case and applied it in an odd, almost perverse way. He told Dean that Whittaker Chambers, Hiss’s accuser, suffered greatly because he was an informer. Chambers, he thought, was one of the great men and writers of his time. Still, “they finished him…. [T]he informer is not wanted in our society. Either way, that’s the one thing people do sort of line up against.” 21 Was that pointed advice for John Dean? 
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The trial of Hunt, Liddy, and the Watergate burglars began on January 10 in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. 
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That same day, Hunt offered to plead guilty to three charges, but Sirica promptly refused the offer, citing the strength of the government’s case. The public, he admonished, must have “not only the substance of justice but also the appearance of justice.” On January 11 Hunt pled guilty to all six counts. Patriotism was his last refuge. He had acted, he insisted, “in the best interest of my country”; he added that he had no knowledge of “higher-ups” in the conspiracy. Sirica released Hunt on $100,000 bail. 
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The four Cuban burglars similarly pled guilty on January 15 to all counts in the indictment. Responding to questions from Sirica regarding their actions, the burglars insisted that they had acted on behalf of Cuban liberation, and because they believed McGovern’s election would lead to Communism in the United States. 
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Patman’s earlier attempts to unravel the Watergate puzzle failed because of White House pressure, the distractions of the political campaign, and, not least, because his investigation was perceived as a partisan attempt to embarrass the President. 
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But the White House was not oblivious. The creation of the Senate Select Committee meant that the maintenance of the cover-up would have to be expanded. The new dimensions, however, only increased the likelihood of exposure. Administration resources proved to be limited, vulnerable, and ultimately, incompetent. 
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- Highlight on Page 257 | Loc. 5785-86  | Added on Saturday, April 05, 2014, 12:27 AM

The President realized the danger. On February 11, he told Haldeman that they must discredit the hearings, reiterating the now-familiar theme that this was a commonplace “political crime.” 
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- Highlight on Page 260 | Loc. 5848-55  | Added on Saturday, April 05, 2014, 12:33 AM

He said nothing about the obvious risk for a Republican judge perceived as favoring a Republican president. Yet Sirica had been Nixon’s kind of judge. And until 1973, Richard Nixon had been John Sirica’s kind of president. Sirica had scheduled sentencing of the Watergate burglars for March 23. Three days earlier, James McCord delivered a letter to the judge’s chambers that led directly to the unraveling of the conspiracy. Recognizing the possibility of a stiff sentence, and “in the interest of restoring faith in the criminal justice system, … [and to] be of help to you in meting out justice in this case,” McCord told Sirica that pressure had been applied to have the defendants maintain silence; that perjury had occurred in the trial; that Watergate was not a CIA operation, but it involved other governmental officials; and that McCord wanted an opportunity to discuss the case at greater length with Sirica. The judge exuberantly told his clerk: “This is going to break this case wide open.” 
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- Highlight on Page 261 | Loc. 5858-60  | Added on Saturday, April 05, 2014, 12:33 AM

He wrote to his friend White House aide John Caulfield at the end of December, warning that “if Helms goes, and the Watergate operation is laid at [the] CIA’s feet where it does not belong, every tree in the forest will fall. It will be a scorched desert,” McCord warned. 
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- Highlight on Page 261 | Loc. 5861-65  | Added on Saturday, April 05, 2014, 12:33 AM

Richard Nixon knew in advance about McCord’s letter to Sirica. The day it was delivered, the President told Haldeman that Dean and others were concerned about the convicted burglars’ sentences and what Sirica might do. He knew that McCord did not want to go to jail and apparently had decided to talk. Haldeman realized the implications: McCord, he said, “would have a lot on Mitchell.” The President replied as if he were unaware of the connection between the two. John Dean knew the implications: “The dam was cracking,” he later said. 
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- Highlight on Page 261 | Loc. 5865-72  | Added on Saturday, April 05, 2014, 12:34 AM

At the same moment, the hearings on L. Patrick Gray’s nomination as Director of the FBI verged on disaster, with Gray about to admit that he had cooperated with Dean in seeking to limit the investigation of the break-in. The nomination also brought a confrontation with the Senate over executive privilege. The day after McCord sent his letter to Sirica, Dean told the President that there was “a cancer on the presidency.” Still, the “containment” effort persisted. Howard Hunt received a $75,000 payment from a White House emissary. Kleindienst, probably acting on White House orders, publicly minimized McCord’s charges and privately wrote to Sirica, chiding him for not sending McCord’s letter through Department of Justice channels. But Assistant Attorney General Petersen knew, as well as the prosecutors did, that Kleindienst’s complaint was beside the point: the case, to use a favorite Oval Office expression, was about to blow. 
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- Highlight on Page 261 | Loc. 5872-73  | Added on Saturday, April 05, 2014, 12:34 AM

The President and Haldeman in their March 20 meeting did not see any particular problems for themselves or any other key White House figures, however. 
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- Highlight on Page 261 | Loc. 5874-77  | Added on Saturday, April 05, 2014, 12:34 AM

Eight days later, Ehrlichman telephoned Kleindienst, conveying word that no White House people had prior knowledge of the break-in. Nixon wanted Kleindienst to keep him informed on developments in the case, particularly any information that involved White House officials. But he was concerned about Mitchell and the people at CREEP, Ehrlichman reported. “So am I,” Kleindienst added. 
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- Highlight on Page 261 | Loc. 5878-79  | Added on Saturday, April 05, 2014, 12:34 AM

After reading the McCord letter in court on March 23, Judge Sirica turned to the sentencing of the other defendants. 
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- Highlight on Page 262 | Loc. 5896-99  | Added on Saturday, April 05, 2014, 12:36 AM

Sirica’s threat of maximum sentences skirted dangerously close to the precipice of forcing self-incrimination. The judicial precedents were mixed. An appellate court had vacated sentences in a drug-trafficking case because they trenched upon the defendant’s right to avoid self-incrimination. “Mercy seasons justice,” the court said, “but the quality of mercy is strained when its price is abandonment of the classic freedom against self-incrimination.” 
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- Highlight on Page 262 | Loc. 5899-5904  | Added on Saturday, April 05, 2014, 12:36 AM

Two years later, a Second Circuit Court ruling sustained broad discretion for the sentencing judge, including his right to consider matters inadmissible at trial. More to the point of Sirica’s example, the court ruled that when a judge left open the possibility of sentence reduction if the defendant subsequently cooperated, any judicial reference to the defendant’s silence was not a punishment for exercising self-incrimination. Ironically, the losing attorney in that case was Samuel Dash, the designated Majority Counsel for the newly created Senate Select Committee. Dash had recommended the precedent to Sirica, hoping that it might persuade the defendants to cooperate. 
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The President and his closest White House aides had determined by then that John Mitchell must be a sacrificial lamb if the strategy of containing the revelations was to work. Such passiveness occasionally gave way to exhortation. “Stonewall it,” “plead the Fifth Amendment,” “cover up”—anything to “save the plan,” he said defiantly. But in the next breath, he talked about his preference for “the other way”—in which his good friend John Mitchell would take the blame. 
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But at bottom, the President recognized the peril. He instructed Haldeman to keep Dean working on the case. From the moment Senator Mansfield proposed a congressional investigation, Nixon was concerned. Dean, he said, should “try to turn it off.” 
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- Highlight on Page 265 | Loc. 5958-63  | Added on Saturday, April 05, 2014, 01:56 PM

The optimistic, even cocky, Dean of September 1972 had vanished; for him, the outlook was terribly grim. “We have a cancer within, close to the Presidency, that is growing,” Dean reported. “It is growing daily. It’s compounded, growing geometrically now, because it compounds itself.” Dean thereupon launched into a long narrative of the origins of Watergate and the subsequent White House responses. But radical surgery lay in the distance. For now, the President and his aides launched a new cover-up, one to mask their earlier effort and also to find appropriate people “to take the heat.” 1 Dean’s pronouncement of March 21 was no surprise to Richard Nixon; he already had prepared for that new stage. 
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The Senate Judiciary Committee’s confirmation hearings began shortly after the President announced Gray’s nomination as FBI Director on February 17. By the end of the month, Gray had acknowledged his direct contacts with the White House during the Watergate investigation, and his ambitions lay shattered. 
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Gray’s positive achievements were quickly disregarded once the Judiciary Committee hearings disclosed that he had regularly submitted FBI investigative reports to Dean. He contended that Hoover had made a practice of providing reports of ongoing investigations; further, he thought that he was merely supplementing Dean’s own investigation. In a conciliatory move, Gray offered to make the Watergate files available to the senators—an offer later vetoed by the White House. But more was to come. The committee learned that Dean took a week to turn over the contents of Howard Hunt’s White House safe to the FBI (Gray thought nothing was “irregular” about this: “the President’s got a rather substantial interest as to what might be in those papers,” he said on March 6). The Judiciary Committee also secured affidavits from CREEP employees who had cooperated with the investigation, stating that their superiors knew almost immediately about their statements to the FBI. By March 13 the committee had heard enough and voted unanimously to invite Dean to testify. The Democrats indicated that Gray’s nomination might be held hostage pending Dean’s appearance. The next day, however, Dean declined to appear, although he agreed to accept written interrogatories. 
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- Highlight on Page 268 | Loc. 6012-16  | Added on Saturday, April 05, 2014, 02:01 PM

The President invoked executive privilege and adamantly opposed any public testimony by his aides. Speaking at his March 2 press conference, Nixon insisted that “no President” could ever allow his Counsel to testify before a congressional committee. Ten days later, he found an enlarged sanctuary in the separation-of-powers doctrine. He transformed separation and independence into unbridled autonomy, maintaining that the manner of exercising assigned executive powers is not subject to questioning by other branches. The fig leaf of executive privilege carried with it high moral purpose. 
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- Highlight on Page 268 | Loc. 6021-22  | Added on Saturday, April 05, 2014, 02:01 PM

But in his memoirs, the President recalled that at that press conference, he suddenly realized: “Vietnam had found its successor.” 
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- Highlight on Page 268 | Loc. 6024-28  | Added on Saturday, April 05, 2014, 02:02 PM

But he told John Ehrlichman in a taped March telephone conversation that “John Wesley”—Gray appropriated an almost reverential name for Dean—must “stand awful tight in the saddle and be very careful about what he says.” Dean must say that he delivered everything developed by the White House investigation of the break-in to the FBI, Gray warned. All this he put on a note of knowing conspiracy: “I’m being pushed awfully hard in certain areas,” he reminded Ehrlichman, “and I’m not giving an inch and you know those areas.” 
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- Highlight on Page 269 | Loc. 6037-43  | Added on Saturday, April 05, 2014, 02:04 PM

The devious Ehrlichman quickly called Dean, and the two snickered about Gray’s alleged toughness. His testimony, Dean said, “makes me gag.” Ehrlichman wondered if Gray had called to “cover his tracks.” He contemptuously dismissed Gray. Ehrlichman wanted Gray to just hang there; “let him twist slowly[,] slowly in the wind.” Dean responded that those were exactly the sentiments of “the boss.” The President, he claimed, had questioned Gray’s ability to lead the Bureau, given the way he had conducted himself before the committee. The President himself decided that Gray was useless and expendable. Nixon told Dean on March 13 that Gray “should not be head of the FBI”; because of the hearings, Nixon added, “he will not be a good Director, as far as we are concerned.” 
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- Highlight on Page 270 | Loc. 6053-55  | Added on Saturday, April 05, 2014, 02:05 PM

On March 22, Byrd challenged Gray: was his first duty to the FBI or to the President?—a “tough question,” as Gray characterized it. But he could not “evade” the fact that he took orders from the President. 
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- Highlight on Page 270 | Loc. 6055-60  | Added on Saturday, April 05, 2014, 02:06 PM

Gray even admitted he would continue to give Dean FBI reports if the President requested them. Byrd then elicited Gray’s frank charge that Dean had lied when he had told FBI agents that he did not know whether Hunt had an office in the White House. Gray had broken contact with Dean by then, sensing that Dean had pushed beyond the bounds of propriety—and foolishly believing that the White House Counsel was an independent authority. Byrd’s questions were devastating. They involved Gray’s political speeches; his political uses of the FBI; his relations with the President, Dean, and other White House staff members; his conduct of the Watergate investigation; and his personal handling of evidence from Howard Hunt’s safe. 
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- Highlight on Page 272 | Loc. 6104-9  | Added on Saturday, April 05, 2014, 02:09 PM

No one better understood the shifting sands of public opinion than John Dean. He had determined that it was time for a direct, thorough discussion with the President of the United States. The President and his men had to confront their past—and their future. Meanwhile the President had created a new layer to the cover-up. On March 12 he issued a blunt statement asserting the nature and broadening the power of executive privilege. Cloaking himself in precedents dating back to George Washington, Nixon argued that executive privilege was sanctioned by the Constitution’s separation-of-powers doctrine and was necessary to protect internal communications of the executive branch regarding vital national concerns. 
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- Highlight on Page 272 | Loc. 6109-10  | Added on Saturday, April 05, 2014, 09:26 PM

He insisted that revelations of such communications threatened the candor of discussion and decision making. 
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- Highlight on Page 273 | Loc. 6123-27  | Added on Saturday, April 05, 2014, 09:28 PM

The Ervin Committee dominated the President’s thoughts at the March 13 meeting. He asked Dean to summarize the potentially damaging witnesses. Dean thought that particularly vulnerable were Hugh Sloan, the CREEP treasurer, who had passed money to Liddy, and Herbert Kalmbach, Nixon’s lawyer, who had provided hush money to the burglars. Nixon protested that Kalmbach, as his lawyer, merely handled some San Clemente property matters and his income tax—“he isn’t a lawyer in the sense that most people have a lawyer.” 
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- Highlight on Page 274 | Loc. 6147-50  | Added on Saturday, April 05, 2014, 09:31 PM

Again, Nixon acknowledged the vulnerability of Mitchell and Haldeman. But he always focused on the roles of others in planning or having knowledge of the break-in. On the surface, Nixon did not recognize that the deep involvement of the White House in the cover-up immediately following the break-in was the real problem. Or did he? Did he not realize that the task now was to cover up the cover-up—to “save the plan,” as he often said? If that was to happen, sacrificial lambs would have to be prepared. 
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- Highlight on Page 274 | Loc. 6151-57  | Added on Saturday, April 05, 2014, 09:33 PM

Dean told the President about Ehrlich-man’s role in the break-in of the office of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist. The President appeared stunned, even mystified, claiming that it was the first he had heard of the matter. “What in the world, what in the name of God was Ehrlichman having something [unintelligible] in the Ellsberg?” Nixon asked. Whatever the answer, the “hang-out road” now had to be even further circumscribed. Another key aide was vulnerable; another “horror” might be revealed. Furthermore, Dean told the President, the CIA had developed pictures Hunt had taken of Liddy in the doctor’s office. Was the CIA, not exactly a reliable Nixon friend, wholly knowledgeable about that break-in? Perhaps not, but the Agency knew that Hunt had some illegal involvement. Here the President lost some of his aplomb, some of his sense of command. 
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- Highlight on Page 275 | Loc. 6166-73  | Added on Saturday, April 05, 2014, 09:34 PM

Dean’s recitation began with Haldeman’s instruction that he establish “a perfectly legitimate campaign intelligence operation” at CREEP. John Caulfield first developed a plan, but Mitchell and Ehrlichman agreed with Dean that it was not suitable. Dean then suggested that they commission Gordon Liddy for the task. Liddy proposed several hare-brained and expensive schemes, which again were rejected, but he then enlisted Hunt as an ally. The two visited Colson who, in turn, pressed Magruder for action. Mean-while Haldeman, through his aide, Gordon Strachan, similarly pressured Magruder for campaign intelligence. Magruder responded by turning to Mitchell and urging the campaign to authorize Liddy’s plan to wiretap the Democratic National Committee. Mitchell agreed, and the fruits of the taps went to Strachan, who gave them to Haldeman. Dean informed the President that Magruder ordered Liddy to make a second foray into the Watergate offices—and added that “no one over here knew that. I know, uh, as God is my maker, I had no knowledge that they were going to do this.” 
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- Highlight on Page 276 | Loc. 6197-6200  | Added on Saturday, April 05, 2014, 09:38 PM

Money, however, seemed to be no problem. How much do you need, he asked Dean? A million dollars over the next two years, the Counsel replied. “We could get that,” the President said. “[I]f you need the money, I mean, uh, you could get the money… . [Y]ou could get a million dollars. And you could get it in cash. I, I know where it could be gotten…. I mean it’s not easy, but it could be done.” 
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- Highlight on Page 277 | Loc. 6217-24  | Added on Saturday, April 05, 2014, 09:40 PM

What was to be done? the President pleaded. Complete disclosure? “Isn’t that the best plan?” Nixon asked. It was Dean’s turn to dodge, for “complete disclosure” threatened him because of his role in the obstruction of justice. Dean wanted the President to ask for another grand jury, order the prosecutors to immunize witnesses, and sacrifice a few individuals. The lawyer-President seemed to have difficulty comprehending the point: “I don’t see it. I can’t see it,” he said. He thought Dean simply had served as a proper President’s Counsel; in any event, he seemed to think the matter could be handled easily enough. Suddenly, the President sounded satisfied with his prospects. “Sometimes it’s well to give them … something, and then they don’t want the bigger fish then.” And just as quickly, he realized that blackmail money still would have to be paid—“it would seem to me that would be worthwhile,” Nixon said. 
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- Highlight on Page 277 | Loc. 6231-32  | Added on Saturday, April 05, 2014, 09:42 PM

It was time, the President and Dean decided, for all of the key principals to meet to discuss future strategy—Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Mitchell, Dean, and the President. 
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- Highlight on Page 279 | Loc. 6260-65  | Added on Saturday, April 05, 2014, 09:46 PM

But Ehrlichman knew that the immediate problem involved Hunt. He favored continuing the pattern of containment and blackmail and ultimately giving Hunt a pardon. Nixon tentatively agreed, yet wondered whether Hunt might get clemency from the court if he talked. Dean warned the President that that was a real possibility; he outlined exactly the scenario that James McCord, not Howard Hunt, had initiated the day before. Dean then contemptuously sneered at those (Colson, Kalmbach, Chapin) who had hired criminal lawyers “to protect their own behinds … ; self-protection is setting in.” Ten days later, Dean himself called a prominent criminal lawyer, disingenuously telling Haldeman that he needed someone to “figure out what everybody else’s criminal liabilities are.” 
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- Highlight on Page 279 | Loc. 6267-68  | Added on Saturday, April 05, 2014, 09:47 PM

Ehrlichman’s plan had the virtue of most heavily implicating Dean; the President and his favored men apparently did not realize at that point that Dean would not let himself go down alone. 
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- Highlight on Page 279 | Loc. 6271-73  | Added on Saturday, April 05, 2014, 09:47 PM

Dean’s theory steered the discussion into the question of just who would go to jail. Awareness of possible criminal liability jolted the conversation back to the easiest course of all: continuing the cover-up. All agreed that Hunt must be paid, and the President offered to make a public statement promising cooperation with the Ervin Committee and an internal investigation to quiet growing 
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- Highlight on Page 279 | Loc. 6271-76  | Added on Saturday, April 05, 2014, 09:49 PM

Dean’s theory steered the discussion into the question of just who would go to jail. Awareness of possible criminal liability jolted the conversation back to the easiest course of all: continuing the cover-up. All agreed that Hunt must be paid, and the President offered to make a public statement promising cooperation with the Ervin Committee and an internal investigation to quiet growing concern. Dean warned, however, that these were merely stopgap arrangements, again stressing that the story would eventually become public knowledge. That route, Haldeman exclaimed, held out “a certainty, almost, of Magruder going to jail, Chapin going to jail, you going to jail … [and] probably me going to jail.” Soothingly, the President responded: “I question the last two.” 
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- Highlight on Page 280 | Loc. 6281-84  | Added on Saturday, April 05, 2014, 09:50 PM

Dean sensed at this point that Haldeman and Ehrlichman ultimately might isolate him. After the meeting broke up, Dean told Richard Moore (who had urged him to speak to the President) that “all of a sudden my two friends, Haldeman and Ehrlichman, don’t know anything about all of this.” Dean also informed his associate Fred Fielding that he saw problems because others refused to admit their complicity. 
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- Highlight on Page 281 | Loc. 6308-12  | Added on Saturday, April 05, 2014, 09:53 PM

Nixon relayed Dean’s concerns about the future, a cue for Nixon to praise Dean’s “superb job here keeping all the fires out” and for Colson to laud his “spectacular job—I don’t think anybody could do as good a job as John has done.” Colson realized that Dean could be charged with obstruction of justice, but he planted an idea Nixon later adopted, that Dean had the double protection of executive privilege and lawyer-client privilege. 
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- Highlight on Page 282 | Loc. 6347-51  | Added on Saturday, April 05, 2014, 09:57 PM

The March 21 discussions were an overture to the series of meetings that began the next day and continued into April. Much of that time was spent maneuvering John Mitchell and his CREEP aides into position to take responsibility for Watergate, leaving the White House entourage relatively immune. But that scenario had been devised before the President heard Dean’s “cancer” exposé on the twenty-first. The evening before, Nixon and Haldeman met for more than an hour. They knew that McCord had offered to talk; accordingly, they mapped their own strategy. 
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- Highlight on Page 283 | Loc. 6359-64  | Added on Sunday, April 06, 2014, 12:27 AM

Both Nixon and Haldeman believed that Ehrlichman posed a problem, however, not for what he knew about Watergate, but for the break-in of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office. Haldeman suggested that key aides should prepare statements for publication in the Washington Star, but Nixon objected—“open[s] too many doors.” He would issue a statement, perhaps a general one, expressing confidence in his staff and basing it on “the Dean report”—a nonexistent document to be conjured up when convenient. But both men were sensitive to the danger of saying that any truth was “the whole truth.” “Never, never, never,” the President emphasized. 
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- Highlight on Page 283 | Loc. 6370-73  | Added on Sunday, April 06, 2014, 12:28 AM

The President quickly covered for Colson, asserting his conviction that Colson had no prior knowledge of the Watergate break-in. Nixon and Haldeman both believed that Mitchell had an interest in maintaining the cover-up because of his own complicity in—or at least awareness of—the plan. “No question about that,” Haldeman emphasized. The stage was set for Mitchell to play his part. 
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- Highlight on Page 283 | Loc. 6374-78  | Added on Sunday, April 06, 2014, 12:28 AM

Nixon and Haldeman resumed their conversation for nearly ninety minutes on the morning of March 22. First, Haldeman briefed the President on his use of $350,000 in campaign contributions to pay the defendants. Haldeman had directed Dean to channel the money to Strachan, who in turn gave it to Mitchell’s aide and friend at CREEP, Fred LaRue. The money had been collected since 1968 and had initially been set aside by Haldeman for taking polls and surveys. Nixon argued that none of this constituted an obstruction of justice (as Dean had contended it did) and that the funds were not covered by the recent campaign-financing laws. 
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- Highlight on Page 284 | Loc. 6379-83  | Added on Sunday, April 06, 2014, 12:29 AM

The President insisted that he would not be blackmailed: it was “right” to pay. “God damn it, the people are in jail, it’s only right for people to raise the money for them. I got to let them do that and that’s all there is to it. I think we ought to… . [W]e’re taking care of these people in jail. My God, they did this for—we’re sorry for them. We do it out of compassion… . What else should we do?” More a plea than a question, it seemed. But the bottom line was that the President agreed to blackmail payments. 
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- Highlight on Page 284 | Loc. 6394-97  | Added on Sunday, April 06, 2014, 12:30 AM

Mitchell’s “awfully close to you,” Haldeman said, as if to prod the President, but getting only a grunting “Yeah.” In the terms of an old political saw, Haldeman was a man who “seen his opportunities and took ’em.” Mitchell no longer was as close to the President as Ehrlichman, himself, and, now, Dean had become. Proximity was power and influence. 
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- Highlight on Page 285 | Loc. 6403-9  | Added on Sunday, April 06, 2014, 12:31 AM

At 2:00 P.M. on March 22, the President assembled Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Mitchell, and Dean and asked, “[W]hat, uh, words of wisdom do we have from this august body on this point?” Rather sarcastically, Ehrlichman remarked that “our brother Mitchell” had brought some wisdom on the matter of executive privilege. Mitchell seemed to sense his vulnerability and cautioned his erstwhile law partner that the more he waived executive privilege, the less it was worth. He urged tough negotiations with Senator Ervin, through Howard Baker, and he recommended organizing “a damn good PR team” in order to avoid “a political roadshow.” Given his vulnerabilities, Ehrlichman heartily endorsed Mitchell’s advice. Haldeman worried that any testimony might indicate that “the President was involved”—certainly an uncomfortable possibility for him, as well. 
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- Highlight on Page 285 | Loc. 6418-20  | Added on Sunday, April 06, 2014, 12:32 AM

Who would testify before the Ervin Committee? Haldeman knew the committee wanted “big fish,” meaning that he and Ehrlichman could not avoid an appearance. He seemed confident they could handle things. Clearly, everyone appeared anxious to keep Dean away from the committee: his vulnerability was the vulnerability of all. There was talk of the lawyer-client relationship to give him further protection. 
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- Highlight on Page 287 | Loc. 6451-53  | Added on Sunday, April 06, 2014, 12:35 AM

Thus Richard Nixon interpreting history and applying its lessons: “I don’t give a shit what happens,” he defiantly told his men. “I want you all to stonewall it, let them plead the Fifth Amendment, cover-up or anything else, if it’ll save the plan. That’s the whole point.” 
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- Highlight on Page 289 | Loc. 6510-12  | Added on Sunday, April 06, 2014, 12:41 AM

If Goldwater believed that the President and his men had lied, then indeed the President was in trouble. But Nixon preferred his own options: stonewalling, modified limited hang outs, sacrificial lambs. He remained confident that he could get his house in order as April approached. But truly, for him it became the “crudest month.” 
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- Highlight on Page 291 | Loc. 6543-46  | Added on Sunday, April 06, 2014, 12:44 AM

Two days later Magruder and his lawyer began extended discussions with Silbert leading to a confession and a plea bargain. The deal was struck on April 14, but a day earlier, Haldeman delegated his top aide, Larry Higby—popularly known as “Haldeman’s Haldeman”—to sound out Magruder. Magruder told Higby that the U.S. Attorney’s office would get all the facts, but Haldeman, he assured Higby, would have “no problem.” Mitchell, Dean, and Liddy had problems, but not Haldeman, Magruder insisted. 
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- Highlight on Page 292 | Loc. 6569-74  | Added on Sunday, April 06, 2014, 11:26 AM

The talks of April 14 began with a morning meeting of more than two and one-half hours between the President, Haldeman, and Ehrlichman. The tape recordings of the conversations at times appear disjointed. The transcripts have been cannibalized for a juicy tidbit here, a titillating curse there. Interpreting the transcripts as showing hesitation or uncertainty in the Oval Office would be an error, however. The transcripts reflect a consistent line of discussion. Certainly, participants occasionally sounded unsure of matters, but that only mirrored the compartmentalization that Nixon generally had imposed on his dealings with aides. The President himself always seemed to know the correct answers, and throughout he established and maintained the drift and tone of the conversations. In his most perilous moments, Richard Nixon remained the man on top. 
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- Highlight on Page 294 | Loc. 6614-15  | Added on Sunday, April 06, 2014, 11:30 AM

Perhaps Richard Nixon saw Agnew as a pawn; neither then nor later did he understand that Agnew represented a built-in insurance policy against impeachment proceedings directed at himself. 
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- Highlight on Page 295 | Loc. 6625-30  | Added on Sunday, April 06, 2014, 11:32 AM

Ehrlichman had his own agenda. Mitchell, of course, was his primary target, but Ehrlichman thought that Dean, too, should be given an opportunity to serve the President in like fashion. He reminded Nixon of Dean’s knowledge of the hush money, as well as several other links to the cover-up. Ehrlichman did not want Dean fired; if he remained as the President’s Counsel, Ehrlichman believed that Silbert and the grand jury would be more respectful. The President then spoke carefully about Dean’s role. He “only tried to do what he could to pick up the Goddamn pieces and … everybody else around here knew it had to be done… . Uh, let’s face it. I’m not blaming anybody else … That was his job.” 
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- Highlight on Page 297 | Loc. 6681-82  | Added on Sunday, April 06, 2014, 09:11 PM

Shortly after 5:00 P.M. on that April 14, Ehrlichman returned to the Oval Office to report on his meeting with Magruder and his lawyers. It was as expected: Magruder would implicate Mitchell, along with Dean. 
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- Highlight on Page 297 | Loc. 6682-84  | Added on Sunday, April 06, 2014, 09:11 PM

He had given the prosecutors details of the extent to which Dean’s coaching had led to his earlier perjured testimony. Nixon realized that Dean might be an enemy within, now that he found himself threatened. 
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- Highlight on Page 297 | Loc. 6687-94  | Added on Sunday, April 06, 2014, 09:12 PM

At the end of the conversation the President cursed the growing official and public preoccupation with the Watergate story. “[D]ragging the God damn … thing out and dragging it out and being—and having it be the only issue in town,” he complained to Ehrlichman. Get the “son of a bitch done,” he said. Indict Mitchell and the rest; there would be a horrible two-week scandal, but he was sure they could survive. He thought the story might appear worse than Teapot Dome, but he saw a difference: no venality, no thievery, no favors. Still, he realized the seriousness of the picture if Mitchell were indicted. And then there was what he described as the vulnerability of others—he must have realized that these others included him—regarding the charges of obstruction of justice. On this front, he exhorted Haldeman and Ehrlichman to fight. After all, he said, “we were simply trying to help these defendants.” 
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- Highlight on Page 299 | Loc. 6714-18  | Added on Monday, April 07, 2014, 10:38 AM

Whatever empathy or relief the President expressed toward Magruder in his diary entry was forgotten as he told Haldeman that he just could not depend on Magruder. He seemed particularly anxious to establish the line that money payments to the defendants had not been intended to obstruct justice. He reassured himself that it would be the word of felons such as McCord and Hunt against the word of those who raised the money. But he worried that someone might have “some piece of paper that somebody signed or some God damned thing… .”—as if in fear that written or taped evidence would undermine the White House in some way. 
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- Highlight on Page 302 | Loc. 6798-6800  | Added on Monday, April 07, 2014, 10:48 AM

Furthermore, for the first time Ehrlichman informed Nixon that he had urged Dean to reveal everything in the summer of 1972, but that Dean had refused, ostensibly because doing so would hurt the campaign. Dean in fact, Ehrlichman argued, had been protecting Mitchell. 22 
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- Highlight on Page 302 | Loc. 6789-93  | Added on Monday, April 07, 2014, 10:48 AM

John Dean still had some White House cards to play. He called Haldeman on April 15 to relay some messages to Nixon. Dean wanted the President to understand that he remained loyal; “if it’s not clear now, … it will become clear,” Dean said. He refused to meet Ehrlichman, but he would meet the President at any time. Finally, he urged Nixon to counsel with Petersen, “who I assure you does not want the Presidency hurt.” Although Nixon seemed unsure about Dean, Haldeman and most emphatically Ehrlichman had turned rather sharply on him. 
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- Highlight on Page 303 | Loc. 6809-11  | Added on Monday, April 07, 2014, 10:50 AM

Within a half-hour, Dean met the President. He remembered later that Nixon asked him “leading questions which made me think the conversation was being taped.” Specifically, he recalled Nixon’s remark that his March 21 statement about raising a million dollars to sustain the cover-up had been merely a joke. 
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- Highlight on Page 303 | Loc. 6816-23  | Added on Monday, April 07, 2014, 10:51 AM

Two hours later—near midnight—the President phoned Petersen again. The relationship seemed to be becoming intimate. Nixon anxiously tried to give Petersen the impression that he was deeply involved in the case and interested only in pursuing the truth. “The main thing, Henry, we must not have any question, now, on this, you know I am in charge of this thing. You are and I am. Above everything else and I am following every inch of the way and I don’t want any question … of the fact that I am … way ahead of the thing. You know,” he emphasized, “I want to stay one step ahead of the curve.” Petersen then revealed which principals would be questioned in the next several days. When the President slyly, almost parenthetically, asked about Haldeman and Ehrlichman, Petersen indicated that they might have to resign. He promised to give the President “all the facts with respect to them into a pattern.” Unwittingly, but understandably, Petersen had informed the wrong man of his plans. 
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- Highlight on Page 304 | Loc. 6838-40  | Added on Monday, April 07, 2014, 10:54 AM

John Dean clearly emerged as the principal “enemy.” Dean “stonewalled,” he “shot down” White House attempts to make a clean breast of things in 1972, and “he dug in his heels.” Haldeman and Ehrlichman desperately made the case against John Dean. 
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- Highlight on Page 304 | Loc. 6844-48  | Added on Monday, April 07, 2014, 10:54 AM

Haldeman and Ehrlichman passed Dean on their way out of the Oval Office, “laughing like college pranksters,” Dean recalled, until they saw him. Dean realized they did not look like men who had been told to resign. When he sat down, the President immediately confronted him with the alternative letters that Ehrlichman, apparently, had prepared. Dean balked, insisting that Haldeman and Ehrlichman, too, must resign. The President then baldly lied, claiming that he had similar letters from them. Dean warned Nixon against believing that the aides had no problem. “I’m telling you, they do,” he declared. Nixon then seemed to agree. 
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The President’s treatment included fatherly advice on truth-telling. “John, I want you to tell the truth,” the President said. “I have told everybody around here, said, ‘God damn it, tell the truth.’ ’Cause all they do [when they lie], John, is compound it.” The experienced Nixon offered his advice, resurrecting Alger Hiss’s perjury. “[D]on’t ever lie with these bastards,” Nixon emphasized. He reminded Dean that right clearly could be distinguished from wrong, but when Dean agreed, the President added: “perhaps there are gray areas.” 
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as Petersen later explained, “The Son of God could not have turned off that investigation in April 1973.” 
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John Dean was history for the President, who now focused his energies on Petersen. Perhaps Nixon remembered Dean’s March 21 characterization of Petersen as a “soldier,” one who “believes in this Administration.” Nixon called Petersen at nine that evening, again urging him to share information. He wanted grand-jury information, promising not to pass it on to anyone else—“because I know the rules of the Grand Jury.” 
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For the last two weeks in April, Haldeman and Ehrlichman underestimated the President’s resolve. They joined him in finger-pointing sessions to lay the blame at the feet of others (Magruder, Mitchell, Dean, Gray), conjuring up explanations, skewing memories—all designed to rationalize their behavior and impugn that of others. The idea of “getting out in front of the story” disappeared in a wash of recriminations and excuses. 
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When Petersen recommended that Haldeman and Ehrlichman resign, the President listened. He knew his aides had to go. Undoubtedly he was loath to dismiss them, but Richard Nixon’s antennae of self-interest left him no choice. He realized this by April 16: for the rest of the month, however, he played out the string, hoping that his advisers would leave quietly and of their own accord. 
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On April 17 he acknowledged that “major developments” had resulted from “intensive new inquiries” he had made into the affair. His Secret Service agent remembered that the President sobbed after his statement. Later that afternoon 
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On April 17, with one unforgettable word, Ziegler declared all his previous remarks on Watergate “inoperative.” 33 That dramatic concession clashed with Nixon’s reluctance to act decisively in his own house. 
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Ron Ziegler knew that he would face hostile questions, but he agreed to state simply that this now was the “operative” statement. “Don’t [expletive deleted] on Dean,” the President cautioned Ziegler, apparently still hoping to cut a deal in that quarter. 
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Ehrlichman warned that if he had to take leave, “I gotta start answering questions.” Whether he was presenting a fact or a threat was not clear. “Let me ask you this, to be quite candid,” the President responded. “Is there any way you can use cash?” Haldeman reacted with a blend of fury and sarcasm. They were being “drummed” out of office for their “supposed role” in payments to the defendants, and now the President offered them cash. “That compounds the problem,” he told Nixon. “That really does.” 
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Ehrlichman contributed his part: “The American people—you gotta go on the assumption that the American people want to believe in their President.” Cover-up still was the order of the day, but now John Dean would be the scapegoat. 43 Haldeman listened to the March 21 tape that afternoon and then gave an interpretation that would remain at the foundation of the President’s defense. Nixon and Dean had discussed the White House’s role in the break-in and the defendant’s demands for money. Now, Haldeman proposed the following version: Nixon had asked leading questions; he was trying to “bust the case,” and he did not know “whether to believe this guy [Dean] at this point.” 
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The President had also then realized that Hunt was blackmailing him on the Plumbers, but he no longer would support payments because he knew he could defend the burglary of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist on national-security grounds. Haldeman was not sure that this interpretation of the March 21 record could be sustained—particularly if Dean had a different version of the conversation. “I just wonder if the son-of-a-bitch had a recorder on him,” Nixon remarked. 
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Now, the President said, Ehrlichman had to take a leave of absence. Bad news exploded like Chinese firecrackers. Two minutes after Kleindienst called about the Plumbers, Nixon learned that the New York Times was about to reveal Pat Gray’s destruction of the evidence from Hunt’s safe linking Colson to the Plumbers—evidence Ehrlichman had suggested that Gray “deep six.” 
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“I mean, we don’t have any investigators, that’s our problem, see,” he said. This, as Haldeman later noted, from the man who created the Plumbers. 
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Not all the bad news reached the White House. The prosecutors had learned from Anthony Ulasewicz, a former New York policeman, that he had been a courier for Herbert Kalmbach and had delivered cash payments to several of the Watergate defendants, including $154,000 to Howard Hunt. 46 With Ulasewicz offering corroborating testimony, John Dean’s credibility increased significantly. So, too, did his vulnerability—as did that of his various superiors at the White House. 
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On April 27 Nixon spoke to Assistant Attorney General Petersen again. Published reports indicated that Dean had implicated the President. 
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Pat Gray’s withdrawal of his nomination as FBI Director, on April 5, allowed him to stay in place pending the appointment of a successor. But the end for Gray came suddenly on April 27—probably before either he or the President intended, particularly in the light of Nixon’s crisis involving the futures of his closest White House aides. The New York Times revealed that Ehrlichman and Dean had given Gray, then Acting FBI Director, the contents of Howard Hunt’s office safe at a White House meeting on June 28, 1972. Dean reportedly said that the contents “should never see the light of day.” Gray accepted the material after Dean assured him that it had nothing to do with the Watergate incident. 
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The Plumbers and the Gray revelations proved too much for Attorney General Kleindienst. On Friday, April 27, as Gray stepped down, Kleindienst decided to submit his resignation the following Monday. But Richard Nixon had other plans. On Sunday he summoned Haldeman and Ehrlichman to Camp David to demand their resignations. 
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Nixon called Kissinger that evening, “nearly incoherent with grief,” and told him that he needed him more than ever, to “help me protect the national security matters now that Ehrlichman is leaving.” Kissinger spitefully, but correctly, regarded the remark as both “a plea and a form of blackmail.” 
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Nixon later realized that he had amputated both arms. Perhaps he could survive, he recalled, but the day left him “so anguished and saddened that from that day on the presidency lost all joy for me.” He noted that he had written his last full diary entry on April 14. “Events became so cheerless that I no longer had the time or the desire to dictate daily reflections.” But an anonymous aide fit the event into a familiar Nixon pattern: “For Nixon,” he claimed, “the shortest distance between two points is over four corpses.” 
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Pat Buchanan pleaded with Nixon not to appease his opponents. This was not the time, Buchanan warned, “to surrender all claim to the positions we have held in the past”; instead it was a time for a “low profile and quiet rearmament in this worthwhile struggle.” He urged Nixon to take the offensive and not passively “suffer the death of a thousand cuts.” Nixon responded that it would be useful to unleash Spiro Agnew or John Connally to say that the President had been right in his handling of the Watergate affair. 
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he had been jumped over 240 senior officers. In January 1973, Nixon nominated Haig to be the Army’s Vice Chief of Staff to replace Palmer, although Haig’s selection went against the recommendations of both outgoing Chief of Staff William Westmoreland and his successor, Creighton Abrams. After Haig moved to the Pentagon, the President provided him with a secure phone link to the White House, and Haig remained “deeply involved” in Administration affairs. Haig’s connection only fueled resentment in the Pentagon. 6 Until the Watergate crisis, Haig was a shadowy figure, yet one Nixon trusted in a special way. In the wake of the Joint Chiefs of Staff’s spying on Kissinger and the National Security Council in 1971, the President directed that nothing be done to harm Haig. Haig was then Kissinger’s deputy, although many suspected that he kept both White House and Pentagon officials apprised of Kissinger’s activities. 
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When, as Secretary of State in 1981, Haig appeared at the White House following the attempted assassination of President Reagan and proclaimed, “I am in charge here,” many observers found him displaying a familiar pattern of behavior—characterized by Bull as a “very serious personality disorder.” Haldeman, Bull recalled, never had to remind others of his authority, and Haig often expressed insecurity about himself vis-à-vis Haldeman. 
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Haig had a way of making himself indispensable, like Thomas Cromwell, who in a famous play described his role for Henry VIII: “I do things.” 
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The President, Richardson claimed uneasily, had promised him that he would be a “counterweight” to Kissinger in mapping the Administration’s geopolitical strategy. 
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Richardson sensed that Nixon must curb his well-known proclivity for nursing grievances; above all, he believed, the President must realize that he had “arrived,” that he had stature in the eyes of the people. “[Y]ou have won—not only won, but been reelected by a tremendous margin. You are the President of all the people of the United States. There is no ‘they’ out there—nobody trying to destroy you.” But he remembered that the President sat mute, offering no expression of either agreement or disagreement. 11 Richardson’s truth, as he saw it, simply did not fit Richard Nixon’s perception of reality or his favorite guise of outsider. 
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More than half the lawyers who served in the Special Prosecutor’s office had graduated from the Harvard Law School. Cox’s sweeping authority alarmed the Administration even more than his personnel. 
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Richardson and Cox agreed on a charter, and on May 31, the Attorney General directed Cox to investigate all “possible offenses” of the Administration—not just those relating to the Watergate break-in, but including all other “allegations involving the President, members of the White House staff or presidential appointees.” Nixon was “shocked and angry.” Richardson assured Haig that the language referred only to the Watergate break-in and cover-up, but the President knew better. His doubts, resentments, and fears only magnified. His staff and supporters mirrored his mood. Within a few months, White House lawyers and the President’s supporters were contemptuously referring to the Special Prosecutor’s office as “Coxsuckers,” or as “Cox’s Army,” one with “sharp ideological axes to grind.” The Special Prosecutor’s office appeared to them as nothing less than the vanguard for Senator Kennedy’s march to the White House. 
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Perhaps Cox was the wrong man for the job. What he represented, and how he proceeded, undoubtedly exacerbated the situation. Henry Petersen, who naturally resented the transfer of the case from his own jurisdiction, thought Cox “ultra-liberal” and believed the post should have gone to “a less partisan man.” The job required a man “with more detachment”; Cox’s rectitude, Petersen thought, was “second only to God.” Less than three months after Cox’s appointment, Petersen bitterly described his resentment to the Senate Select Committee. “Damn it,” he exploded, “I think it is a reflection on me and the Department of Justice. We could have broken that case wide open, and we would have done it in the most difficult circumstances… . That case was snatched out from under us when we had it 90 percent completed.” By that time, Petersen realized how the President of the United States and his Counsel, John Dean, had so badly misled him. It was a frustrating conclusion to a worthy career. 
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The perception that the Justice Department’s investigation was compromised was not without reason, but both Cox and Ervin knew better. The U.S. Attorney’s office had in fact discovered the cover-up conspiracy and had broken the case by the time Cox took control, and before Senator Ervin’s committee provided a public venting of what the prosecutors had learned. 
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The Senator, furthermore, failed to acknowledge John Dean’s success in keeping the prosecutors at bay. 
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Time flew like an arrow for Silbert and his colleagues. The Senate hearings opened on May 17, and Richardson appointed Cox the next day. The U.S. Attorneys’ days in the case were numbered. 
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Cox eased the transition in order not to lose the momentum of the case. The federal prosecutors briefed their successors at great length as to the evidence and prosecutorial theories they had developed. James Neal, who had gained the conviction of Jimmy Hoffa, was brought to Washington by Cox in late May, to prepare for prosecutions. Neal graciously complimented the prosecutors for their efforts. Silbert was ambivalent. The appointment of the Special Prosecutor deprived him and his associates of a proper share of public credit; still, he had grown weary of the unfair criticism and of maintaining proper procedures and fairness in the face of media pressures. Ultimately, he acknowledged that “the special prosecutor may be considered necessary for the appearance of justice.” 
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The federal prosecutors’ report to Cox was a turning point for the President’s fortunes. For the first time a duly constituted authority had officially raised the possibility of Nixon’s own involvement in aspects of the criminal conspiracy. Ironically, the May 22 press conference statement of the President had raised the prosecutors’ suspicions. (“I neither authorized nor encouraged subordinates to engage in illegal or improper campaign tactics.”) 
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As the case passed to the Special Prosecutor, the U.S. Attorney’s office provided Cox with their materials. Silbert and his colleagues would not reap the harvest of a year’s intimate contact with the Watergate case and the growing ramifications of it; that glory would belong to others. On June 29 they wrote to Cox, renewing a request to withdraw from the case. They used the occasion to state the record of their long, arduous work. By mid-April their office had uncovered “the existence of a massive conspiracy to obstruct justice, the participants therein, and their motives.” 
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Cox perceived that his task force had a substantial rival in the Senate Select Committee. The committee had been at its work for more than three months when Cox appeared on the scene. The day before Richardson announced Cox’s appointment, the committee launched its public hearings. Cox quickly came to the same conclusion that Earl Silbert had reached: the committee’s public hearings could well interfere with future prosecutions. 
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When Dean and Baker later clashed over this meeting in an executive session of the committee, Dean admitted that Baker had urged the President to waive executive privilege. But he insisted that Nixon believed he had Baker’s commitment to aid the White House. Colson told the President on March 21 that Baker was eager to cooperate and that the Senator had signalled the President to ignore his public statements, as they were for “political” consumption. Baker met Kleindienst for secret consultations, and a Baker aide informed Colson that Baker hoped to “control” Ervin. 
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Baker and Ehrlichman held lengthy discussions regarding television coverage of the hearings. They talked several times in late March and early April, and on several occasions. Baker spoke to the President. 
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At a crucial May 8 executive session of the committee, Baker argued that the burglars (excepting McCord) and the arresting police officers should appear first, followed by Mitchell, Colson, Haldeman, and Ehrlichman. Dean would be last, thus enabling the others to avoid responding to his accusations. Baker also wanted senators to question witnesses before the committee counsels had their turn. Ervin would have none of it: “Well, my daddy used to say that if you hire a lawyer, you should either take his advice or fire him. Since we’re not planning to fire Sam Dash, I suggest we take his advice.” 
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Throughout March and April Weicker became a familiar television figure, particularly for his spirited defense of Pat Gray and then for his equally spirited assault on the White House for its manipulation of Gray. But for many, much of that anger appeared contrived to boost the political stock of a first-term Senator who had captured only 38 percent of the vote in a threeway race. 
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Yet those statements were devastating, particularly Baker’s relentless—but largely misunderstood—line: “What did the President know, and when did he know it?” 
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He projected extremely well on television, combining a boyish smile with the appearance of a diffident, nonpartisan pursuit of the truth. In the end, Baker served himself well: a Republican, he nonetheless emerged from a Democratic-dominated show with his reputation substantially enhanced. He subsequently parlayed that performance into the position of Senate Republican leader and gained national visibility as a presidential contender. 
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Sam Ervin had been a prime force in establishing the committee, and he easily dominated it. His Democratic colleagues gave him free rein. He hired Dash, a man with a considerable background in criminal law as a prosecutor and professor, who in turn assembled a formidable staff of lawyers and investigators. Dash, at forty-eight, was eighteen years older than Fred Thompson, his Republican counterpart. His experience in the Philadelphia District Attorney’s office and as a trial attorney in the Criminal Division of the Department of Justice, and his prominence in academic circles, dwarfed Thompson’s brief tenure as an Assistant U.S. Attorney in Tennessee with a few years in private practice. Ervin, Dash, and the majority staff simply overwhelmed the lesser—and divided—Republican forces. 
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By the beginning of the second week, the networks reached an unprecedented agreement among themselves to rotate live coverage, ostensibly to satisfy “viewer discontent.” The real discontent was in the boardrooms, since each hour of pre-empted programming lost the networks an estimated $120,000 in advertising revenues. 
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“It now appears,” he added, that some persons had “gone beyond” his directives and used national security as an excuse “to cover up any involvement they or certain others might have had in Watergate.” 
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A month earlier, on April 17, when the President publicly acknowledged his recognition of “serious charges” about the Watergate case, he had insisted emphatically that he “reserved” executive privilege and that it might be asserted regarding any questions raised during the hearings. 45 The President’s reversal on May 22 dramatically underscored his eroding position; nothing declined more sharply than his ability to challenge Congress. 
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Now, in May, such confidence, such arrogance was on the wane. Nixon’s reversal on executive privilege signaled the retreat. The steady stream of his men before the Senate Select Committee left the doctrine in shambles, at least as far as Congress was concerned. The courts, indeed, provided one final forum for invoking the privilege, but that was for another day. 
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His “friend” corroborated much of McCord’s story. Caulfield acknowledged that he had lengthy discussions with Dean regarding McCord’s silence and executive clemency. 
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The testimony of McCord and Caulfield revealed that Nixon would have vigorous support within the committee. When McCord offered the first intimation of White House involvement, Baker quickly interrupted to establish that McCord’s belief was based on hearsay evidence that he had picked up from Gordon Liddy. Gurney similarly broke in to note that Caulfield was not working in the White House when he allegedly delivered the messages to McCord. 
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Quoting Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ruckelshaus concluded that “this time ‘like all times is a very good one, if we but know what to do with it.’” 
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Sloan discussed the matter with the campaign finance chairman, Maurice Stans, who told him: “I do not want to know and you do not want to know” why Liddy needed money. 
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Magruder had a grant of immunity from Judge Sirica. When he testified, what had been rumor for weeks was publicly stated before the committee by a key principal, as Magruder implicated Mitchell, Dean, LaRue, and Strachan in the planning and cover-up of the Watergate break-in. 
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His mind was not a tape recorder, as he told Gumey and Inouye, but he had an uncanny ability to recall whole passages of conversation, recollections eventually substantiated by tape recordings of Oval Office talks. 
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The rest of Dean’s testimony described the cover-up and his role in it. He revealed with uncanny accuracy the crucial September 15, 1972 meeting with Nixon and Haldeman. Dean had left that meeting, he remembered, with “the impression that the President was well aware of what had been going on regarding the success of keeping the White House out of the Watergate scandal.” 
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John Dean was different. He had challenged the integrity and image of the Administration; more important, he had portrayed the Nixon White House as deeply entwined in illegal activities and the obstruction of justice. Dean’s exposing the falsity of Nixon’s sponsorship of any serious attempt to investigate Watergate was reminiscent of the remark of a critic of Freudian psycho-analysis who called it “the disease that presumes itself the cure.” 
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Higby contended that people had talked to Dean believing that they were covered by lawyer-client confidentiality; now, Higby said, Dean used that information for his own advantage and to damage others. No one, however, understood the implications of Dean’s testimony better than the President. During Dean’s testimony, he listened to relevant tape recordings of his meetings with his former Counsel. 
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Throughout, Dean maintained his composure, his appearance of restraint, and above all, his consistency. 
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Earlier, in executive session, Ervin spoke to the President on the telephone and described the substance of the letter. Throughout the call, Ervin insisted that “we are not out to get anybody.” The Senator assured the President that he would be delighted to say that there was “nothing in the world to connect you with the Watergate in any way.” Nixon told Ervin that he was ill with viral pneumonia and would be hospitalized. He added that he would meet the Chairman at some future date to discuss the impasse. 
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- Highlight on Page 364 | Loc. 8140-44  | Added on Sunday, April 13, 2014, 05:09 PM

The printed record inadequately conveys Mitchell’s behavior. His recalcitrance, his foggy, vague answers, his angry interruptions, and his snide, sarcastic remarks directed at the committee and at some of his own associates need to be seen and heard to be fully appreciated. His long pauses, his silent rejection of questions, and his facial expressions amply reflected his absolute contempt for the proceedings and his total loyalty to the President. That loyalty is the more remarkable in view of what Mitchell and the President both knew: Mitchell acted as he did despite Nixon’s eagerness to make him a scapegoat just two months earlier. 
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- Highlight on Page 365 | Loc. 8174-78  | Added on Tuesday, April 15, 2014, 01:11 PM

As Dash led Mitchell through his knowledge of the Huston Plan and the Plumbers’ operations, Mitchell referred to these activities as the “White House horrors.” His remarks at this point effectively diminished the singularity and importance of the Watergate break-in and provided a window on the entire pattern of wrongdoing and abuse of power in the Administration. He bluntly stated that the cover-up really was designed to conceal the “horrors” rather than any aspects of the Watergate break-in. Watergate, in short, “did not have the great significance that the White House horror stories … had,” Mitchell concluded. 
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- Highlight on Page 370 | Loc. 8285-87  | Added on Tuesday, April 15, 2014, 01:21 PM

With obvious pain and emotion, Ervin described it as “the greatest tragedy” in American history—one even more profound than the Civil War, which at least had the redeeming qualities of sacrifice and heroism. “I see no redeeming features in Watergate,” he concluded. 
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- Highlight on Page 371 | Loc. 8309-14  | Added on Tuesday, April 15, 2014, 01:25 PM

Damon Runyon might have written the script for Ulasewicz’s testimony. The former New York policeman’s comic descriptions of driving on the Washington Beltway, carrying a money changer for telephone calls, putting keys and envelopes in phone booths, lurking around corners, behaving in an exaggeratedly surreptitious manner, and delivering cryptic messages would have been the stuff of Broadway comedy except for the serious implications of his efforts. “Who thought you up?” Baker asked, much to the amusement of the audience. But Inouye soberly demanded to know whether Ulasewicz actually believed that he had delivered money for the legal defense of the Watergate conspirators. “Not likely,” Ulasewicz admitted. 
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- Highlight on Page 372 | Loc. 8324-26  | Added on Tuesday, April 15, 2014, 01:26 PM

all of which, he noted, provoked disappointment and disillusionment in younger people and affected their attitude toward public service. What advice could Strachan give them? “Stay away,” he retorted, probably not offering quite the penitent statement Montoya desired. 
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- Highlight on Page 373 | Loc. 8345  | Added on Tuesday, April 15, 2014, 01:28 PM

When Ervin quoted a Biblical parable, Ehrlichman snapped back: “I read the Bible, I don’t quote it.” 
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- Highlight on Page 378 | Loc. 8463-66  | Added on Tuesday, April 15, 2014, 06:23 PM

Ehrlichman had managed to skirt discussion of the White House tapes. For Haldeman, who acknowledged that he had supervised the installation of the recording devices, that was not so easy. Furthermore, he infuriated the senators when they learned that he had had access to the tapes and had taken them to his house as part of his preparation for his testimony. Ervin sarcastically noted as a “strange thing” that Haldeman could listen to the tapes but the committee could not. 
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- Highlight on Page 378 | Loc. 8470-72  | Added on Tuesday, April 15, 2014, 06:24 PM

The tapes were a trap for Haldeman. His answers to Baker regarding the March 21 meeting with Dean and the President concerning the unraveling cover-up formed the basis for a subsequent perjury indictment, as the tapes demonstrated a quite different story from the one Haldeman had rendered. The former Chief of Staff, however, confidently believed that the contents of the tapes would never become public knowledge. 
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- Highlight on Page 381 | Loc. 8531  | Added on Tuesday, April 15, 2014, 06:43 PM

The summer of 1973 marked a sharp shift in Nixon’s fortunes. More verifiable proof than polls demonstrated his declining powers. 
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- Highlight on Page 381 | Loc. 8539-42  | Added on Tuesday, April 15, 2014, 06:44 PM

his giving in on the Cambodian bombing halt amounted to the “largest and most gratuitous concession” in the history of American foreign policy. 55 The President’s declining authority in foreign affairs, coupled with the growing disenchantment of his conservative supporters, ominously exhibited the reality of his deteriorating position. 
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- Highlight on Page 398 | Loc. 8905-8  | Added on Wednesday, April 16, 2014, 09:43 PM

The decision to move for a criminal indictment of Agnew might have been a lost opportunity for Nixon. Impeachment might have become dangerously popular, to be sure; but it also would have consumed enormous time and energy, perhaps enough so that following an Agnew impeachment, Congress and the nation might have had neither the inclination nor the will to move against the President. For five years, the President had treated Agnew as a pawn. But when the Vice President resigned, Richard Nixon lost his queen. 
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- Highlight on Page 406 | Loc. 9083-88  | Added on Wednesday, April 16, 2014, 10:00 PM

Instead of simply removing Archibald Cox’s probing lance, they raised a “firestorm” of protest that permanently scarred Nixon’s credibility with the public, and, most damaging, with congressional Republicans and Southern Democrats. The news and televised images of FBI agents, following a White House directive, sealing the Special Prosecutor’s office and barring access by Cox’s staff, shocked and frightened the nation. The ominous action raised talk of a coup and prompted comparisons to the Reichstag fire that prepared Germany for the rise of Hitler. Leon Jaworski, viewing events from Texas, thought the FBI’s actions resembled those of the Gestapo. 
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- Highlight on Page 406 | Loc. 9088-90  | Added on Wednesday, April 16, 2014, 10:00 PM

A decade and a half later, the reverberations from those events still influenced the American political landscape, including the confirmation hearings of a Supreme Court nominee. The “Saturday Night Massacre”—a name appropriate to the bloody political hemorrhaging—of October 20, 1973, was one more irretrievable blunder by the President. 
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- Highlight on Page 407 | Loc. 9091-97  | Added on Wednesday, April 16, 2014, 10:01 PM

Several incidents are indisputable: Elliot Richardson refused to fire Archibald Cox and resigned; when his deputy, William Ruckelshaus, similarly refused Haig’s command (“this is an order from your Commander-in-Chief”), Ruckelshaus resigned—although that evening the White House insisted he had been fired. Haig told Ruckelshaus that Cox had embarrassed the President during the Middle East crisis, and he insisted it was necessary for the Administration to close ranks. Ruckelshaus suggested that the President should postpone firing Cox if he had such a problem. The Justice Department’s third-in-command, Solicitor General Robert H. Bork, then agreed to carry out the President’s order, to a significant extent because of the urging of Richardson. Why Bork acted as he did, exactly how he acted, and what were the consequences of his acts, became matters of some dispute. 
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- Highlight on Page 408 | Loc. 9132-37  | Added on Wednesday, April 16, 2014, 10:07 PM

In his October 26 press conference, Nixon denounced the media in words reminiscent of his famous “last press conference” in 1962. The reporting, he said, had been the most “outrageous, vicious, [and] distorted” he had witnessed in twenty-seven years of public life. Although the nation had been “pounded night after night with … frantic, hysterical reporting,” he assured reporters and his audience that they had not affected him or his job performance. Asked if he felt any stress because of the pressure of both domestic and foreign crises, the President smiled wanly and said, “The tougher it gets, the cooler I get.” 
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- Highlight on Page 409 | Loc. 9138-39  | Added on Wednesday, April 16, 2014, 10:07 PM

The reply was vintage Nixon: “Don’t get the impression that you arouse my anger… . You see,” he said with a nervous grin, “one can only be angry with those he respects.” 
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- Highlight on Page 413 | Loc. 9250-54  | Added on Thursday, April 17, 2014, 12:15 AM

The events of the last days of October numbed and galvanized. Bork’s predecessor as Solicitor General, Erwin Griswold, was shocked. Cox, Richardson, and Ruckelshaus had been his students—and all were “honorable men.” Griswold had “lost faith” in the President by April; October’s events only confirmed his misgivings. For recently appointed FBI Director Clarence Kelley, the “Saturday Night Massacre” was a turning point. He no longer thought the Administration could be saved. 
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- Highlight on Page 414 | Loc. 9264-65  | Added on Thursday, April 17, 2014, 12:16 AM

Whether the nation would support or reject him now was the question on the table. The fractures, the divisions would have to cease; in one way or another, Richard Nixon would have to “bring us together.” 
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- Highlight on Page 421 | Loc. 9413-16  | Added on Thursday, April 17, 2014, 12:35 AM

Even Ford acknowledged that whatever momentary goodwill Nixon had fostered by nominating him had been neutralized by the Saturday Night Massacre. Two months after Ford’s confirmation, a Democrat captured his House seat, the first Democrat since 1910 to represent Michigan’s Fifth District. Watergate was the issue, and the result was interpreted as a referendum on the President himself. 
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- Highlight on Page 421 | Loc. 9418-22  | Added on Thursday, April 17, 2014, 12:36 AM

The vice presidency plagued Richard Nixon in a curious way. His own tenure in that office had catapulted him to fame, but it was an unhappy, frustrating experience, tethered as he was to a President who in truth neither liked nor trusted him. Henry Cabot Lodge, Nixon’s 1960 running mate, preferred afternoon naps to campaign appearances. The candidate who shared the ticket with him in 1968 and 1972 resigned in disgrace. Finally, his last Vice President hovered over the White House in 1974, a conspicuous alternative to the agony of the President and the nation. 
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- Highlight on Page 422 | Loc. 9423-29  | Added on Thursday, April 17, 2014, 12:36 AM

the Justice Department had been useless to him in his Watergate battles. In practice, the department consciously severed itself from the President and his problems. Before the creation of the Special Prosecutor, the department had been an antagonist, despite the President’s concerted efforts to co-opt its leaders and thwart their investigation. The events of October, beginning with the Agnew negotiations and the dealings with Cox, further demonstrated that the department remained an independent power center. Among the many paradoxes of Watergate was that the President of the United States—the “Most Powerful Leader of the Free World”—could muster only the most meager resources against an array of legal talent commanding the full range of public agencies. 
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- Highlight on Page 423 | Loc. 9458-61  | Added on Thursday, April 17, 2014, 12:40 AM

Garment also understood his limitations as a criminal lawyer. He feared Nixon’s lawyers would be the “patsy” for the President. By November, he had come to realize that he should have removed himself from the case earlier, but he could not stay away from it—he operated with a kind of obsessiveness; protecting the President in the Watergate affair was “like feeling a sore tooth.” Yet he worried that he might find himself in trouble, for he was learning too much and might have to disclose what he knew. 
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- Highlight on Page 425 | Loc. 9498-9500  | Added on Thursday, April 17, 2014, 12:44 AM

Oliver Wendell Holmes’s dictum that a man should share the passion and action of his time “at a peril of being judged not to have lived,” summed up Wright’s feelings. 
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- Highlight on Page 426 | Loc. 9516-21  | Added on Thursday, April 17, 2014, 01:30 PM

Apparently, the first choice of Bork and the White House was Leon Jaworski, a Houston lawyer and a confidant of Lyndon Johnson. Elliot Richardson had approached Jaworski about the position in the spring, but he had declined because of inadequate assurances of independence. On November 1 the President announced that Senator William Saxbe (R–OH) would be the new Attorney General, a move denounced by conservatives as “appeasement.” Bork followed Nixon’s announcement to report the Jaworski selection—apparently a matter on which Nixon could not bring himself to speak. Bork said that Jaworski would have no restraints on his freedom to pursue presidential documents, marking a clear retreat from the position Nixon had laid down in his October 26 statement. 
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- Highlight on Page 431 | Loc. 9630-33  | Added on Saturday, April 19, 2014, 09:47 AM

The panel examining the erased June 20 tape reported to Sirica on January 15, 1974. It unanimously found that at least five, and possibly as many as nine, “separate and contiguous” erasures had been made by hand operated controls. When one of the Watergate prosecutors asked if the erasures had been accidental, an expert testified that “it would have to be an accident that was repeated at least five times.” 
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- Highlight on Page 431 | Loc. 9635-37  | Added on Saturday, April 19, 2014, 09:48 AM

The President’s new lawyer, James St. Clair, told one of the experts that he would have to talk to “his own experts”—apparently forgetting that the panel had been selected with White House cooperation. 
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- Highlight on Page 432 | Loc. 9707-9  | Added on Saturday, April 19, 2014, 09:56 AM

Questions regarding the President’s taxes dovetailed with discussions of government expenditures for his houses in San Clemente, California, and Key Biscayne, Florida. The General Services Administration had spent more than $1.2 million on house and ground “improvements” at the two estates. 
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- Highlight on Page 432 | Loc. 9712-13  | Added on Saturday, April 19, 2014, 09:56 AM

Modern presidents are away from the White House a good deal of the time, and Nixon may have established the most extraordinary record of all. Between 1969 and 1972, he spent 195 days in California and 157 in Florida—nearly one-fourth of his first term. 
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- Highlight on Page 434 | Loc. 9722-26  | Added on Saturday, April 19, 2014, 09:57 AM

Several weeks earlier, speaking to newspaper editors at Disney World in Florida, the President admitted that he had made some mistakes but insisted that he had never profited from his years of public service. “I have never obstructed justice,” he claimed. He welcomed a public scrutiny of his records, because “people have got to know whether their President is a crook.” With no hesitation, he quickly and forcefully responded: “Well, I am not a crook. I earned everything I got.” These words would haunt him the rest of his days. 
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- Highlight on Page 434 | Loc. 9742-50  | Added on Saturday, April 19, 2014, 10:49 AM

Several days prior to the Cox dismissal, the Special Prosecutor’s office had begun to move against corporations that had made illegal campaign contributions and engaged in other illegal activities on behalf of the President. Much of this material had been developed in the later stages of the Senate Select Committee’s investigation. On October 17, 1973, American Airlines pled guilty to a violation of the U.S. code on campaign contributions and was fined $5,000. The same day, the 3M Corporation similarly was fined $3,000, and a corporate officer was fined an additional $500. Before the year was out, Goodyear Tire & Rubber, Braniff Airways, Gulf Oil, Ashland Petroleum, Phillips Petroleum, and the Carnation Company submitted guilty pleas, as did a number of their officials, and all were duly fined. During the next year, another ten companies followed the same pattern. The most prominent was the American Ship Building Company, which was fined $20,000 in August 1974; its chairman, George M. Steinbrenner, received a $15,000 fine, the highest for any corporate official. Steinbrenner originally had been charged with five counts of illegal campaign contributions and four counts of obstruction of justice. 
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- Highlight on Page 435 | Loc. 9754-57  | Added on Saturday, April 19, 2014, 10:51 AM

In addition to his fines, Steinbrenner was suspended for two years from his presidency of the New York Yankees by baseball Commissioner Bowie Kuhn. Around the same time, a baseball player convicted of manslaughter received no penalty from the Commissioner; that activity, Kuhn noted, had happened in the off-season. 33 Apparently, Steinbrenner had written his checks between April and October. 
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- Highlight on Page 445 | Loc. 9969-71  | Added on Sunday, April 20, 2014, 08:30 PM

On January 30, the same day that President Nixon declared that “one year of Watergate is enough,” the grand jury requested an opportunity to meet with him. 
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- Highlight on Page 447 | Loc. 10029-34  | Added on Sunday, April 20, 2014, 08:38 PM

After several delays, including revelations of the missing tapes and the 18½-minute gap, Buzhardt delivered seven tapes to Judge Sirica on November 26, one month after the President’s lawyer had agreed to comply with the subpoena. The Special Prosecutor’s office was pleased with this progress, and after Sirica listened to the tapes in camera, the prosecutors received them on December 21. Before releasing the material to the Special Prosecutor, the judge withheld some tapes, thus sustaining some of the President’s claims of executive privilege. Jaworski and his staff immediately realized that the tapes had strengthened their evidence against the President’s men; what was more, they believed they now had a case against Nixon—and it was in the tapes. 
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- Highlight on Page 448 | Loc. 10043-50  | Added on Sunday, April 20, 2014, 08:40 PM

Jaworski and Haig met in the White House on December 21. Haig told the Special Prosecutor that the March 21 tape of Nixon’s conversation with Dean was “terrible beyond description.” Jaworski concurred, adding that he found it “unbelievable.” But Haig insisted that “the White House lawyers” believed no criminality attached to the President’s behavior. Jaworski disagreed and suggested that the White House hire a good criminal lawyer. Shortly afterward, Haig called Jaworski at his Houston home, again reporting that Buzhardt found no criminality involved because there was no overt act following the meeting of March 21. Haig and Buzhardt may have invented their own version of criminal law; nevertheless Jaworski again warned the Chief of Staff to get a criminal lawyer. Jaworski, no stranger to criminal wrongdoing, was appalled at the stupidity of maintaining the taping system when such “an evil approach and wrongful conduct by the President” had been taking place. “I would have turned off the system,” Jaworski thought. 
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- Highlight on Page 451 | Loc. 10120-23  | Added on Monday, April 21, 2014, 08:13 PM

What seems clear is that during the last ten days of March and the first ten days of April, the President and his advisers made a decision to release new tape transcripts. The Judiciary Committee may have spurred that decision when it voted 33–3 on April 11 to subpoena the requested material. 
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- Highlight on Page 452 | Loc. 10130-31  | Added on Monday, April 21, 2014, 08:14 PM

Richard Nixon knew that his fate rested on the tapes. 
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- Highlight on Page 452 | Loc. 10124-28  | Added on Monday, April 21, 2014, 08:17 PM

Five days later, Jaworski appeared before Sirica, seeking an order to deliver sixty-four more taped conversations, and the judge issued a subpoena on April 18. St. Clair again requested more time: White House secretaries were frantically transcribing tapes. The task was a tedious one: transcription, then a check by Buzhardt and St. Clair, and then one by Ziegler’s aide, Diane Sawyer, who would look for “non-substantive problems,” such as might be posed by the presence of obscenities. Finally, the President himself examined the transcripts. 
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- Highlight on Page 452 | Loc. 10134-40  | Added on Monday, April 21, 2014, 08:18 PM

As always, legal problems became political ones and thus required a special public-relations twist to ensure favorable understanding. Nixon spoke on national television on April 29 to announce his decision to release the tape transcripts. He appeared with a stack of blue notebooks allegedly containing tape transcripts but in fact amounting only to a stage prop, part of the carefully contrived scenery for presidential appearances which also included, from time to time, family pictures and Lincoln busts, all designed to foster a favorable illusion on behalf of the President. Nixon’s elaborate speech seemed tailored to establish his interpretation of the tapes and to anticipate any negative reactions. What eventually appeared was a 1,200-page book, liberally spaced, of fragmented conversations which at times seemed incomprehensible or nonsensical when read in abstracted form. 
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- Highlight on Page 457 | Loc. 10251-52  | Added on Monday, April 21, 2014, 10:05 PM

As Nixon’s Watergate troubles deepened, conservatives began boldly to express their contempt. 
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- Highlight on Page 457 | Loc. 10260-66  | Added on Monday, April 21, 2014, 10:08 PM

Admiral Elmo Zumwalt, who resigned from the Joint Chiefs of Staff because of his dissatisfaction with the Administration, thought that Kissinger, true to the “dynamics of history,” believed that the Soviet Union eventually would surpass the United States and that it was best for the U.S. government now to arrange the best deal it could. Zumwalt specifically referred to the “deliberate, systematic, and unfortunately, extremely successful efforts” of Nixon and Kissinger to conceal their “real policies about the most critical matters of national security.” Others heaped scorn on Kissinger’s grasp of the issues. “The master delusion of our time,” columnist M. Stanton Evans wrote in March 1972, “is the idea that Henry Kissinger actually knows what he’s doing.” 
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- Highlight on Page 458 | Loc. 10275-79  | Added on Monday, April 21, 2014, 10:10 PM

As late as May 1974, William Buckley believed that Nixon should destroy tapes to protect his office. Even if the nation concluded that such action proved guilt, and even if it resulted in impeachment, Buckley thought, it would save the presidency. Besides, with no tapes, the charges would remain inconclusive.” 27 (The President’s moral critics apparently claimed no monopoly on morality.) Still, by May 1974, a good part of the conservative establishment had abandoned the President. 
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- Highlight on Page 463 | Loc. 10391-92  | Added on Tuesday, May 20, 2014, 12:53 AM

That same evening, February 25, Nixon held his first televised press conference in four months. 
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- Highlight on Page 463 | Loc. 10400-10402  | Added on Tuesday, May 20, 2014, 12:54 AM

The “presidency” must not be “hostage” to the momentary “popularity” of any incumbent. The work must be continued, he concluded, “and I’m going to stay here till I get it done.” 
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- Highlight on Page 464 | Loc. 10411-12  | Added on Tuesday, May 20, 2014, 12:55 AM

Haig later claimed that Nixon told him the next day that he was too busy trying to run the country and would not listen to any more tapes. But Nixon later admitted that he had heard the June 23 tape. 
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- Highlight on Page 465 | Loc. 10423-26  | Added on Tuesday, May 20, 2014, 12:56 AM

The jurors had also returned indictments against a former Attorney General and the President’s three closest aides, as well as others. The indictments came down on March 1. The counts ranged from conspiracy and obstruction of justice to perjury and false declarations to the FBI. The jury listed forty-five overt acts of conspiracy to cover up the true nature of the involvement of the Administration and the re-election committee with the break-in. 
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- Highlight on Page 465 | Loc. 10426-27  | Added on Tuesday, May 20, 2014, 12:57 AM

The defendants—Mitchell, Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Colson, Robert Mardian, Kenneth Parkinson, and Gordon Strachan—pled not guilty before Judge Sirica on Saturday morning, March 9. 
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- Highlight on Page 465 | Loc. 10431-34  | Added on Tuesday, May 20, 2014, 12:58 AM

Jaworski saw Mitchell as a “broken-down old man” and the once-ruthless Colson as “a frightened man”; while Haldeman and Ehrlichman “tried to maintain their bravado.” When Jaworski entered the court, Mitchell rose and greeted him. “You must be very busy these days,” Mitchell said. “Yes,” Jaworski responded, “more so than I wish.” 
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- Highlight on Page 466 | Loc. 10454-57  | Added on Tuesday, May 20, 2014, 01:01 AM

But the members of the House Judiciary Committee, particularly the seasoned veterans, preferred the old political maxim festina lente—“make haste slowly.” They realized they had neither the time nor the moral authority to create Cox’s “substantive law of impeachment.” Practical imperatives of political action, and not the intellectual symmetry of theory and precedent, dictated the course of the committee’s progress. 
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- Highlight on Page 469 | Loc. 10519-23  | Added on Tuesday, May 20, 2014, 01:08 AM

Jaworski was in a combative mood. Saxbe and Bork wrote to him on June 5, assuring him that their guarantees of independence remained intact but that they thought St. Clair had reason to pursue the question of Jaworski’s jurisdiction. They urged him and St. Clair to work out an agreement for handling the jurisdictional problem. Jaworski responded with lengthy quotations from the Special Prosecutor’s charter which defined his authority. Compromise? “A highly significant principle is involved, as I see it, one that involves not only the integrity of others but mine as well—and accordingly, there is no room for compromise.” 
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- Highlight on Page 469 | Loc. 10532-36  | Added on Tuesday, May 20, 2014, 01:09 AM

The dispute perhaps raised Jaworski’s ire more than any single event in his tenure. Clearly, he viewed St. Clair’s words and actions as those of St. Clair’s master, and therefore as especially sinister in their implications. By raising the jurisdictional issue, St. Clair invited judicial intervention against the Special Prosecutor. After all, the Supreme Court had neither a vested interest in the Special Prosecutor nor had it made a commitment guaranteeing his independence. If the Court ruled that the Special Prosecutor had no jurisdiction, then to whom would he appeal for the preservation of his existence? 
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- Highlight on Page 472 | Loc. 10587-89  | Added on Friday, May 23, 2014, 11:10 PM

Given the Framers’ recent experience with George III, however, neither they nor their constituents conceded “all sail and no anchor” to the office or the man. James Madison pointedly reminded Americans in Federalist48 of the dangers to liberty “from the overgrown and all-grasping prerogative of an hereditary magistrate.” 
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- Highlight on Page 473 | Loc. 10591-93  | Added on Friday, May 23, 2014, 11:11 PM

But the provision for impeachment perhaps best reinforced accountability, as it implicitly rejected the traditional English doctrine that “the king could do no wrong.” 
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- Highlight on Page 473 | Loc. 10607-10  | Added on Friday, May 23, 2014, 11:14 PM

Article II, Section 4 of the Constitution provided that the President and all civil officers might be removed following impeachment and conviction for “treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors.” The House had the sole power of impeachment; the Senate had the sole power to try the impeached; and the Chief Justice presided over the Senate in the event of a presidential impeachment trial. 
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- Highlight on Page 473 | Loc. 10610-13  | Added on Friday, May 23, 2014, 11:14 PM

The constitutional reference to “high crimes and misdemeanors” is not language historically vague in source or meaning. Its origins can be traced to an impeachment proceeding in England in 1386 and amounted to a catalogue of political crime. The language has been best described as “words of art confined to impeachments, without roots in the ordinary criminal law.” 
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James Iredell (a future Supreme Court Justice) thought that impeachment “must be for an error of the heart, and not of the head.” Iredell’s dictum became, in time, the standard for requiring evil motives as a basic criterion for impeachment. 
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The historical evidence, however, is impressive in showing that neither English practice nor the framers of the American Constitution required an indictable crime as a basis for impeachment. 
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The first impeachment resolution was introduced in the Congress by Representative Robert Drinan (D–MA) on July 31, 1973, not coincidentally, it seemed, just after Alexander Butterfield revealed the presidential taping system. Perhaps the suspicions regarding the President might be confirmed after all. 
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following the Saturday Night Massacre in October 1973, four impeachment bills appeared in the House hopper, including one from California Republican Paul McCloskey. The new resolutions repeated Drinan’s charges but added others denouncing the President for breaking his trust with Congress when he dismissed Archibald Cox. 
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Throughout April, the committee had bristled at the White House’s delay in releasing more tapes. After extensive wrangling, it approved a bipartisan compromise subpoena on April 11. Two weeks later, St. Clair requested and received an additional five days to comply, a deadline he met when the President released the tape transcripts on April 30. The next day, Doar informed the committee that his staff had reason to believe the edited transcripts they had received (the tapes and Dictabelts had not yet arrived) had numerous inaccuracies and omissions that could be rectified with better listening equipment. Clearly, at this point, the majority considered the President in contempt of the subpoena. Rodino, in a rare display of combativeness, contended that the House, and not the President, must determine the relevance of evidence. 
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Vice President Ford later claimed he told Nixon in May that he could no longer support the stonewalling and that the House had a right to the information. “We’re handling it this way because we think we’re right,” the President told Ford. 29 Publicly, the Vice President maintained his steadfast support of Nixon. 
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Meanwhile, numerous members had become restless with Doar’s presentation of the evidence. The information books covered a variety of subjects, with the cover-up being the largest and most important, yet they seemed aimless. The materials were presented chronologically; thus, if numerous calls or conversations occurred in a three-day period, they were set down chronologically. But they related to multiple subjects, and the chronology had to be keyed to the different subjects. Doar’s presentation did not attempt to do that. About July 1, several members turned to Richard Cates and other staff members for succinct summaries of the evidence and some clues as to the reasonable conclusions that could be drawn from it. Cates notified the entire committee of his intention to analyze the material. 
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Essentially, Cates disentangled the material from its rigid chronological setting to offer a coherent theory of presidential involvement in the cover-up. 
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St. Clair requested that the House committee hearings be open and televised, claiming that the selective leaks of evidence unfairly damaged the President. But Republican staff members sensed a shrewder reason. St. Clair himself had seen how passively the members listened to Doar, their boredom apparent to all. A television spectacle could either discredit the committee or make the members more active, questioning Doar incessantly and dragging the process on indefinitely. The White House now understood that time was on its side and could create a backlash in its favor, as the nation might grow bored with the inquiry. 
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Reluctantly, committee Republicans opposed St. Clair’s move. With elections only months away, they had no interest in prolonging the work. 
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Finally, on June 21, Doar concluded his presentation of the evidence, six weeks and eighteen closed sessions after he had started. 
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The President’s popularity continued to plunge. In June and early July, Nixon journeyed to the Mideast, traveling where no American President had before, and then to the Soviet Union for another summit. The televised images of the President riding by train through Egypt, cheered by enthusiastic crowds; continuing on to the long-forbidden and malevolent Syria, leader of the socalled radical bloc of Arab states; receiving a warm, emotional reception in Israel; and finally basking in the glow of an apparently enhanced détente with the Soviets, contrasted jarringly with the steady revelations regarding his behavior at home. 
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Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, however, dramatically sought to mark Watergate’s corrosive effects on foreign policy when he threatened to resign because of a New York Times editorial charging that he had lied to congressional investigators about his role in authorizing wiretaps of his aides. In a stopover in Salzburg, Austria, on June 11, Kissinger said he would not have his “public honor” discussed. With his credibility in question, he found it impossible to conduct foreign policy. 
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At the end of June, Nixon flew to Moscow to meet with Leonid Brezhnev. Criticism from conservatives in both parties mounted, fearful as they were that the President would fail to bargain effectively because of his political weakness, even desperation. 
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Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger insulted the President at a National Security Council meeting, when he proposed a SALT agreement that assured overwhelming American nuclear superiority. 
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By the time Nixon returned from the Soviet Union on July 4, he realized that he had serious problems in the House of Representatives. 
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Certainly, his well-honed political instincts told him that “on some subsurface level, the political tide was flowing fast, and flowing against me.” 
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Alexander Butterfield appeared to discuss the President’s work habits. He portrayed Nixon as the man in charge; Haldeman and other aides did nothing without the President’s knowledge, and Haldeman himself was nothing more than “an implementer.” St. Clair tried to discredit Butterfield, but the testimony fit the image the President himself had fashioned in his various image-building efforts. Nixon’s lawyers had more success in insulating the President when Fred LaRue testified that John Mitchell knew money had been paid to the burglary defendants. 
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Cohen’s time for questioning then expired, and no one else pursued the question of why LaRue met with the shadowy Pappas—“the Greek bearing gifts,” as Dean and Mitchell had described him. 
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Once again, John Dean provided the most interest and generated the most heat. For more than a year Nixon’s defenders had argued that Dean was a loose cannon, that he had instigated and carried out the cover-up on his own, to protect himself and a few others—but not the President. Charles Colson later testified that Dean ran the cover-up, even exerting pressure on Colson to cooperate in the effort. Dean admitted to St. Clair that Nixon did not specifically instruct him in the cover-up, but the former aide insisted that his conversations with Haldeman and Ehrlichman demonstrated both “concern and instructions” regarding the cover-up; “it was not quite willy-nilly, as you have tried to portray,” Dean retorted to a hostile questioner. 
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Petersen’s most devastating remarks centered on his trust in the President and his willingness to share privileged information with him. The tapes, of course, revealed that Nixon had improperly provided his aides with Petersen’s reports; the President’s own words, together with Petersen’s testimony, offered a substantial case for obstruction of justice. 
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Colson revived the finger-pointing that had characterized Oval Office discussions in early 1973. He claimed he told the President to urge Mitchell—“the guy who was responsible”—to come forward “and take the consequences.” At that point—mid-February 1973—Colson said, Nixon responded angrily, insisting that “I am not about to take an innocent person [Mitchell] and make him a scapegoat.” Colson also raised what came to be another favorite White House explanation of events: the CIA had played a decisive role in the events of Watergate. 
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The President, furthermore, could not “crack down” on the military, “because of what they knew and what they had taken”—a dark hint, never really pursued by the committee. It was not Colson’s last attempt to till revisionist soil. 
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St. Clair stressed that transcribing the tapes had become “quite an art.” He also gave the impression that the White House had been overly severe in its rendition, as he noted that the committee’s transcripts “are more favorable to the President than our own.” But the committee found significant discrepancies in the Administration’s transcripts; the White House versions had not in fact been less favorable. For example, the committee found a clear indication in the March 13, 1973 tape that Nixon had rejected the “hang-out road”—that is, a full revelation of the truth—in a conversation with Dean. Again, in his March 22, 1973 talk with Mitchell, the President repudiated Eisenhower’s scrupulous standards for the conduct of subordinates; more important, in this exchange, he told Mitchell to “stonewall” and to take the Fifth Amendment. 
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On July 12, a day after the House committee made its evidence public, Ford stated that the “new evidence as well as the old evidence” exonerated Nixon. Ford may have been obtuse, as some critics charged, but he apparently had no knowledge of the extent to which the White House had played with the evidence. 
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Whatever shackles had been imposed on St. Clair during the lengthy proceedings before the House Judiciary Committee, they dissolved on July 18 as he presented his closing defense of the President. He spoke for nearly one and a half hours, finally gaining an opportunity to display his reputed skills. St. Clair sensed the decisiveness and the solemnity of the occasion. His argument was impressive: organized, articulate, unyielding in behalf of his client, totally skeptical of the adversarial positions—and selective. 
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St. Clair had quickly negated any pluses he had earned. 
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He thought the record already offered ample support for the President, but at this point he again produced a hitherto undisclosed portion of a tape transcript, this time from March 22, 1973, when Nixon told Haldeman: “I don’t mean to be blackmailed by Hunt. That goes too far.” That was the “evidence,” St. Clair announced, that was the “fact” that the President did not deliberately plot to obstruct justice. 
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St. Clair had argued that being president justified some of Nixon’s actions; Doar turned that proposition inside out. In the ordinary course of affairs, concealing one’s mistake might be understandable, but “this was not done by a private citizen.” The President of the United States, Doar contended, had used the Department of Justice, the FBI, the CIA, the Secret Service, and his aides to obstruct justice. “It required perjury, destruction of evidence, obstruction of justice, all crimes. But, most important,” Doar concluded, “it required deliberate, contrived, continued, and continuing deception of the American people.” That evidence, Doar assured his listeners, would “help and reason with you” to reach a verdict. 
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On July 23, the day after Garrison’s summation, Hogan became the first Republican to announce that he would vote for impeachment. 
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The committee scheduled the opening of its debate for the next evening, July 24. The nationally televised spectacle was about to begin; first, however, a truly dramatic development unfolded behind the scenes. Despite the procedural fuss, the Democrats were about to gain their crucial bipartisan coalition, and the President was about to lose preciously needed political and moral support. The months of the staff’s labors, as well as some careful cultivation by committee members, finally secured the most desired prize of all: votes for impeachment by Republicans and Southern Democrats who also happened to constitute a rainbow of ideological commitments. 
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The coalition emerged rather haphazardly, and only after each of the men had come to a decision on his own. 
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But the younger Fish had supported the President on less than half the congressional roll calls prior to 1974. In 1968, he narrowly won election because the state Conservative Party had fielded a candidate who took away much of the traditional Republican vote. The candidate, Gordon Liddy, agreed not to campaign too hard, and in 1969 Fish helped him secure a position in the Treasury Department. 
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For Railsback, committee Counsel Richard Cates’s July 20 briefing had been decisive, while he thought St. Clair had failed to make a case for the President. On July 21, Railsback concluded that Nixon’s lies constituted a serious obstruction of justice, that he was directly involved in the cover-up, and that he had abused power. 
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Thornton believed that Nixon had damaged “the system” with his abuses of power. He saw the White House itself—apart from the executive agencies—as a virtual fourth branch of government, checked by no one. The President’s lack of cooperation with the impeachment inquiry buttressed Thornton’s conviction that the arrogant pattern of abuse was endemic. “Ford brought his life to the Judiciary Committee,” he said, “whereas Nixon brought his lawyers.” 
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As Robert Frost had said of love, the reason to impeach was indefinable but unmistakable, and he would know it when he saw it. 
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Before July 22, Fish remembered, the time was “a very lonely thing”; he did not discuss evidence with Republican colleagues, only political implications. Unlike Cohen, Fish had no desire to operate on his own: “I was perfectly willing to confess that I did want company.” 
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On July 22, all the coalition’s members had their first look at Doar’s draft articles of impeachment. They later agreed that the “ambiguous and vague and arbitrary” language galvanized them into action. That evening, Flowers told Railsback to “get your guys together and I’ll get mine and let’s sit down and visit about this.” Flowers then spoke to Mann and Thornton, who agreed to meet with the others. The next morning the seven gathered in Railsback’s office. Fish was surprised to find the Southern Democrats. At the outset, Railsback asked whether they could find an alternative route to impeachment, such as censure of the President. Flowers pointed out that the committee had responsibility only for deciding the issue of impeachment. They were in the “driver’s seat,” Flowers remembers; the “thing” was “in their hands,” and they realized their power. What was “fragile” was not the coalition members’ attachment to one another; rather, it was their link to the nominal liberal majority, who now found themselves “at the mercy of seven swing votes.” 
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the President shifted to a more existential posture: “I intend to live the next week without dying the death of a thousand cuts…. Cowards die a thousand deaths, brave men die only once.” It was, he wrote in his diary, his “Seventh Crisis in spades”; he could only “hope for the best and plan for the worst.” Publicly, Nixon was defiant. He assured supporters on July 18 that he would leave office “in 1977 when I shall have finished my term of office to which I was elected.” 
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On July 12 a California jury found John Ehrlichman guilty of perjury and of conspiring to violate Daniel Ellsberg’s civil rights. At the end of the month, the court imposed a twenty-month-to-five-year sentence. 
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Shocked, he learned that Fred Buzhardt had signed an affidavit stating that the White House documents contained nothing material to Ehrlichman’s defense. Ehrlichman believed then and in later years that he had been betrayed and went to jail for a crime the President had authorized. 
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Old California friends entertained the President in Bel Air on July 21. It was a pleasant evening, but Nixon later remembered that it was the last time he felt any real hope. 
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Two days later, he called Governor George Wallace from San Clemente, desperately seeking to enlist Wallace’s help in dissuading Walter Flowers from voting for impeachment. But Wallace told Nixon that it would be improper. The conversation lasted only six minutes. When it ended, the President turned to Haig and said: “Well, Al, there goes the presidency.” 
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The Watergate spotlight briefly moved from the House Judiciary Committee to the Supreme Court on July 8 as Leon Jaworski and James St. Clair presented their arguments to the Justices. 
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- Highlight on Page 506 | Loc. 11336-37  | Added on Sunday, May 25, 2014, 11:31 PM

Except in periods of emotional assault upon the institution from those momentarily aggrieved by a decision, the Court’s prestige consistently has remained high among the American people. 
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“We are a lost people when the supreme tribunal of the law has lost our respect,” ran a typical comment that urged Americans to maintain faith in the efficacy of the Court, despite its momentary lapse. 
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Truman’s claim of “inherent powers” to justify his seizure of steel mills to prevent a strike that he believed would impair the Korean War effort. When the steel companies sued to regain control of their property, six of the nine Justices ruled that in the absence of congressional authorization, the President had no such power. In a concurring opinion, Justice Robert H. Jackson eloquently underlined the rule of law: “With all its defects, delays and inconveniences, men have discovered no technique for long preserving free government except that the Executive be under the law, and the law be made by parliamentary deliberations.” 
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Burger, however, assigned the opinion to himself. He was in a bind as he confronted a case affecting the future political well-being of the man who appointed him. White House gossip in 1973 and 1974 reported that he “had assured the President that the tapes would not be taken away.” Burger’s closeness to Nixon and the Administration was well known—a situation riddled with irony since the Senate had rejected Lyndon Johnson’s nomination of Abe Fortas to be Chief Justice, in part because of charges of cronyism. 
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The Chief Justice at one point had suggested that the federal rule allowing courts to subpoena evidence considered potentially relevant and admissible, must be applied more strictly for issuing a subpoena against the President. Douglas would have none of it: “My difficulty is that when the President is discussing crimes to be committed and/or crimes already committed with and/or by him or by his orders, he stands no higher than the Mafia with respect to those confidences.” 
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In the end, Brennan and the others certainly had the input they had wanted all along; meanwhile, Burger alone had his name on an opinion that united the Court: the President must surrender the tapes. The Court met for its final conference on July 23, and the Chief Justice issued a press release noting that it would convene the next morning. 
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The next morning Alexander Haig called the President to report that he had the complete text of the Supreme Court’s decision. “Unanimous?” the President asked. “Unanimous. There’s no air in it at all.” “None at all?” the President persisted. “It’s as tight as a drum,” said Haig. 
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Richard Nixon’s fatalistic sense came closer to understanding the truth. He knew he could not defy the Court; perhaps he could still devise a plan for deleting some material. But the June 23, 1972, tape “worried” him ceaselessly; it could not be “excerpted properly,” he confided to his diary. While St. Clair made the President’s case to the Judiciary Committee on July 18, Nixon admitted that his greatest concern was “the Supreme Court thing.” On July 23 he talked to Haig and Ziegler about resigning. That night, Nixon stayed up late, reviewing a speech draft on economic matters. At midnight, he wrote: “Lowest point in the presidency, and Supreme Court still to come.” 
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That morning, on July 24, St. Clair had been advised by his White House aides that the Court’s decision was imminent. Fifteen minutes later, the wire services carried the news, but Haig did not inform the President for another forty-five minutes. At noon, Ron Ziegler told reporters that St. Clair would make a statement later in the day. The President’s lawyer appeared before the press at 4:00 P.M., approximately eight hours after the Supreme Court’s decision. 
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in 1952 Truman promptly dispatched a letter to his Secretary of Commerce ordering him to return the confiscated steel mills to the owners. The President complied less than thirty minutes after the Justices finished reading their opinions in the Steel Seizure Case. 
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St. Clair always thought that even now the President “didn’t have to turn over the tapes, maybe. I don’t know.” That “maybe” was predicated on St. Clair’s belief that the presidency and the judiciary were two equal and separate branches, a belief traceable to Jefferson and to Andrew Jackson’s notion of concurrent powers, under which some actions of the judiciary were not necessarily binding on the executive. 
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The nation barely had time to absorb the impact of the Supreme Court’s decision, for that same evening, July 24, the House Judiciary Committee reassembled to continue its impeachment inquiry. Now its debates would be aired on prime-time television. Nixon had fought throughout his presidency to control the media, to use it to his advantage. Whether in unveiling his Cabinet or in announcing his China visit or his selection of Gerald Ford, he had tried to persuade the nation that he was the right man doing the right thing. It was fitting, then, that following his repudiation by the Supreme Court, his “enemies” mounted their own television spectacular, as choreographed in its production and as emotional in its impact as anything that Richard Nixon might have imagined doing. 
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The narrow question centered on whether the President had told the truth when he said he had been deceived by subordinates, and whether or not he himself had participated in a design systematically to cover up the role of his agents and associates in an illegal political-intelligence operation, together with related activities—whether he, in short, had engaged in a course of conduct that had impeded his faithful execution of the laws and had done this for his own political interest and protection. 
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Finally, Hutchinson took note of the day’s events in the Supreme Court and suggested that the Chairman consider postponement until the President yielded additional evidence. Rodino ignored him and instead turned to the committee’s senior Democrat, Harold D. Donohue, who introduced a resolution and two articles of charges against Nixon. For the first time in more than a century, Congress confronted the President of the United States with the very real possibility of impeachment. 
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- Highlight on Page 518 | Loc. 11604-7  | Added on Monday, May 26, 2014, 12:02 AM

Responding to the members’ wishes for something concrete to debate, John Doar hastily assembled his draft articles and presented them on July 19. Several members of the coalition, including Caldwell Butler, met with Richard Cates on Saturday morning, July 20, and again had been impressed with Cates’s tight summary of the evidence and its inexorable conclusion. No such precision appeared in the Doar drafts, which struck the coalition members as vague, rambling, and altogether “a sloppy piece of work.” 
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Dissatisfaction with the drafts galvanized the coalition into collective action, and led to their July 23 meeting in Railsback’s office. 
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- Highlight on Page 519 | Loc. 11621-22  | Added on Monday, May 26, 2014, 12:03 AM

That same evening, Tom Mooney, a Judiciary Committee staffer with close links to Railsback, armed with copies of the Doar, Mann, and Thornton drafts, also began to compose articles on his own. 
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- Highlight on Page 519 | Loc. 11622-26  | Added on Monday, May 26, 2014, 12:04 AM

When the coalition reconvened at 8:00 A.M. on July 23, Mooney offered a draft article focusing on the President’s obstruction of justice. Working through the afternoon, periodically meeting with Mann and other members, Mooney assembled four other drafts before producing one for circulation. Five of the members met the next morning and developed two more drafts. They realized that their articles had to be drawn with the severity of any indictment, charging Nixon only with what could be proven. 
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- Highlight on Page 520 | Loc. 11640-41  | Added on Monday, May 26, 2014, 12:05 AM

The coalition had the Mann and Thornton drafts of the charges in Article II on July 23. 
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- Highlight on Page 520 | Loc. 11647-48  | Added on Monday, May 26, 2014, 12:06 AM

Each member of the full committee had fifteen minutes during the opening debate for his remarks. The proceedings carried through the afternoon and the evening of the second day, July 25. 
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- Highlight on Page 521 | Loc. 11673-74  | Added on Monday, May 26, 2014, 12:08 AM

“I think,” Cohen concluded, “that no man should be able to bind up our destiny, our perpetuation, our success, with the chains of his personal destiny.” 
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- Highlight on Page 522 | Loc. 11684-88  | Added on Monday, May 26, 2014, 11:36 AM

Butler’s dismay with Nixon and his annoyance at the narrow partisanship of the President’s defenders on the committee finally burst forth in a wave of passion and anger that belied his usual calm. Although Butler had to confront a skeptical district, he seemed to focus his public remarks on his fellow House committee Republicans. Watergate, he reminded them, “is our shame,” a scandal for a party that had campaigned so often against corruption and misconduct. “We cannot indulge ourselves in the luxury of patronizing or excusing the misconduct of our own people.” 
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- Highlight on Page 522 | Loc. 11691-93  | Added on Monday, May 26, 2014, 11:48 AM

The evidence was “clear, direct, and convincing”—St. Clair’s words—that Richard Nixon had abused power and that he had engaged in a “pattern of misrepresentation and half-truths” to explain his conduct in the Watergate affair, a policy “cynically based on the premise that the truth itself is negotiable.” 
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- Highlight on Page 522 | Loc. 11694-96  | Added on Monday, May 26, 2014, 11:49 AM

The combination of Mann and Butler left no doubt as to the outcome. Together, they offered a bipartisan conservative condemnation of the President. Together, they combined the sadness and fury that must have flowed through all but the most committed Nixon-haters and loyalists alike. 
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- Highlight on Page 522 | Loc. 11698-701  | Added on Monday, May 26, 2014, 03:15 PM

When debate opened at noon on July 26, McClory moved to postpone consideration of the impeachment articles for ten days, if the President assured the committee within twenty-four hours that he would provide the House with the tapes which the Supreme Court had ordered him to submit to Judge Sirica. McClory had no expectation that Nixon would make the materials available. Apparently, he simply wanted to demonstrate that the committee had treated the President fairly and with proper deference. 
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- Highlight on Page 523 | Loc. 11702-5  | Added on Monday, May 26, 2014, 03:16 PM

Brooks, Railsback, and Sandman, representing the three major factions in the committee, rejected the gesture as meaningless and opposed it. McClory’s motion failed, 27–11. By now the President commanded virtually no trust. A Gallup poll released that same day revealed that his disapproval rating had risen to 63 percent, while his support had fallen to 24 percent. 
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- Highlight on Page 523 | Loc. 11722-24  | Added on Monday, May 26, 2014, 03:18 PM

By late afternoon the Democrats had recovered somewhat and had begun to reply effectively to Wiggins and Sandman. Rodino read a staff member’s hurried note citing previous impeachment proceedings in which a body of evidence was provided apart from the articles themselves. 
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- Highlight on Page 524 | Loc. 11730-33  | Added on Monday, May 26, 2014, 03:20 PM

The counterassault by Wiggins and Sandman blistered the pro-impeachment forces. The Republican loyalists had little hope of moving those Democrats who had been firmly convinced by the evidence to vote against the President. Their target was the tenuous, uneasy bloc of approximately six Republicans and three Southern Democrats. Their shock tactics momentarily stunned the coalition and severely tested its mettle. 
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- Highlight on Page 524 | Loc. 11738-40  | Added on Monday, May 26, 2014, 03:20 PM

That night, Democrats Mann and Flowers, and Republicans Cohen, Rails-back, Butler, and Hogan met for dinner and a post-mortem at the Capitol Hill Club. Some blamed Doar and poor staff communication for their own weak reply to Wiggins and Sandman. Flowers complained that the Democratic majority had not made the case. Cohen disagreed. “The members had got stung and they didn’t really know what to do,” he later recalled. 
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- Highlight on Page 524 | Loc. 11743-49  | Added on Monday, May 26, 2014, 03:21 PM

Butler and Mooney remembered the “state of panic” and chaos that pervaded the group that evening. Flowers said that Sandman was the biggest hero in his Alabama district. The “specificators” had “licked us,” he complained. Meanwhile, ever politic, he suggested that the group maintain its image of neutrality. But the time for neutrality had passed. The coalition only bent; it did not break. The members had decided, and they were committed. Cohen deplored the label “fragile coalition.” He had reached the point where it didn’t really matter to him whether others “stayed in or stayed out,” as he had made his resolve. And so had his colleagues. The bloc remained intact, and despite Flowers, a number of them eagerly responded to the challenge of the President’s defenders. 
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- Highlight on Page 525 | Loc. 11759-63  | Added on Monday, May 26, 2014, 03:23 PM

Sandman sometimes appeared a man who could not put the trees together to form a forest, but by Saturday afternoon, July 26, he knew the count. He saw no need to “bore the American public with a rehashing” of material and acknowledged that the votes were there to pass the article. Wiggins, too, sensed the futility of the situation. The glue holding together the coalition—in Wiggins’s opinion, self-interest and an erroneous understanding of constitutional responsibility—proved strong enough. 
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- Highlight on Page 525 | Loc. 11769-70  | Added on Monday, May 26, 2014, 03:23 PM

Flowers then briefly yielded to allow Fish to speak to his “friends and supporters” in New York who supported Nixon. “There was no smoking gun,” Fish noted. “The whole room was filled with smoke.” 
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- Highlight on Page 525 | Loc. 11771-77  | Added on Monday, May 26, 2014, 03:24 PM

Suddenly, dramatically, Rodino asked for a vote on the Sarbanes substitute Article I that the coalition had prepared. Choruses of “ayes” and “noes” responded. But Rodino called the roll, and thirty-eight members recorded their vote. The afternoon pattern held firm, and by a 27–11 vote, the committee adopted one article of impeachment against Richard Nixon. Six Republicans—Butler, Cohen, Fish, Froehlich, Hogan, and Railsback—joined the twenty-one Democrats. 23 The bipartisan vote, transcending ideological alliances as it did, belied charges that the committee’s proceedings were a partisan vendetta. Richard Nixon had brought the committee together, as he was to bring the nation together—though clearly not the way he had intended in 1968. It was fourteen years to the day since he had first been nominated for the presidency. 
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- Highlight on Page 527 | Loc. 11780-84  | Added on Monday, May 26, 2014, 03:25 PM

Richard Nixon received the news of his own “Saturday Night Massacre” in his San Clemente beach trailer; it was, he said, “exactly” what he had “feared.” He realized a sense of historical shame—the “first President in 106 years to be recommended for impeachment.” Not the kind of first on which he usually prided himself. Compounding his anguish, the June 23 tape, in which he had discussed using the CIA to cover up the Watergate break-in, was, he knew, “like slow-fused dynamite,” waiting to explode. 
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- Highlight on Page 527 | Loc. 11787-92  | Added on Monday, May 26, 2014, 03:26 PM

Returning to Washington on July 29, Nixon found the White House “cloaked in gloom,” the staff’s confidence “shattered.” St. Clair had returned from a long weekend at Cape Cod and learned the contents of the June 23 tape. According to Nixon, his “breezy optimism” had evaporated. Now, St. Clair expressed concern for his own liability as a party to obstruction of justice. 1 The House Judiciary Committee resumed deliberations on July 29. In three sessions that day, and three the following day, the members considered four more articles of impeachment. 
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- Highlight on Page 528 | Loc. 11793-94  | Added on Monday, May 26, 2014, 03:26 PM

Many of the issues raised during the debate over Article I remained apparent when the members discussed the abuses of power charged in Article II. 
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- Highlight on Page 529 | Loc. 11816-19  | Added on Monday, May 26, 2014, 03:31 PM

The Republican loyalists proposed various motions to strike Hungate’s substitute article, but this time their opponents were better prepared. For example, when Wiley Mayne insisted that the Plumbers had a national-security purpose, Hamilton Fish had Albert Jenner read the relevant evidence pointing to the conclusion that the Plumbers’ goal was to cultivate public relations, not to protect national security. 
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- Highlight on Page 529 | Loc. 11823-24  | Added on Monday, May 26, 2014, 03:31 PM

The voting lines held. McClory crossed over to the majority, and the committee approved Article II, 28–10. 
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- Highlight on Page 529 | Loc. 11833-34  | Added on Monday, May 26, 2014, 03:32 PM

McClory picked up only one Republican vote (Hogan’s) and lost two southerners; nevertheless, the article passed, 21–17. 
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- Highlight on Page 530 | Loc. 11841-44  | Added on Monday, May 26, 2014, 03:34 PM

First, John Conyers introduced an article condemning the President for his taking “unilateral” military actions against Cambodia without informing Congress and for insisting that he had not done so. Edward Mezvinsky then submitted a fifth article, charging the President with willfully evading income taxes and with receiving compensation in the form of excessive government expenditures for his estates. Both articles failed, 26–12. 
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- Highlight on Page 531 | Loc. 11872-78  | Added on Monday, May 26, 2014, 03:40 PM

On July 30, as the committee debate ended, the Nielsen Company informed White House aides that the debate had an estimated audience of 35–40 million—extraordinarily high numbers. A few days later, Nielsen reported that the average household watched 1.9 days of a possible four of the debates, for an average of 3 hours and 43 minutes. The viewing audience translated into double the American population of 1868, the year the House impeached Andrew Johnson. Only 10 percent of U.S. adults heard none of the House committee proceedings on television or radio. A Louis Harris poll taken on August 2, a week after the first vote, showed public opinion favoring impeachment 66–27 percent. Pro-impeachment sentiment had risen 13 percent in one week. 
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- Highlight on Page 532 | Loc. 11884-90  | Added on Monday, May 26, 2014, 03:41 PM

After the final committee vote, the President spent a restless night. Early the next morning, he wrote out his options: resign immediately; resign if the full House voted impeachment; or fight through the Senate trial. Nixon’s “natural instinct” prevailed over any reasoned approach to the options, for at the end of his notes, he wrote: “End career as a fighter.” The only other real alternative was to set a precedent for resignation—and that was “far worse,” he thought. But hours later, according to Nixon, Haig read the June 23, 1972, tape transcript “for the first time” and agreed with Buzhardt and St. Clair: “I just don’t see how we can survive this one,” Haig told the President. The next day, August 1, Nixon told Haig that he intended to resign. 
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- Highlight on Page 533 | Loc. 11925-27  | Added on Monday, May 26, 2014, 03:45 PM

Nixon’s traditional support eroded. On July 29 Howard Phillips called for the President’s removal, either by resignation or impeachment. He announced the creation of “CREEP 2”—Conservatives for the Removal of the President. 
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- Highlight on Page 533 | Loc. 11927-30  | Added on Monday, May 26, 2014, 03:46 PM

Just after the impeachment vote, Federal Judge Gerhard Gesell sentenced John Ehrlichman to a twenty-month-to-five-year jail term for his role in the Fielding break-in, and two days later, John Dean received a one-to-four-year sentence for obstructing justice. The emergence of new enemies and painful reminders of “White House horrors” only reinforced the image of a totally discredited Administration. 
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- Highlight on Page 534 | Loc. 11931-33  | Added on Monday, May 26, 2014, 03:46 PM

Ford’s enduring faith must have shattered on August I when Haig told him that the situation had so deteriorated that “the ball game” might be over, and Ford should start “thinking about a change” in his life. 
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- Highlight on Page 534 | Loc. 11936-43  | Added on Monday, May 26, 2014, 03:47 PM

Anger was a mild word to describe the feelings of presidential supporters four days later when the President released the June 23, 1972 tape transcript, destined to be known as the “smoking gun.” At the President’s first meeting that day, more than two years earlier, Haldeman told the President that “we’re back in the problem area,” because Pat Gray did not have the FBI under control. The FBI’s investigation had led into some “productive areas,” where “we don’t want it to go,” he said. Haldeman had talked to Mitchell and Dean, who agreed on the need to maintain a cover-up of the Administration’s role in the Watergate break-in. Mitchell’s recommendation that Deputy CIA Director Vernon Walters call Gray and tell him to “stay the hell out of this” was the fateful instruction. Didn’t Gray want to stay out of it? the President asked. Yes, Haldeman responded, but he needed a reason, and the CIA could provide him with one. Haldeman thought the story might be plausible, because the FBI investigation allegedly had been tracing money to some CIA connections. 
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- Highlight on Page 534 | Loc. 11947-51  | Added on Monday, May 26, 2014, 03:48 PM

The conversation shifted to various legislative and policy matters. But abruptly, Nixon returned to the Watergate problem. Call in the CIA people, he said, and tell them that further inquiry might lead to “the whole Bay of Pigs thing”; “don’t lie to them to the extent to say there is no involvement, but just say this is a comedy of errors,” Nixon said. The CIA should call in the FBI and say, ‘Don’t go further into this case[,] period’ !” 
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- Highlight on Page 535 | Loc. 11954-56  | Added on Monday, May 26, 2014, 03:48 PM

When the two men resumed their conversation later that afternoon, the President urged caution lest the CIA and FBI leaders have “any ideas we’re doing it because our concern is political.” Instead, he underlined an anxiety that any revelations might “blow the whole, uh, Bay of Pigs thing.” 
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- Highlight on Page 535 | Loc. 11960-62  | Added on Monday, May 26, 2014, 03:49 PM

The June 23 tape offered a definitive answer to Howard Baker’s question, put just over a year earlier: the President knew. He knew that he had instigated a cover-up and thus had participated in an obstruction of justice almost from the outset of events. 
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- Highlight on Page 536 | Loc. 11993-96  | Added on Monday, May 26, 2014, 07:01 PM

But after they learned of the June 23 tape, Republicans, like cuckolded mates, refused to accept Nixon’s expressions of regret for withholding the information. Some wanted him simply to resign; others wished to vent their fury on him. As the news spread through Washington, House Republicans reacted with dismay, sorrow, or anger; whether by impeachment or by resignation, they concluded, the President had to go. 
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- Highlight on Page 537 | Loc. 12008-13  | Added on Monday, May 26, 2014, 07:05 PM

The President desperately tried to insert exculpatory material into his August 5 statement on his release of the tape. At the last moment, he drafted a notation that he had told Pat Gray to press forward two weeks after the June 23 conversation, once he had determined that there was no national-security matter at stake. But the statement would have to wait for his memoirs. Haig told him that St. Clair and the lawyers would leave unless the prepared statement remained intact. “The hell with it,” Nixon said. “Let them put out anything they want. My decision has already been made.” 
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- Highlight on Page 539 | Loc. 12050-53  | Added on Monday, May 26, 2014, 07:12 PM

The President, with some urging from Burch, called in the Republican leaders on August 7. Goldwater’s presence was a measure of his untitled stature within the Republican Party and the nation. Burch knew his friend would be blunt and honest. Given the Senator’s significant national constituency, and the growing respect of old adversaries, Burch also realized that Nixon could not lightly reject any counsel Goldwater gave him. 
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- Highlight on Page 539 | Loc. 12056-61  | Added on Monday, May 26, 2014, 07:13 PM

Accompanied by Hugh Scott and John Rhodes, Goldwater met the President. According to several accounts, including his own, he never directly told Nixon to resign, indicating instead that he had no significant support in Congress. He informed Nixon that he had at most ten supporters in the Senate, six of whom really were undecided, including himself. Goldwater left the meeting with no doubt as to the outcome: the President “would resign.” When the three met reporters late in the afternoon of August 7, Goldwater told them that no decision had been made and that they had visited the President to describe the situation in Congress. 
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- Highlight on Page 539 | Loc. 12063-66  | Added on Monday, May 26, 2014, 07:14 PM

Nixon remembered Goldwater’s telling him that he leaned toward voting for Article II. He also recalled saying to Scott as they ended their discussion: “Now that old Harry Truman is gone, I won’t have anybody to pal around with.” Truman had had monumental contempt for Nixon, and the President knew it. Nixon’s remarks to Scott displayed his typical awkwardness and perhaps offered some indication of a momentary flight from reality. 
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- Highlight on Page 540 | Loc. 12092-95  | Added on Monday, May 26, 2014, 07:17 PM

Meanwhile, Ford delivered Agnew-style speeches—written in the White House—assailing the President’s critics and blithely assuring his audience of Nixon’s innocence. “Throughout my political life, I always believed what I was told,” Ford later wrote. And he believed that Nixon had told him the truth. When he saw the experts’ report on the 18½-minute tape gap, he began to suspect he was being used, yet he dutifully continued to defend the President for months to come. 
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- Highlight on Page 541 | Loc. 12115-21  | Added on Monday, May 26, 2014, 07:22 PM

He reminded his lieutenants that the presidency had experienced enormous trauma in the past decade, with the assassination of Kennedy and with Johnson “literally hounded from office.” The institution, he said, must not sustain another “hammer blow” without a defense. Consequently, he would not resign, and would let the constitutional process run. This, he insisted, would be in the “best interests of the Nation”; he would not “desert the principles which give our government legitimacy.” To do otherwise, he continued, “would be a regrettable departure from American historical principles.” He offered nothing in the way of personal defense aside from past diplomatic triumphs; instead, he wrapped himself in the mantle of the presidency—claiming 
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- Highlight on Page 542 | Loc. 12122-25  | Added on Monday, May 26, 2014, 07:22 PM

With that, Nixon turned to a discussion of economic problems, projecting policies for six months in the future. Attorney General William Saxbe was dumbfounded by Nixon’s bravado. “Mr. President, don’t you think we should be talking about next week, not next year?” he asked. According to Saxbe, Nixon looked around the table, no one said a word, and with that he picked up his papers and left the room. 
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- Highlight on Page 541 | Loc. 12112-13  | Added on Monday, May 26, 2014, 07:23 PM

President Nixon appeared for his last Cabinet meeting on Tuesday, August 6. 
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- Highlight on Page 542 | Loc. 12133-34  | Added on Monday, May 26, 2014, 07:24 PM

Resignation offered only short-term benefits, Butler thought; more important, he did not want to establish a precedent “for harassment out of office, 
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- Highlight on Page 544 | Loc. 12164-68  | Added on Monday, May 26, 2014, 07:27 PM

Preventing the “death of a thousand cuts” seemed to be the rallying cry for the President’s men. Haig complained, however, that to some White House aides the slogan meant that Nixon should resign rather than suffer such a painful ordeal—the “pussy fire group,” he contemptuously called them, comparing them to Vietnamese who would not stand and fight. Some in the White House felt besieged: “It was us against the world.” Every day, it seemed, brought what Stephen Bull called the “Oh, Shit Syndrome,” meaning another revelation, another disclosure, another indictment. 
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- Highlight on Page 544 | Loc. 12170-72  | Added on Monday, May 26, 2014, 07:27 PM

Still, Bull knew that the White House atmosphere was different; “things just were not happening,” he recalled, and the blank pages of the presidential logs offer mute testimony to that fact. 
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- Highlight on Page 545 | Loc. 12190-93  | Added on Monday, May 26, 2014, 07:30 PM

According to McClory, Rodino promised to end the impeachment inquiry as well if Nixon stepped down. Speaker Carl Albert concurred, although he added that he had no influence over the Special Prosecutor’s course of action. The news from McClory undoubtedly had some appeal. If Nixon learned of that development, then he would have done so just prior to his meeting with Goldwater, Rhodes, and Scott. That conversation, taken together with the news from Rodino, might well have been influential. 
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- Highlight on Page 545 | Loc. 12196-99  | Added on Monday, May 26, 2014, 07:31 PM

That evening Nixon began to work in earnest on his resignation speech and arranged to meet Vice President Ford the next day to discuss a transition. In that meeting, the President recommended that Ford retain Haig; the rest of the meeting was awkward, as both men seemed to understand, yet were unable to express, what was required of each. 
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- Highlight on Page 545 | Loc. 12199-205  | Added on Monday, May 26, 2014, 07:33 PM

The following night, Nixon saw more than forty longtime, steadfast supporters. “I just hope I haven’t let you down,” he told them. But he said later that he knew he had—as he had “let down the country … our system of government and the dreams of all those young people that ought to get into government…. I … let the American people down, and I have to carry that burden with me for the rest of my life.” Earlier, he met with congressional leaders from both parties. He told them what he would say to the nation that evening: he had “lost his base” in Congress, and he believed the outcome of the impeachment process to be inevitable. Speaker Albert best remembered that Nixon never discussed the question of whether he had done wrong. Perhaps that was asking too much. Instead, the President broke down in tears. 
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- Highlight on Page 545 | Loc. 12206-12  | Added on Monday, May 26, 2014, 07:34 PM

Nixon’s last full day in office proceeded routinely. He vetoed annual appropriations bills for the Agriculture Department and the Environmental Protection Agency on the grounds that they were inflationary. On a lesser, but far more symbolic note, he nominated a judge to fill a federal court seat in Wisconsin which had been vacant for three years. Nixon had sought unsuccessfully to appoint an old friend, Republican Representative Glenn Davis, but the American Bar Association, as well as state groups, had mounted an intense campaign in opposition. The new appointment on August 8 painfully measured the President’s decline and powerlessness. Later that day, Nixon addressed his simple letter of resignation to the keeper of the seals, the Secretary of State: “I hereby resign the Office of President of the United States.” 
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- Highlight on Page 546 | Loc. 12226-31  | Added on Monday, May 26, 2014, 07:35 PM

General Brown sent a message on August 8 to various American military commanders in the United States and abroad, advising increased vigilance. Yet he also urged them not to be overly ambitious in implementing the order. The next day, two other messages went to the same commanders over Schlesinger’s name. The first conveyed remarks of President Ford: “I know that I can count on the unswerving loyalty and dedication to duty that have always characterized the men and women of the Department of Defense. The country joins me in appreciation for your steadfast service.” The other communique, signed by Schlesinger, stated: “Mr. Ford will have, consistent with our best traditions, the fullest support, dedication, and loyalty of all members of the Department of Defense.” 
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- Highlight on Page 547 | Loc. 12251-53  | Added on Monday, May 26, 2014, 07:37 PM

The President spent the afternoon of August 8 correcting and memorizing his resignation speech, to be broadcast that evening. “One thing, Ron, old boy,” he feebly joked to Ziegler, “we won’t have to have any more press conferences, and we won’t even have to tell them that[,] either!” Of course, he had said a similar thing a dozen years earlier in California. 
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- Highlight on Page 548 | Loc. 12253-56  | Added on Monday, May 26, 2014, 07:37 PM

He also said that he looked forward to writing, noting that it might be done in prison. “Some of the best writing in history has been done in prison. Think of Lenin and Gandhi,” he said. At 9:00 P.M. the thirty-seventh President addressed the nation from the White House for the thirty-seventh time. 
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- Highlight on Page 548 | Loc. 12261-62  | Added on Monday, May 26, 2014, 07:38 PM

With a hint of defiance, he asserted that he had never been a quitter. To resign was “abhorrent to every instinct” within him. But he would put “the interests of America first.” 
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- Highlight on Page 548 | Loc. 12266-68  | Added on Monday, May 26, 2014, 07:38 PM

“I regret deeply any injuries that may have been done in the course of the events that led to this decision. I would say only that if some of my judgments were wrong—and some were wrong—they were made in what I believed at the time to be the best interest of the Nation.” It was Richard Nixon’s only moment that approximated contrition. 
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- Highlight on Page 548 | Loc. 12274-75  | Added on Monday, May 26, 2014, 07:40 PM

“few things in his presidency became him as much as his manner of leaving.” 
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- Highlight on Page 549 | Loc. 12278-79  | Added on Monday, May 26, 2014, 07:40 PM

Six years earlier, to the day, Nixon had delivered perhaps the best speech of his career as he accepted the Republican presidential nomination. 
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- Highlight on Page 549 | Loc. 12279-81  | Added on Monday, May 26, 2014, 07:41 PM

He had told the nation that he would restore respect for the law. “Time is running out,” he said at that time, “for the merchants of crime and corruption in American society.” 
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- Highlight on Page 550 | Loc. 12308-10  | Added on Monday, May 26, 2014, 07:44 PM

His “old man” was “a great man because he did his job,” and every job counted to the hilt, regardless of what happened. His mother, too, was remembered. No books would be written about her, “but she was a saint,” he said, as tears welled up in his eyes. 
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- Highlight on Page 550 | Loc. 12315-18  | Added on Monday, May 26, 2014, 07:45 PM

Nixon quoted a delicate, moving passage from Roosevelt’s autobiography that described her death and his enduring love for her. With her death, Roosevelt wrote, “the light went out from my life forever.” How strange that Nixon should have identified with Teddy Roosevelt’s lament for his inexplicable loss. For after all, Richard Nixon’s cause for grief was all too explainable. 
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The Wars of Watergate: The Last Crisis of Richard Nixon (Stanley I. Kutler)
- Highlight on Page 553 | Loc. 12324-28  | Added on Wednesday, May 28, 2014, 10:56 AM

On Sunday morning, September 8, President Gerald R. Ford attended St. John’s Church, across from Lafayette Park. Afterward, he invited a pool of reporters and photographers into the Oval Office, where he read a brief statement and then signed a proclamation granting Richard Nixon a “full, free, and absolute pardon” for any crimes “which he, Richard Nixon, has committed or may have committed” during his presidency. The time had come, the President said, to end this “American tragedy” and restore “tranquility.” 
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The Wars of Watergate: The Last Crisis of Richard Nixon (Stanley I. Kutler)
- Highlight on Page 554 | Loc. 12343-45  | Added on Wednesday, May 28, 2014, 10:58 AM

Alexander Hamilton in Federalist74 warmly endorsed its discretionary aspect. There would be, he said, “seasons of insurrection or rebellion,” or “critical moments, when a well-timed offer of pardon … may restore the tranquility of the commonwealth; and which, if suffered to pass unimproved, it may never be possible afterwards to recall.” 
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- Highlight on Page 554 | Loc. 12347-48  | Added on Wednesday, May 28, 2014, 10:58 AM

“Our long national nightmare of Watergate” was over, he said as he took his oath of office. 
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- Highlight on Page 555 | Loc. 12361-63  | Added on Wednesday, May 28, 2014, 11:00 AM

It is clear, however, that Ford believed the nightmare still haunted the nation, and that he had an antidote. The new President’s cure had substantial merit; unfortunately, he fumbled its application, with costly short-run effects for him and for the nation. 
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- Highlight on Page 555 | Loc. 12366-69  | Added on Wednesday, May 28, 2014, 11:01 AM

So much of the affair of the past two years had been extraordinary; its denouement was no exception. We have differing versions of when a pardon for Richard Nixon first received serious consideration. Seymour Hersh’s 1983 article on the subject in the Atlantic contended that Nixon selected Ford as his Vice President in October 1973 because “he thought that he could rely on Ford to pardon him.” 
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- Highlight on Page 555 | Loc. 12369-70  | Added on Wednesday, May 28, 2014, 11:02 AM

Ford himself testified that on August 1, 1974, Haig told him that a pardon for Nixon, if he resigned, should be a possibility. 
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The Wars of Watergate: The Last Crisis of Richard Nixon (Stanley I. Kutler)
- Highlight on Page 555 | Loc. 12378-79  | Added on Wednesday, May 28, 2014, 11:03 AM

Buzhardt later insisted that he never proposed any discussion of a Ford pardon of Nixon, yet he drafted a pardon proclamation in Gerald Ford’s name, dated August 6, 1974, three days before Nixon’s eventual resignation. 
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The Wars of Watergate: The Last Crisis of Richard Nixon (Stanley I. Kutler)
- Highlight on Page 556 | Loc. 12390-91  | Added on Wednesday, May 28, 2014, 01:44 PM

Less than a week after Nixon returned to San Clemente, John Ehrlichman’s lawyers subpoenaed the former President as a witness in the forthcoming trial of Nixon’s former aides. 
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- Highlight on Page 556 | Loc. 12396-99  | Added on Wednesday, May 28, 2014, 01:46 PM

Near the end of the month, Nixon received a subpoena to give a deposition for a pending civil trial related to Watergate. From his San Clemente exile, the law’s long arm seemed menacing to Richard Nixon. “Do you think the people want to pick the carcass?” he said in a telephone call to a Republican congressman on August 26, adding that “We’ve got problems with that fellow …”—meaning Jaworski. 
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- Highlight on Page 557 | Loc. 12424-27  | Added on Wednesday, May 28, 2014, 01:48 PM

On August 20, Ford nominated Nelson A. Rockefeller, Nixon’s old rival, for the vice-presidency. Reporters questioned the former New York governor regarding Nixon’s future. He already had been “hung,” Rockefeller said, and added that he need not “be drawn and quartered.” He proposed that Nixon be given “immunity from prosecution.” 
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- Highlight on Page 557 | Loc. 12427-28  | Added on Wednesday, May 28, 2014, 01:48 PM

That same day, by a 412–3 vote, the House of Representatives accepted the Judiciary Committee’s report on its impeachment inquiry. 
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The Wars of Watergate: The Last Crisis of Richard Nixon (Stanley I. Kutler)
- Highlight on Page 558 | Loc. 12434-35  | Added on Wednesday, May 28, 2014, 01:50 PM

But public sentiment was skeptical: a Gallup poll, conducted between August 16 and 19, showed that 56 percent of the respondents favored a criminal trial for the ex-president. 
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- Highlight on Page 559 | Loc. 12454-57  | Added on Wednesday, May 28, 2014, 01:52 PM

Conveniently—perhaps too conveniently—the first question raised at Ford’s press conference that day, August 28, was whether he agreed with Rockefeller on immunity for Nixon and whether he would use his pardon authority. Ford thought that Rockefeller’s statement “coincided” with the “general view” of the American people. A bit elliptically, he added that “in this situation I am the final authority,” and then pointedly declared that a pardon was a “proper option.” 
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The Wars of Watergate: The Last Crisis of Richard Nixon (Stanley I. Kutler)
- Highlight on Page 559 | Loc. 12466-69  | Added on Wednesday, May 28, 2014, 01:55 PM

But he insisted that the nation’s health most concerned him, and he quoted one of his military aides: “We’re all Watergate junkies. Some of us are mainlining, some are sniffing, some are lacing it with something else, but all of us are addicted. This will go on and on unless someone steps in and says that we, as a nation, must go cold turkey. Otherwise, we’ll die of an overdose.” 
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- Highlight on Page 560 | Loc. 12477-80  | Added on Friday, May 30, 2014, 05:10 PM

On September 4, Jaworski told Buchen that Nixon could not be tried for at least nine months to two years. He added that the forthcoming trial of Mitchell, Haldeman, and Ehrlichman would generate unfavorable, prejudicial publicity, precluding any fair trial for Nixon. Jaworski also had no intention of including Nixon as a co-defendant, believing that the former President’s condemnation in the impeachment process might well prejudice the cases of the other defendants. 
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- Highlight on Page 560 | Loc. 12492-93  | Added on Friday, May 30, 2014, 05:11 PM

Ford had made his decision firm by September 4, perhaps sooner. But for the next few days, he carried out a bargaining charade with his predecessor. 
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- Highlight on Page 562 | Loc. 12535-40  | Added on Friday, May 30, 2014, 05:20 PM

After all the hard bargaining, bargaining in which Nixon did not deal personally with Ford’s emissary, Benton Becker had a brief audience with Nixon. He claimed that he told Nixon the White House would stand by prevailing legal doctrine that acceptance of a pardon acknowledged guilt. Nixon seemed uninterested. Becker remembered the conversation as unfocused and depressing. He found Nixon to be “an absolute candidate for suicide; the most depressed human being I have ever met, and I didn’t think it was an act.” Becker duly conveyed that impression to President Ford. Whatever Nixon’s mood when he met with Becker, less than three weeks later he signed a contract for a two-million-dollar advance for his forthcoming memoirs. 
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- Highlight on Page 563 | Loc. 12554-63  | Added on Friday, May 30, 2014, 05:25 PM

Becker brought back an agreement on the Nixon records subsequently known as the Nixon-Sampson Agreement, named after the Administrator of the General Services Administration, and announced the same day as the pardon. The agreement required the former President to deposit his papers in the National Archives, yet gave him “all legal and equitable title” to those materials, as well as the right to control access and to withdraw any of them after three years. Nixon was also assured that his tape recordings would be destroyed upon his death or in 1984, whichever came first. Buchen later defended the agreement because he considered the recordings as “so offensive and contrary” to personal privacy. For his part, Becker claimed that Ford was not going to be a party to the “final cover-up” of Watergate by giving Nixon possession of his papers—a statement that somehow ignored the fact that giving him unequivocal control over their use was a complete victory for Nixon. Within weeks, Congress abrogated the Nixon-Sampson Agreement when it passed the Presidential Recordings and Materials Preservation Act of 1974, giving the National Archives custody of the Nixon records and the authority to determine their use. 
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- Highlight on Page 564 | Loc. 12581-82  | Added on Friday, May 30, 2014, 05:27 PM

The White House received nearly 270,000 written communications following the pardon, almost 200,000 of which opposed Ford’s act. 
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- Highlight on Page 566 | Loc. 12617-19  | Added on Friday, May 30, 2014, 05:30 PM

Charles Colson later claimed Nixon had promised him that he would not leave office “without wiping the slate clear” for everyone, and that there had been a deal for Ford to pardon all Administration defendants until the subsequent storm over the Nixon pardon. 
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The Wars of Watergate: The Last Crisis of Richard Nixon (Stanley I. Kutler)
- Highlight on Page 566 | Loc. 12620-23  | Added on Friday, May 30, 2014, 05:31 PM

Nixon telephoned Ford about a week after the pardon, apologizing for the political embarrassment he had caused and expressing his gratitude. It was small comfort for Ford, however. The image of goodwill and honesty he had so assiduously fostered now dissipated. The President’s Gallup poll approval rating plunged in a month from 71 percent to 49 percent, and would eventually drop even more. Within two days, the White House reported that mail and telegrams ran five to one against Ford, an extraordinary admission. 
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- Highlight on Page 566 | Loc. 12627-31  | Added on Friday, May 30, 2014, 05:33 PM

In a completely cynical vein, William Buckley’s National Review stated that conservatives were happy with the pardon, for, at last, it had exposed Ford to liberal criticism. The President, the magazine remarked, had “burned his bridges to the great organs of liberal opinion,” preparing the way for “the real battle” in American politics. Charles Colson, now a “born-again” Christian, delivered his own innuendoes, and denied the President any comfort in his struggle with conservatives, when he reiterated that Nixon never would have resigned unless he had reason to believe Ford would pardon him. 
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- Highlight on Page 567 | Loc. 12652-58  | Added on Friday, May 30, 2014, 05:38 PM

What went wrong was that Ford failed to prepare the country for what he must have known he would do, certainly as early as the end of August. He apparently consulted with no political leaders; furthermore, his lack of desire—or his inability—to get that measure of contrition from Richard Nixon that the national mood may well have demanded was a serious miscalculation. In deciding to pardon Nixon, Ford relied on only a few advisers. Given his congressional experience, Ford must certainly have understood the virtue and indispensability of consultation. Yet he made no effort to touch the necessary political bases in this momentous case. Ford made a brave decision; he need not have made one amid such “splendid isolation.” 
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- Highlight on Page 568 | Loc. 12659-61  | Added on Friday, May 30, 2014, 05:39 PM

Imagine if Ford had asked former congressional colleagues from across the political spectrum—Mansfield, Scott, Goldwater, Albert, Rhodes, and O’Neill—to stand with him as he delivered his announcement. 
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- Highlight on Page 569 | Loc. 12695-97  | Added on Friday, May 30, 2014, 05:47 PM

On September 16 Congresswoman Bella Abzug (D–NY) introduced a resolution requesting that the President respond to ten questions relating to the pardon. A week earlier, she had written to Jaworski, contending that the pardon was unconstitutional and that he should proceed with an indictment. No reply was sent. 
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- Highlight on Page 570 | Loc. 12702-3  | Added on Friday, May 30, 2014, 05:47 PM

The White House reply came on September 30 with dramatic suddenness: the President himself would appear to answer questions. 
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The Wars of Watergate: The Last Crisis of Richard Nixon (Stanley I. Kutler)
- Highlight on Page 570 | Loc. 12705-8  | Added on Friday, May 30, 2014, 05:48 PM

October 17, Elizabeth Holtzman carried the burden of the questioning, mainly repeating the questions that Abzug and Conyers had stipulated in their resolutions. But she launched them in rapid-fire succession, hardly allowing Ford time to answer. Finally, he interrupted: ‘[T]here was no deal, period, under no circumstances.” 
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- Highlight on Page 573 | Loc. 12771-73  | Added on Friday, May 30, 2014, 07:22 PM

The framers of the Constitution debated granting pardon only after conviction. They decided otherwise, in the belief that a pardon might be used as a means of obtaining cooperation from an accused individual. But Richard Nixon provided nothing toward resolving Watergate.35 
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The Wars of Watergate: The Last Crisis of Richard Nixon (Stanley I. Kutler)
- Highlight on Page 575 | Loc. 12798-800  | Added on Friday, May 30, 2014, 07:27 PM

In 1986, Richard Nixon, serenely confident that he had been “rehabilitated,” suddenly found Watergate alive and well, hauntingly compared to the Iran-Contra affair that erupted that fall. Watergate proved to be more than the “dim and distant curiosity” that one historian described. 
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The Wars of Watergate: The Last Crisis of Richard Nixon (Stanley I. Kutler)
- Highlight on Page 575 | Loc. 12805-12  | Added on Friday, May 30, 2014, 07:29 PM

Donald Segretti pleaded guilty on October 1, 1973, to three counts of distributing illegal campaign literature and eventually served four months. Dwight Chapin was indicted on November 29, 1973, on four counts of perjury relating to his ties to Segretti. After a five-day trial, he was convicted on two counts on April 5, 1974, and sentenced to ten to thirty months in prison. John Dean pleaded guilty on October 19, 1973, to one count of obstructing justice, but the court delayed his sentence until August 2, 1974, to ensure his continuing cooperation. Judge John Sirica ordered a jail term of one to four years, but Dean served only four months, as Sirica ordered him released following the conviction of Nixon’s closest associates. Dean spent the entire time at Fort Holabird in Maryland, conveniently available foralmost daily questioning in preparation for the Mitchell-Haldeman-Ehrlichman trials, in which he appeared as the principal witness for the prosecution. 
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- Highlight on Page 575 | Loc. 12812-15  | Added on Friday, May 30, 2014, 07:29 PM

Jeb Magruder offered a guilty plea in August 1973 and received a penal term of one to four years. He, too, appeared as a witness against his former associates and had his sentence reduced. Herbert Kalmbach pleaded guilty in February 1974 to several campaign violations, and in return for his testimony, all other charges were dropped. 
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- Highlight on Page 576 | Loc. 12818-20  | Added on Friday, May 30, 2014, 07:30 PM

Charles Colson pleaded guilty to a charge of obstructing justice by scheming to defame and destroy the reputation of Daniel Ellsberg and thereby influence Ellsberg’s trial. Other charges for his role in obstructing justice in the Watergate burglary were dropped, and on June 3, 1974, Judge Gerhard Gesell sentenced Colson to one to three years. 
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- Highlight on Page 576 | Loc. 12823-25  | Added on Friday, May 30, 2014, 07:31 PM

Ehrlichman was sentenced to concurrent prison terms of twenty months to five years. Liddy received a jail sentence to run simultaneously with the one he was then serving in connection with the Watergate burglary. 
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The Wars of Watergate: The Last Crisis of Richard Nixon (Stanley I. Kutler)
- Highlight on Page 576 | Loc. 12825-27  | Added on Friday, May 30, 2014, 07:31 PM

The trial of Mitchell, Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Robert Mardian, and Kenneth Parkinson for various charges of conspiracy, obstruction of justice, and perjury began on October 1, 1974. After three months, the jury returned guilty verdicts against all but Parkinson. 
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The Wars of Watergate: The Last Crisis of Richard Nixon (Stanley I. Kutler)
- Highlight on Page 576 | Loc. 12828-30  | Added on Friday, May 30, 2014, 07:32 PM

On February 21, 1975, Richard Nixon’s closest advisers—Mitchell, Haldeman, and Ehrlichman—received sentences of 2½-8 years for their crimes. For many, the verdict represented a conviction of the former president in absentia. 
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The Wars of Watergate: The Last Crisis of Richard Nixon (Stanley I. Kutler)
- Highlight on Page 577 | Loc. 12851-54  | Added on Friday, May 30, 2014, 07:35 PM

As President Ford continued the same policies, conservatives refused to submit to party loyalty and offer affection for an incumbent they had once admired. In May 1975 Ronald Reagan condemned Ford for a projected $51-million budget deficit. Conservative Digest reported a poll in June 1975 claiming that 71 percent of its readers thought Ford was doing a “poor” job, and 91 percent opposed his nomination for the 1976 election. 
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The Wars of Watergate: The Last Crisis of Richard Nixon (Stanley I. Kutler)
- Highlight on Page 578 | Loc. 12866-69  | Added on Friday, May 30, 2014, 07:39 PM

Richard Nixon’s Republican opponents finally enjoyed a measure of revenge. Fifteen years after he left the presidency, Nixon found himself out of the mainstream of his own party. Periodically, he invoked conservative slogans and labels, but he remained a distrusted and embarrassing figure. The former President had the unique distinction of not appearing at the four presidential nominating conventions of his party that followed his leaving the White House. 
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The Wars of Watergate: The Last Crisis of Richard Nixon (Stanley I. Kutler)
- Highlight on Page 579 | Loc. 12890-91  | Added on Friday, May 30, 2014, 07:42 PM

Three consecutive presidential defeats left the Democrats floundering in search of their identity as a party. Perhaps that identity might have been found nearly two decades earlier, had Watergate not diverted the party from the quest. 
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The Wars of Watergate: The Last Crisis of Richard Nixon (Stanley I. Kutler)
- Highlight on Page 580 | Loc. 12923-28  | Added on Friday, May 30, 2014, 08:08 PM

The 1974 law regulated both contributions and expenditures. But in Buckley v. Valeo (1976), the Supreme Court held that expenditure limits violated the First Amendment, except for those imposed on grants of public funds. The Court ruled nine years later that PAC expenditures, if made independently of the candidate, could not be constitutionally limited. The net effect of the judicial decisions was to stimulate the flow of special-interest money. Increased use of the media, involving legions of “creative and support” staff, as well as expanded roles for pollsters and political consultants, made campaigning more expensive, which made the demands for increased campaign funds circular and even more extravagant. 
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The Wars of Watergate: The Last Crisis of Richard Nixon (Stanley I. Kutler)
- Highlight on Page 581 | Loc. 12933  | Added on Friday, May 30, 2014, 08:09 PM

Sociologist Robert Nisbet observed that “unethical” might well be the most difficult word to define in the American language. 
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The Wars of Watergate: The Last Crisis of Richard Nixon (Stanley I. Kutler)
- Highlight on Page 582 | Loc. 12951-56  | Added on Friday, May 30, 2014, 08:12 PM

1978 law first required the Attorney General to investigate such allegations and then to report to a three-judge panel within ninety days on whether the charges were unfounded or whether the judges should appoint a special prosecutor. The judges defined the prosecutor’s jurisdiction. Once selected, the prosecutor had authority to perform the investigative and prosecutorial functions of Justice Department officials. Finally, the prosecutor could not be removed, except by impeachment or conviction of a crime, or by the Attorney General in the event of extraordinary impropriety or physical incapacity. The Attorney General must justify such action to the Senate Judiciary Committee; moveover, the prosecutor might appeal to the courts for review. The Ethics Act institutionalized the memory of the Saturday Night Massacre. 
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The Wars of Watergate: The Last Crisis of Richard Nixon (Stanley I. Kutler)
- Highlight on Page 583 | Loc. 12976-79  | Added on Friday, May 30, 2014, 08:16 PM

Two years of wrangling produced a series of amendments to the Ethics Act in 1983. The changes renamed the Special Prosecutor an “Independent Counsel” (a less “inflammatory” title, one Senator suggested), gave the Attorney General more discretion in the decision to name a counsel, reduced the list of officials who might be investigated, provided for reimbursement of attorney’s fees for the subject of an investigation if no indictment were brought, and allowed the Attorney General to remove the counsel for “good cause.” 
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- Bookmark on Page 584 | Loc. 13003  | Added on Friday, May 30, 2014, 08:20 PM


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The Wars of Watergate: The Last Crisis of Richard Nixon (Stanley I. Kutler)
- Highlight on Page 584 | Loc. 13003-6  | Added on Friday, May 30, 2014, 08:20 PM

Independent Counsel Whitney North Seymour complained that the Ethics in Government Act had too many loopholes and exemptions. Whatever its inadequacies, the law nevertheless remained imperative, he said, because there was “too much loose money and too little concern in Washington about ethics in government.” Seymour struck particularly at the Reagan Administration’s failure to instill an ethical sense throughout the government. 
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The Wars of Watergate: The Last Crisis of Richard Nixon (Stanley I. Kutler)
- Highlight on Page 585 | Loc. 13020-26  | Added on Friday, May 30, 2014, 08:33 PM

The Supreme Court put its imprimatur on the independent-counsel statute in a surprisingly firm and broad decision. Reversing the appellate court, Chief Justice William Rehnquist led the Court in rebuffing the Administration. The Justices found no violation of separation-of-powers doctrine. The Court held that the Ethics Act in no way inhibited the President from performing his constitutionally assigned duties. Further, unlike the lower court, Rehnquist rejected any notion that the law constituted “Congressional usurpation” of executive functions. In a lone dissent, Justice Antonin Scalia bitingly referred to “our former constitutional system,” as he lamented the Court’s refusal to uphold what he believed to be a proper and absolute scheme of separation of powers. 
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- Highlight on Page 587 | Loc. 13076-79  | Added on Friday, May 30, 2014, 08:43 PM

Helms dismissed Nixon’s lament as hypocritical and misguided, for he had “no doubt that the whole Watergate business fueled” the CIA’s difficulty with Congress. Nixon’s attempt to entangle the CIA in Watergate, Helms contended, had been “the battering ram” for the subsequent congressional inquiry. 
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- Highlight on Page 588 | Loc. 13094-101  | Added on Friday, May 30, 2014, 08:49 PM

Executive orders are subject to new executive orders, however; relations between the CIA and the Attorney General are subject to the compatibility of their interests; and congressional oversight is dependent, first, on what information the CIA or the President chooses to provide, and second, on the extent of Congress’s own vigilance and interest. President Reagan’s Executive Order 12333 of December 4, 1981, substantially weakened Carter’s 1978 directives and restored a large measure of discretion to CIA activities. (That order also upset the Levi guidelines on the FBI and, in general, “unleashed” the intelligence agencies, as the President noted.) The Iran-Contra affair in 1986–87 demonstrated that the CIA and the Administration had acted without congressional consultation and hence lacked that degree of consent that might have provided some cover of legitimacy to what clearly was a dubious enterprise. The result was predictable; renewed demands to force full CIA disclosure of its activities were followed by expressions of concern that the CIA not be inhibited or compromised in its activities. 
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- Highlight on Page 588 | Loc. 13108-12  | Added on Friday, May 30, 2014, 08:51 PM

The charges leveled against President Nixon’s misuse of executive agencies touched developing concerns for the right of privacy. Interest in the problem erupted in the 1960s, partly in response to a concern over the government’s increasing surveillance of the civil rights movement and of opponents of the Vietnam war, and partly in recognition that sophisticated new technology-including computers and the establishment of centralized computer data banks—threatened freedom of private activities and information. 
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- Highlight on Page 589 | Loc. 13122-26  | Added on Friday, May 30, 2014, 08:53 PM

The result was the Privacy Act of 1974, passed four months after Nixon resigned. The new law permitted individuals to see information in their federal agency files and to correct or amend the information. Agencies were prohibited from making files available to other agencies without permission. They also could not maintain records describing a person’s exercise of First Amendment rights unless the action fell within the scope of official law-enforcement activities—a loophole that specifically exempted the FBI, the CIA, the Secret Service, and other agencies from the law. 
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- Highlight on Page 589 | Loc. 13127-30  | Added on Friday, May 30, 2014, 08:54 PM

Nowhere was the privacy issue more sensitive than with regard to tax information. Revelations that Nixon and his advisers had used IRS data sensationalized the White House’s war against its “enemies.” John Caulfield’s testimony to the Ervin Committee in 1973, and Nixon’s well-known searches for a politically pliable IRS Commissioner, made prophets of the Nixon Administration’s critics. 
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- Highlight on Page 590 | Loc. 13135-39  | Added on Friday, May 30, 2014, 08:55 PM

Congress apparently was not content to leave compliance entirely to presidential and IRS discretion. As part of the Tax Reform Act of 1976, it provided that presidential requests for information must specify the reason for any request and that the President must submit a quarterly report to the Joint Congressional Committee on Taxation, describing the returns requested and the reasons for seeking them. Two years later, Congress passed the Financial Privacy Act of 1978, a law designed to bar government agencies from gaining bank records without knowledge of the person under investigation, except in rare circumstances. 
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- Highlight on Page 591 | Loc. 13161-63  | Added on Friday, May 30, 2014, 08:59 PM

That enterprise, combined with the Watergate environment, fostered substantial additions to the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) of 1966, the landmark law that provided an opportunity to scrutinize behind-the-scenes activity in the executive branch (if not the legislative). 
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- Highlight on Page 591 | Loc. 13169-72  | Added on Friday, May 30, 2014, 09:01 PM

When the Supreme Court ruled in 1973 that the original law did not give courts the right to review bureaucratic decisions, the Watergate context inspired a congressional movement to revise the law. The House passed new provisions in March 1974, followed by Senate action in May. A conference version finally emerged in November. 
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The Wars of Watergate: The Last Crisis of Richard Nixon (Stanley I. Kutler)
- Highlight on Page 592 | Loc. 13194-96  | Added on Friday, May 30, 2014, 09:05 PM

The PRMPA specifically addressed itself to the problem of Watergate. It noted that the Archives regulations should recognize “the need to provide the public with the full truth, at the earliest reasonable date, of the abuses of governmental power popularly identified under the generic term ‘Watergate.’” 
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The Wars of Watergate: The Last Crisis of Richard Nixon (Stanley I. Kutler)
- Highlight on Page 593 | Loc. 13200-13203  | Added on Friday, May 30, 2014, 09:05 PM

Furthermore, the Justices noted that “the expectation of the confidentiality of executive communications … has always been limited and subject to erosion” after a president left office. Nixon must yield, the Court concluded, to the legitimate and desirable congressional purpose of “preserving the materials and maintaining access to them for lawful governmental and historical purposes.” 
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The Wars of Watergate: The Last Crisis of Richard Nixon (Stanley I. Kutler)
- Highlight on Page 593 | Loc. 13203-4  | Added on Friday, May 30, 2014, 09:06 PM

In a concurring opinion, Justice John Paul Stevens argued that Nixon’s behavior properly placed him in a different class from all other presidents; that behavior, he said, justified the 1974 law that “implicitly condemns [Nixon] as an unreliable custodian of his papers.” 
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The Wars of Watergate: The Last Crisis of Richard Nixon (Stanley I. Kutler)
- Highlight on Page 593 | Loc. 13210-13  | Added on Friday, May 30, 2014, 09:06 PM

Following the mandate of the 1974 law regarding Watergate, the National Archives processed more than two million Watergate documents. By 1986, the Archives had, pursuant to the PRMPA, promulgated five sets of regulations governing the use of the documents, each challenged by Nixon or his aides, or by Congress, or by the courts. 
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The Wars of Watergate: The Last Crisis of Richard Nixon (Stanley I. Kutler)
- Highlight on Page 593 | Loc. 13220-22  | Added on Friday, May 30, 2014, 09:08 PM

Just prior to leaving office, however, Reagan revealed his self-concern by issuing an executive order that ignored Silberman’s ruling and passed executive privilege on to former presidents. 
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The Wars of Watergate: The Last Crisis of Richard Nixon (Stanley I. Kutler)
- Highlight on Page 594 | Loc. 13222-26  | Added on Friday, May 30, 2014, 09:08 PM

Despite the controversy over executive privilege, the National Archives opened the Nixon Papers in 1987, first with assorted materials pertaining to policy matters, and then with successive releases of the Watergate “Special Files.” The 1974 law had provided that the Archives do so “at the earliest reasonable date.” By 1978, the archivists had complied with that dictate, but Nixon’s resistance prevented public access to these files for nearly a decade. 
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The Wars of Watergate: The Last Crisis of Richard Nixon (Stanley I. Kutler)
- Highlight on Page 594 | Loc. 13229-31  | Added on Friday, May 30, 2014, 09:09 PM

Richard Nixon always realized the stakes, knowing that the documentary and audiotaped record would shape history’s final judgments of him and his presidency. Perhaps, too, he knew the Orwellian dictum: “To control the present is to control the past. To control the past is to control the future.” 
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The Wars of Watergate: The Last Crisis of Richard Nixon (Stanley I. Kutler)
- Highlight on Page 594 | Loc. 13240-45  | Added on Friday, May 30, 2014, 09:11 PM

The Budget and Impoundment Act of 1974 represented an attempt of Congress to assert its rightful powers, and at the same time to respond to perceived excesses of the Nixon Administration. The law reflected in equal measures the Democrats’ concern that Nixon had excessively impounded appropriated funds, especially as an instrument of his own policy preferences, and the concerns of Republicans to reform the budget process in order to get spending under control, and so lessen the need for impoundment. The act established budget committees in both houses, a Congressional Budget Office with experts to analyze the budget, and authority to enact a budget resolution to guide, yet not bind, the appropriations process. 
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The Wars of Watergate: The Last Crisis of Richard Nixon (Stanley I. Kutler)
- Highlight on Page 596 | Loc. 13278-82  | Added on Friday, May 30, 2014, 09:16 PM

“We won the war in Vietnam, but lost the peace. All that we had achieved in twelve years of fighting was thrown away in a spasm of congressional irresponsibility,” the former President wrote, as he linked Watergate and the collapse of South Vietnam. “As a matter of fact, the Congress lost it,” he said in a television interview, implying that Congress proved to be irresponsible in using the power newly gained at executive expense. On occasion, too, Nixon turned the argument around, blaming his preoccupation with the war for the negligence that allowed Watergate to happen. 
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The Wars of Watergate: The Last Crisis of Richard Nixon (Stanley I. Kutler)
- Highlight on Page 596 | Loc. 13283-88  | Added on Friday, May 30, 2014, 09:17 PM

For Henry Kissinger, the historical stakes were equally great, for as a result of Watergate, he said, “I, a foreign-born American, wound up in the extraordinary position of holding together our foreign policy and reassuring our public.” Even some Kissinger critics acknowledged that he was “nearly the sole figure who legitimized or redeemed the government.” But Kissinger offered his own maze of contradictions, as he admitted that Nixon resented his Nobel Prize and the adulation of the media for his role in the peace process. “Had Watergate not soon overwhelmed [Nixon], I doubt whether I could have maintained my position in his Administration,” Kissinger wrote, taking a position opposite to his usual disdain toward Watergate. 
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The Wars of Watergate: The Last Crisis of Richard Nixon (Stanley I. Kutler)
- Highlight on Page 597 | Loc. 13304-6  | Added on Friday, May 30, 2014, 09:20 PM

The Nixon-Kissinger search for a scapegoat in the loss of Vietnam had a sinister resemblance to the Nazi revisionism that blamed Germany’s defeat in 1918 on a “stab in the back” delivered by domestic subversives. 

July

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Building Wireless Sensor Networks: with ZigBee, XBee, Arduino, and Processing (Robert Faludi)
- Bookmark Loc. 1658  | Added on Tuesday, July 22, 2014, 12:04 AM


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Building Wireless Sensor Networks: with ZigBee, XBee, Arduino, and Processing (Robert Faludi)
- Highlight Loc. 1960-63  | Added on Wednesday, July 23, 2014, 10:45 AM

ATIC Configures the digital I/O pins to monitor for changes in state, using a binary value to set for each pin. The pin(s) would also need to be configured as digital inputs. When change-detection is enabled, a sample is sent immediately any time a pin shifts from low to high or vice versa. This is useful if you are monitoring a switch, and care about triggering a transmission only when a button is pressed or released. 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 315-17  | Added on Thursday, July 31, 2014, 10:04 AM

“ There is quite a deal of hysteria in the country about German spies. If you will kindly box up and send me from one to a dozen I will pay you very handsomely for your trouble. We are looking for them constantly, but it is a little difficult to shoot them until they have been found.” 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 376-80  | Added on Thursday, July 31, 2014, 10:10 AM

As the Senate’s alarm at the Red threat increased, the fighting spirit mustered for the world war festered. Nine million American workers in war industries were being demobilized. They found new jobs scarce. The cost of living had nearly doubled since the start of the war. As four million American soldiers started coming home, four million American workers went out on strike. The United States never had seen such confrontations between workers and bosses. The forces of law and order felt the Reds were behind it all. 

August

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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 464-76  | Added on Sunday, August 03, 2014, 02:01 PM

The president appeared as a prophet of doom. Wheezing, coughing, seeing double, blinded by headaches, Wilson delivered an apocalyptic vision to the American people. He foresaw the nation and the world under the never-ending threat of war. He spoke of the Russian Revolution as if it were a gigantic cloud of deadly gas, floating west across the Atlantic, bringing “the poison of disorder, the poison of revolt, the poison of chaos” to America. “Do you honestly think, my fellow-citizens, that none of that poison has got in the veins of this free people?” the president asked. “Men look you calmly in the face in America and say they are for that sort of revolution, when that sort of revolution means government by terror.” Without peace, “that poison will steadily spread, more and more rapidly until it may be that even this beloved land of ours will be distracted and distorted by it.” He warned that the United States would have to be ready to fight “in any part of the world where the threat of war is a menace.” The enemies of the United States would not rest: “You have got to watch them with secret agencies planted everywhere.” The nation would have to keep a great standing army and navy in a constant state of high alert. “And you can’t do that under free debate,” the president said. “You can’t do that under public counsel. Plans must be kept secret. Knowledge must be accumulated under a system which we have condemned, because we have called it a spying system. The more polite call it a system of intelligence.” 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 476-77  | Added on Sunday, August 03, 2014, 02:01 PM

As the president whistle-stopped westward across the Great Plains, a new American intelligence system was taking shape in Washington. 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 725-28  | Added on Sunday, August 03, 2014, 02:21 PM

“Real Americans, men who believe in law, order, liberty, toleration of others’ views on political and religious subjects, are not given to advertising themselves and their patriotism. They have too much respect for Americanism and for patriotism to disgrace these fine words as they are being daily disgraced by those using them for personal or political notoriety.” 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 2045-49  | Added on Sunday, August 03, 2014, 07:54 PM

Biddle had to find a way around that ruling. He told the president to appoint a special military commission. It would run a secret trial against the saboteurs under military law. When this decision came to the Supreme Court for a review, as it inevitably would, Biddle would argue that enemy combatants, waging a secret war against America, could be tried and punished by a military tribunal under the laws of war. The same argument would be raised in America’s twenty-first-century war on terror. 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 2423-27  | Added on Wednesday, August 06, 2014, 12:19 AM

American and British warplanes had bombed most of Berlin to rubble and the Soviets had crushed what remained. On July 16, a motorcade took Truman through the city. The ruins stank of death. Corpses rotted in the rubble and wild dogs scavenged their bones. A civilization lay in a state of collapse. “I thought of Carthage, Baalbek, Jerusalem …,” Truman wrote in his diary. “I hope for some sort of peace—but I fear that machines are ahead of morals by some centuries and when morals catch up there’ll be no reason for any of it.” 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 2631-35  | Added on Wednesday, August 06, 2014, 01:29 PM

Ten years before he came to Washington to be sworn in to the House of Representatives, while he was still in law school, Nixon had applied for a job at the FBI. He never heard back. But he would make the most of his contacts with the Bureau for the next quarter of a century. In February 1947, Father Cronin helped him make the first of those connections. He personally briefed Nixon on the FBI’s investigations into American communism and Soviet espionage, introduced him to agents who specialized in Red-hunting, and became Nixon’s back-channel liaison with the Bureau. 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 2683-85  | Added on Wednesday, August 06, 2014, 01:37 PM

“Espionage is as old as man,” Hoover began. “We have always had it and we will continue to have it until the brotherhood of man becomes a reality as well as an ideal.” 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 2680-86  | Added on Wednesday, August 06, 2014, 01:37 PM

National Security Act in the spring and summer of 1947. The bill proposed to unify the American military services under the aegis of the Pentagon; to create a secretary of defense to oversee the army, the navy, and a nuclear-armed air force; to form a new National Security Council to coordinate military, intelligence, and diplomatic powers at the White House; and to establish the first permanent peacetime American espionage service. “Espionage is as old as man,” Hoover began. “We have always had it and we will continue to have it until the brotherhood of man becomes a reality as well as an ideal.” Until then, the United States had to have a permanent and professional spy service established under law. He said no one was better qualified to run it than he himself. 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Bookmark Loc. 2686  | Added on Wednesday, August 06, 2014, 01:38 PM


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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 2702-4  | Added on Wednesday, August 06, 2014, 01:40 PM

Hoover capped his secret briefing by playing on the president’s fears of a secret police. “Luckily for us,” he said, “there is no more horrible example of what can happen through the creation of one vast central superstructure that both investigates and judges than the German Gestapo.” 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Bookmark Loc. 2706  | Added on Wednesday, August 06, 2014, 01:43 PM


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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 2706-9  | Added on Wednesday, August 06, 2014, 01:43 PM

Hoover was surpassed by a rival whose rhetoric flew higher. Allen Dulles was Wild Bill Donovan’s leading protégé, a star at Donovan’s Wall Street law firm, and the brother of John Foster Dulles, the Republican Party’s shadow secretary of state. Puffing on his pipe, he gave suave, sophisticated, and factually slippery testimony to a closed congressional hearing on the National Security Act on June 27, 1947. 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 2714-16  | Added on Wednesday, August 06, 2014, 01:45 PM

One month later, on July 26, President Truman signed the National Security Act. The FBI was given no new powers to prosecute the Cold War. The director of Central Intelligence was given many. Hoover began spying on the CIA from that day forward. He started wiretapping CIA officers suspected of Communist sympathies or homosexual tendencies. 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 2721-25  | Added on Wednesday, August 06, 2014, 01:45 PM

Hoover’s political warfare intensified month by month. “It strikes me as a waste of time to cultivate this outfit,” he wrote after offering CIA officials a tour of the FBI’s training academy. He furiously rejected an aide’s draft of a polite letter to the director of Central Intelligence: “Please cut out all of the slobbering palaver. We know they have no use for us & I don’t intend to do a Munich.” When the CIA asked the FBI what it knew about the Comintern, Hoover swatted down the request: “Waste no time on it. We have more pressing matters.” 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 2754-58  | Added on Wednesday, August 06, 2014, 06:36 PM

But now he had witnesses. The Bureau had been running a double agent inside the Party for five years. He was a middling and mild-mannered Communist functionary who delivered devastating testimony to the grand jury and at the trial of the eleven leaders. In time, his story became a classic black-and-white television show called I Led Three Lives, with an introduction instantly familiar to a generation of Americans: “This is the story, the fantastically true story, of Herbert A. Philbrick … Average citizen, high-level member of the Communist Party, counterspy for the Federal Bureau of Investigation.” 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 2782-85  | Added on Wednesday, August 06, 2014, 06:41 PM

Venona was one of America’s most secret weapons in the Cold War—so secret that neither President Truman nor the CIA knew about it. On the occasions that Hoover sent intelligence derived from Venona to his superiors, it was scrubbed, sanitized, and attributed only to “a highly sensitive source.” Hoover decreed: “In view of loose methods of CIA & some of its questionable personnel we must be most circumspect. H.” 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 2858-68  | Added on Wednesday, August 06, 2014, 06:50 PM

Almost two years passed before Hoover formally briefed the White House and the National Security Council: “For some months representatives of the FBI and of the Department of Justice have been formulating a plan of action for an emergency situation wherein it would be necessary to apprehend and detain persons who are potentially dangerous to the internal security of the country.” The detentions would begin in time of war, an emergency, a national crisis, a “threatened invasion” or a “rebellion.” Under the plan, the president would sign an emergency order suspending the writ of habeas corpus and instructing the FBI to begin the nationwide roundup. The attorney general would send the president a “master warrant” attached to the FBI’s Security Index, whose existence Hoover finally revealed to the president. “For a long period of time the FBI has been accumulating the names, identities and activities of individuals,” Hoover wrote. “The index now contains approximately twelve thousand individuals, of which approximately ninety-seven per cent are citizens of the United States.” That number eventually would double. “The plan calls for a statement of charges to be served on each detainee and a hearing be afforded the individual,” Hoover advised the White House. “The hearing procedure will not be bound by the rules of evidence.” 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 2868-70  | Added on Wednesday, August 06, 2014, 06:50 PM

Hoover made plans to fill the detention centers in a time of national emergency, and Congress secretly financed the creation of six of these camps during the 1950s. But no Cold War president seriously considered the mass incarceration of suspected subversives. It took the first president of the twenty-first century to do that. 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 2871-82  | Added on Thursday, August 07, 2014, 06:16 PM

Dewey, would be elected president in November 1948. Dewey, who had made his name as a crime-fighting prosecutor, would be the first conservative in the White House in a generation. Hoover was working behind the scenes to support Dewey, who shared Hoover’s views on the national emergency that confronted the United States. Hoover had hoped that a new president would grant him new powers, perhaps making him the attorney general while allowing him to retain command over the FBI. Truman looked powerless and politically spent as the election approached. Crossing through Indiana by train on a long whistle-stop campaign, with the election four weeks away, Truman caught a glimpse of a Newsweek magazine poll of America’s fifty most prominent political reporters. Their unanimous prediction: Dewey defeats Truman. Every poll and every pundit said the same. Hoover went to sleep on election night confident in that outcome. At 11:14 A.M. on Wednesday, November 3, 1948, the bulletin went out across the world: Truman had won the biggest upset in the history of the American presidency. A shift of only 33,000 voters in California, Illinois, and Ohio would have given Dewey victory. When Hoover heard the news, he left his desk at FBI headquarters and did not come back for two weeks. His public relations office told the press that Hoover had pneumonia. He simply disappeared. 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 2922-23  | Added on Thursday, August 07, 2014, 06:30 PM

Coplon was found guilty, but the verdict would not stand. Judge Learned Hand, who heard Coplon’s appeal, overturned her twenty-five-year sentence. He publicly rebuked Hoover—a rare event in American jurisprudence. 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 2943-45  | Added on Thursday, August 07, 2014, 06:32 PM

On September 20, the CIA issued a report saying the Soviets probably would not produce an atomic weapon for four more years. Three days later, President Truman announced to the world that Stalin had the bomb. American planes had picked up the radioactive fallout from the secret Soviet test. The balance of terror shifted. 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 2959-64  | Added on Thursday, August 07, 2014, 06:35 PM

Hoover discovered, to his intense chagrin, that the FBI had overlooked its own records on Klaus Fuchs for four years. They were English translations of captured German army documents, and they had been in the FBI’s possession since shortly after the end of World War II, when Fuchs was still spying for the Soviets in the United States. They revealed that Fuchs was well-known as a “communist of relatively important character.” The fault lay with a brilliant but erratic FBI counterintelligence supervisor named William K. Harvey. Hoover had fired him for alcoholism in 1947; he had then joined the CIA. The evidence went unseen until after Fuchs confessed. 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 2984-92  | Added on Thursday, August 07, 2014, 06:38 PM

The secret National Security Agency history picks up the story. “The FBI began piecing together information” on why Venona had gone dark. The Bureau “was aghast to learn in 1950 that Weisband was employed at Arlington Hall” as a section chief working on the Soviet cables. He was arrested, but he never talked. He served a year in prison for contempt of court after he refused to testify before a federal grand jury. He worked in and around Washington selling cars and tending apartments for sixteen years before he died. The penetration paralyzed the progress of Venona. For the next three decades, the United States could not read the Soviets’ most secret messages. It could only look backwards, trying to decipher old cables from the 1940s. The FBI never found out what Weisband told the Soviets. The National Security Agency history concludes: “His case instilled a certain paranoia within the profession.” That paranoia afflicted the FBI. Hoover insisted that the FBI would create and control its own system for secret communications. 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 3002-5  | Added on Thursday, August 07, 2014, 06:39 PM

Philby moved freely through the corridors of the Pentagon, an institution still in a state of upheaval six months after the suicide of Secretary of Defense James Forrestal, who had suffered a psychotic breakdown and jumped from his high window at the Bethesda Naval Hospital. Forrestal had been Hoover’s strongest ally in the government of the United States. His death contributed to Hoover’s deepening despair over American intelligence and its ability to meet the growing Soviet threat. 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 3006-7  | Added on Thursday, August 07, 2014, 06:41 PM

While Philby started ransacking American secrets, Hoover was fighting a rearguard action against the future director of Central Intelligence, Allen Dulles. 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 3007-11  | Added on Friday, August 08, 2014, 09:30 AM

Still a lawyer in private practice, Dulles had been commissioned by the Pentagon to conduct a top-secret study of the shoddy state of American spying. He intended to use his report to the president as a fulcrum to elevate himself to the command of the CIA. Dulles had not consulted Hoover or the FBI during his yearlong investigation, a deliberate snub. When Hoover wrangled a draft copy of the report from the Pentagon, he saw that Dulles did not recognize Hoover’s presidentially mandated authority in matters of national security. “It is outrageous that FBI should be excluded,” Hoover wrote. Dulles did not respond. 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 3020-24  | Added on Friday, August 08, 2014, 09:31 AM

On July 24, 1950, just a month after the Korean War began, Hoover won a formal statement from President Truman expanding the FBI’s authority to investigate “espionage, sabotage, subversive activities and related matters” affecting American national security, a mandate even broader than FDR’s wartime directives to the FBI. Hoover sought to justify his enhanced powers with a truly frightening top secret report to the president on August 24. 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 3048-50  | Added on Friday, August 08, 2014, 09:35 AM

On September 23, Congress passed the Internal Security Act of 1950. It contained provisions Hoover had been demanding for a decade. The laws defining espionage and sabotage were expanded and strengthened. Subversive citizens now were subject to political imprisonment. 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 3054-59  | Added on Friday, August 08, 2014, 09:36 AM

The year 1950 brought many bleak days for President Truman. None was darker than November 1. In the morning, the new director of Central Intelligence, General Walter Bedell Smith, delivered a bulletin: Communist Chinese soldiers had entered the Korean War. The CIA’s reporting gravely underestimated the size of the attack. Three hundred thousand Chinese soldiers struck in a human avalanche that killed thousands upon thousands of American soldiers. They came close to driving the Americans from the mountains into the sea. Behind them stood the new dictator of China, Chairman Mao Tse-Tung. 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 3059-64  | Added on Friday, August 08, 2014, 09:38 AM

In the afternoon, a freakish heat wave engulfed Washington; the mercury hit eighty-five degrees. Truman lay down for a nap at Blair House, across the street from the White House; the executive mansion was in a state of collapse and undergoing renovation. On the sidewalk, at the Blair House door, stood two Puerto Rican nationalists, one armed with a German Luger, the other with a German Walther, carrying sixty-nine rounds of ammunition between them. They tried to shoot their way into Blair House and kill the president in the name of Puerto Rican independence. One of them died, as did a Secret Service agent. The second assassin was arrested, convicted, and sentenced to death. Truman commuted the sentence to life. 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 3069-71  | Added on Friday, August 08, 2014, 09:40 AM

“It looks like World War III is here,” Truman wrote in his diary on December 9. “I hope not—but we must meet whatever comes—and we will.” 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 3086-93  | Added on Friday, August 08, 2014, 09:42 AM

His flight to Moscow brought the chief of British foreign intelligence, Sir Percy Sillitoe, to Washington. Sir Percy carried an attaché case bulging with dossiers on Philby, Maclean, and Burgess, and he shared the contents with Hoover and the FBI. The three Britons were friends of twenty years’ standing, going back to their days at Trinity College, Cambridge. In the 1930s, all three had been Communists or socialists. The dossiers held more open secrets: Burgess was famous for his promiscuous homosexuality, Maclean was a closet case, and Philby had married an Austrian Communist and Soviet agent. All three were alcoholics. All this was known by their superiors, yet they were protected and promoted. Maclean and Burgess were in Moscow now; Philby had been recalled to London. Hoover argued that Philby clearly was a Soviet agent, and that he had enabled Moscow to penetrate the CIA and the Pentagon at the highest levels. Sir Percy politely disagreed, unwilling to accept that a man of Philby’s rank and breeding could be a traitor. 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 3096-98  | Added on Friday, August 08, 2014, 09:43 AM

Communists and homosexuals both had clandestine and compartmented lives. They inhabited secret underground communities. They used coded language. Hoover believed, as did his peers, that both were uniquely susceptible to sexual entrapment and blackmail by foreign intelligence services. 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 3109-13  | Added on Friday, August 08, 2014, 09:47 AM

The Responsibilities Program began feeding governors, mayors, and other state and local leaders ammunition to attack subversives at home. The local special agent in charge of FBI regional offices served as the go-between for Hoover and the nation’s political officials. For the next four years, the Responsibilities Program served as a tool for purging the faculties of state universities, colleges, and public schools of hundreds of suspect leftists, until its secrecy was breached by a publicity-hunting state education commissioner. 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 3115-18  | Added on Friday, August 08, 2014, 09:48 AM

Eisenhower’s chief of staff throughout World War II. General Smith had earned a reputation as Ike’s hatchet man, the sharp teeth behind Ike’s warm grin. He had served as Truman’s ambassador to the Soviet Union; he had gone eyeball-to-eyeball with Stalin. He was a man of great force and short temper, intolerant of imperfection. He and Edgar Hoover hit it off. They had a lot in common. 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 3155-58  | Added on Friday, August 08, 2014, 09:53 AM

The election of Eisenhower and Nixon in November 1952, along with a Republican sweep of the House and the Senate, ended two decades of Democratic dominance in Washington—the era that Senator Joseph McCarthy called “twenty years of treason.” At the start of those twenty years, Hoover had led a small, weak organization with 353 special agents and a budget well under $3 million. He now led an anti-Communist army of 6,451 men with 8,206 support staff and $90 million to spend. 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 3166-69  | Added on Friday, August 08, 2014, 09:56 AM

As Hoover reported to the newly inaugurated president on January 26, 1953, FBI agents now worked “day-to-day and person-to-person” at the White House, the Pentagon, the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the National Security Agency, the CIA, the State Department, Congress, six American embassies, army intelligence bases in Germany and Austria, and a dozen more centers of America’s global power. 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 3173-75  | Added on Friday, August 08, 2014, 09:57 AM

American anticommunism came to full power under Eisenhower. Hoover’s men investigated nominees for posts ranging from foreign ambassador to congressional aide. They oversaw internal security purges throughout the government, destroying lives and careers over suspicions of disloyalty or homosexuality. 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 3193-96  | Added on Friday, August 08, 2014, 08:36 PM

The White House read Hoover’s reports on the Soviets as the most authoritative in the government. Attorney General Brownell said: “ The FBI reported to me one of the results of their counterintelligence work against the communist conspiracy. They had learned that Stalin was ill and Malenkov was acting for him and would succeed him if Stalin died. Stalin did die on March 3, 1953, and it is now history that Malenkov succeeded him.” 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 3197-3200  | Added on Friday, August 08, 2014, 08:36 PM

By contrast, the United States had no ambassador in Moscow when Stalin died, and the CIA had no spies inside the Soviet Union. The first CIA officer dispatched to Moscow was seduced by his Russian housekeeper—she was a KGB colonel —photographed in the physical act of love, blackmailed, and fired by the Agency for his indiscretions in 1953. His replacement was caught in the act of espionage, arrested, and deported shortly after he arrived. 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 3204-6  | Added on Friday, August 08, 2014, 08:37 PM

A cop confronting an evildoer wants to string him up. A spy wants to string him along. Waiting and watching required a terrible patience. Hoover had it. After twenty years of attack and a decade of counterattack, the FBI was starting to understand the scope of the KGB’s operations in America. 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 3241-43  | Added on Friday, August 08, 2014, 08:43 PM

Like his colleagues in Congress, the senator regularly paid fealty to Hoover in public and in private. “No one need erect a monument to you,” McCarthy wrote to the director in one typical tribute. “You have built your own monument in the form of the FBI—for the FBI is J. Edgar Hoover and I think we can rest assured that it always will be.” 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 3248-49  | Added on Saturday, August 09, 2014, 12:46 AM

On June 19, 1953, came the execution day. Even Hoover had doubts about the political wisdom of putting Ethel Rosenberg to death. But the FBI had made the case. 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 3254-58  | Added on Saturday, August 09, 2014, 12:47 AM

Hoover understood McCarthy. He told a newspaper reporter: “McCarthy is a former Marine. He was an amateur boxer. He’s Irish. Combine these, and you’re going to have a vigorous individual who’s not going to be pushed around.… I never knew Senator McCarthy before he came to the Senate. I’ve come to know him well, officially and personally. I view him as a friend, and I believe he so views me. Certainly, he is a controversial man. He is earnest and honest. He has enemies. Whenever you attack subversives of any kind, Communists, Fascists, even the Ku Klux Klan, you are going to be the victim of the most extremely vicious criticism that can be made. I know.” 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 3270-76  | Added on Saturday, August 09, 2014, 12:49 AM

Many of McCarthy’s charges were drawn directly from the FBI’s raw and uncorroborated reporting, including third-hand hearsay. Wary about the wholesale disclosure of the FBI files, Hoover sent word to the senator to slow down. Instead, McCarthy reloaded and took fresh aim. On October 12, 1953, the senator began a week of closed-door hearings into suspicions of Soviet espionage at the Army Signal Corps center at Fort Monmouth, New Jersey, where Julius Rosenberg had worked. Rosenberg had been an electrical engineer at the Signal Corps when the FBI first learned that he was a secret Communist. Seven engineers who worked on Signal Corps radars and radios were suspected members of the atomic spy ring—and four of them were still at large the day the Rosenbergs died. 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 3299-3303  | Added on Saturday, August 09, 2014, 12:53 AM

On June 9, 1954, McCarthy fell. The subject of the day was his futile search for spies at Fort Monmouth. McCarthy’s counsel, Roy Cohn, confronted the army’s lawyer at the hearing, Joe Welch. Welch was making mincemeat of him. Cohn looked like a toad in the talons of an eagle. McCarthy, burned out and hungover, came to Cohn’s defense. He had cut a deal with Welch: if the army did not ask how Cohn had avoided military service in World War II and Korea, a question without a good answer, McCarthy would not bring up the issue of Fred Fisher. Welch had kept his word. McCarthy now broke it. 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 3311-13  | Added on Saturday, August 09, 2014, 12:54 AM

McCarthy, censured by the Senate, descended into self-destruction. He drank himself to death three years later. Hoover went to his funeral. So did the young Democrat who had served as the committee’s minority counsel, Robert F. Kennedy. It was a fitting moment for the two to meet. 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 3377-78  | Added on Saturday, August 09, 2014, 12:01 PM

The threat of a nuclear attack haunted Eisenhower every day. He asked Hoover what the FBI was doing to guard against the danger. 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 3377-80  | Added on Saturday, August 09, 2014, 12:02 PM

The threat of a nuclear attack haunted Eisenhower every day. He asked Hoover what the FBI was doing to guard against the danger. “Sometimes it is necessary to make a surreptitious entry where on occasion we have photographed secret communist records,” Hoover told the president. Everyone in the room understood that “surreptitious entry” was against the law. 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 3377-83  | Added on Saturday, August 09, 2014, 12:02 PM

The threat of a nuclear attack haunted Eisenhower every day. He asked Hoover what the FBI was doing to guard against the danger. “Sometimes it is necessary to make a surreptitious entry where on occasion we have photographed secret communist records,” Hoover told the president. Everyone in the room understood that “surreptitious entry” was against the law. Hoover explained that the FBI’s reports based on illegally gathered intelligence would be sanitized to guard their secrecy, and to protect the president and the attorney general. The reports would be scrubbed of any references to break-ins and bugs; the intelligence would be attributed to “confidential sources.” The president commended Hoover. The minutes of the meeting record no more questions about the FBI’s methods. 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 3388-91  | Added on Saturday, August 09, 2014, 12:03 PM

These men tacitly understood the code of silence Hoover required. Eisenhower had run the D-day invasion, the biggest secret operation of World War II. Nixon had been steeped in raw FBI reports from his first days in Washington. Brownell knew more about secret intelligence than any of his predecessors: he had chaired the committee that created the electronic-eavesdropping, code-making, and code-breaking behemoth of the National Security Agency in 1952. 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 3398-3401  | Added on Saturday, August 09, 2014, 12:05 PM

The FBI’s budget had doubled since the end of World War II. The Intelligence Division was now the most powerful force within the Bureau, commanding the most money, the most manpower, and the most attention from the director. The division conducted uncounted break-ins and buggings in the Eisenhower years; the routine destruction of FBI files ensured that no accurate count existed. 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 3408-11  | Added on Saturday, August 09, 2014, 12:06 PM

“The clothing that we wore fit the scene,” he said. “We were dressed in old clothes. Some of the guys let their hair grow a little bit. Didn’t shave all the time. We fit in with the neighborhoods that we were following these people through … We knew what they were doing before some of them knew what they were doing. The placing of informants and the related techniques gave us an inside view of the whole Communist Party underground apparatus.” 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 3430-35  | Added on Saturday, August 09, 2014, 12:08 PM

In Cleveland, the eighth-largest city in America in the mid-1950s, the FBI found six leading Communist figures to arrest and prosecute under the Smith Act, which had effectively outlawed membership in the Communist Party. All were found guilty. But each of those convictions was overturned. The courts were starting to question the legal basis for the FBI’s national security investigations. The Supreme Court, in a series of decisions starting in 1955 and 1956, voided dozens of Smith Act convictions, undercut the FBI’s use of paid informers as witnesses against the Communist Party, and upheld the right of defense lawyers to see evidence gathered through FBI surveillance. Each decision was a blow to Hoover. 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 3450-54  | Added on Saturday, August 09, 2014, 12:12 PM

On May 18, 1956, the new plan of attack began taking shape, the brainchild of the FBI Intelligence Division chief Al Belmont and his trusted aide, William C. Sullivan. They called the plan COINTELPRO, short for counterintelligence program. Counterintelligence, formally defined, is the work of preventing spies from stealing your secrets. COINTELPRO was more than that. Hoover and his men aimed to subvert America’s subversives. Their stratagems were sharpened at the suggestion of agents in the field, toughened by Sullivan, and ultimately approved by Hoover. 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 3457-59  | Added on Saturday, August 09, 2014, 12:12 PM

The idea was to instill hate, fear, doubt, and self-destruction within the American Left. The FBI used Communist techniques of propaganda and subversion. The goal was to destroy the public lives and private reputations of the members of the Communist Party and everyone connected with them. 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 3475-79  | Added on Saturday, August 09, 2014, 12:15 PM

Hoover’s talented political hatchet man and trusted deputy, Cartha “Deke” DeLoach, painted a matching portrait of Sullivan: “Brash, brilliant, brimming over with self-esteem, something of a bantam rooster, Sullivan had more ambition than was good for a man, combined with a slight deficiency in principle. For years COINTELPRO was his special domain. He ruled it with skill and daring most of the time, but occasionally with reckless abandon.” 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 3481-84  | Added on Saturday, August 09, 2014, 12:15 PM

Sullivan’s quicksilver talents for palace intrigue and his political cunning were primal forces that shaped the Bureau, the national security of the United States, and the American presidency for two decades. He came within a hair’s breadth of succeeding Hoover after the director’s death—a very close call made by President Nixon, whose downfall Sullivan then secretly helped ensure. At the end of his era, Sullivan talked in a closed Senate chamber about the thinking that drove the FBI and COINTELPRO onward. 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 3485-89  | Added on Saturday, August 09, 2014, 12:16 PM

“This is a rough, tough, dirty business, and dangerous. It was dangerous at times. No holds were barred,” Sullivan said. And the law was not at issue: “Never once did I hear anybody, including myself, raise the question: ‘Is this course of action which we have agreed upon lawful? Is it legal? Is it ethical or moral?’ We never gave any thought to this realm of reasoning, because we were just naturally pragmatists. The one thing we were concerned about was this: will this course of action work, will it get us what we want?” 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 3497  | Added on Saturday, August 09, 2014, 12:16 PM

Hoover spent his career convinced that communism was behind the civil rights movement in the United States from the start. 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 3516-18  | Added on Saturday, August 09, 2014, 12:18 PM

Three years before, in Brown v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court had cracked the façade of the American way of life by ordering the integration of public schools. Hoover advised Eisenhower that Communists at home and abroad saw the Brown decision as a victory, and that they aimed to “exploit the enforcement of desegregation in every way.” 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 3686-88  | Added on Thursday, August 14, 2014, 01:02 PM

On July 6, he had an audience with Chairman Mao Tse-tung. Was the United States planning to go to war in Southeast Asia? Mao asked. If so, China intended to fight, as it had during the Korean War. “There may be many Koreas in Asia,” Mao predicted. 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 3691-96  | Added on Thursday, August 14, 2014, 01:03 PM

In January and February 1959, at the Party’s Moscow convention, Morris Childs met Communist leaders from around the world and intelligence officers who oversaw espionage against the United States. Though the trips exhausted him, leaving him a physically broken man, he went abroad two or three times a year over the course of the next two decades. He undertook fifty-two international missions, befriending the world’s most powerful Communists. He controlled the income of the American Communist Party’s treasury and contributed the insights for its foreign policy. His work was undetected by the KGB and kept secret from all but the most powerful American leaders. 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 3698-3702  | Added on Thursday, August 14, 2014, 01:04 PM

Hoover briefed the cabinet about the Solo mission on November 6, 1958. For the next two years, he sent summaries of his reporting directly to the president, the vice president, the secretary of state, and the director of Central Intelligence. He took pleasure in concealing the source of his intelligence from Allen Dulles and the CIA: “I flatly refuse to disclose the disclosure of the informant irrespective of any ‘fits’ Allen Dulles or anyone else throws. H.” 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 3707-11  | Added on Thursday, August 14, 2014, 01:07 PM

Hoover said Moscow had decided that “the main task of the Communist Party, USA, is to fight for Negro equality and integration.” The FBI noted that the Kremlin had asked Solo to send a copy of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s first book, the newly published Stride Toward Freedom, written with the help of Stanley Levison, King’s close adviser and a former member of the Communist underground. This evidence of ties between international communism and the American civil rights movement was electrifying to Hoover. The idea that they were connected through covert operations was an elemental part of his thinking and his conduct for the rest of his life. 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 3711-15  | Added on Thursday, August 14, 2014, 01:07 PM

Hoover told the White House that Solo had met with Anibal Escalante, a political leader of the newly victorious revolution in Cuba, a confidant to Fidel Castro, and the most highly regarded Cuban Communist in Moscow. Escalante said that the Cubans knew the United States was planning a paramilitary attack to overthrow Castro. This reporting gave Eisenhower pause as he weighed the CIA’s proposal to invade the island with a force of anti-Castro Cubans undergoing training in Guatemala. He never approved the plan. 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 3715-21  | Added on Thursday, August 14, 2014, 01:07 PM

Hoover reported directly to Nixon as the vice president prepared to go to Moscow in July 1959, where he would engage Khrushchev in a public discussion on the political and cultural merits of communism and capitalism. Solo had met with the top Communist Party officials responsible for American affairs. Hoover distilled their thinking about the leaders of the United States and the qualifications of the leading candidates in the 1960 presidential election. Moscow liked Ike: he understood the meaning of war and he was willing to risk the chances of peace. The Democrats were less appealing: Senator John F. Kennedy was judged as “inexperienced” and Senator Lyndon B. Johnson was “a reactionary.” As for Nixon himself, the Communists thought he would be a capable president, though he was “cunning” and “ambitious.” 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 3729-31  | Added on Thursday, August 14, 2014, 01:09 PM

The counsel of the world’s top Communist—“Don’t trust anybody”—sounded like wisdom to Hoover as he prepared for the end of the Eisenhower years and the election of the next president of the United States. 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 3745-52  | Added on Thursday, August 14, 2014, 01:14 PM

Hoover had wanted nothing to do with the Mafia, whose existence as a force in American economic and political life was by now an open secret. In 1959, more than four hundred FBI agents based in New York covered the Communist threat; only four covered the mob. Hoover had argued that crimes like racketeering and extortion were matters for state and local law enforcement. He thought that investigating the Mob would create the risk that agents would be bribed and bought off, recalled the FBI’s Graham Desvernine: “ The ensuing problems and publicity—that would overcome any of the benefits.” Hoover had shied from infiltrating the Ku Klux Klan for fear his agents would be seen as aiding and abetting cross-burning racists. He balked at undercover work against the Mafia on the chance his men would be corrupted. Different reasons, same rationale: Don’t embarrass the Bureau. 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 3765-71  | Added on Thursday, August 14, 2014, 01:18 PM

On July 13, 1960, the day that JFK won the presidential nomination at the Democratic National Convention, the FBI produced a biographical sketch on the candidate for Hoover. It reported that the senator and Frank Sinatra had socialized in New York, Las Vegas, and Palm Springs during the campaign. The FBI had a long-standing file on Sinatra. The Bureau surmised that the singer was trying to use his influence with the Kennedy clan on behalf of mobsters. Sinatra’s FBI file included his association with Sam Giancana, who was later overheard on an FBI bug boasting that he had influence with the Kennedys. The FBI would soon learn that Sinatra had introduced JFK and Giancana to a woman of easy virtue named Judith Campbell, who had sexually serviced the senator during the Democratic convention and maintained intimate relations with both men. 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 3814-19  | Added on Thursday, August 14, 2014, 01:29 PM

On October 18, 1960, Hoover wrote a terse memorandum to Richard Bissell, the CIA’s covert operations chief, with copies to the top men at Justice, State, the Pentagon, and the FBI’s chain of command. It concerned Sam Giancana and Fidel Castro. Hoover had read FBI reports that Giancana, while enjoying a meal at La Scala, the best Italian restaurant in New York, had boasted that “Castro was to be done away with very shortly”—by November. The mobster said he had met with the hired assassin three times in Miami. The instrument of death was to be a poison pill. And, as Hoover soon discovered, the CIA was behind the plot. 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 3822-25  | Added on Thursday, August 14, 2014, 01:30 PM

The FBI learned that Giancana was one among ten members of “the commission,” which oversaw the work of Mafia families in the United States and the Caribbean. Mafia dons aimed to revive Mob-owned casinos in Havana from which they had been expelled by Castro, who had come to power in Cuba on January 1, 1959, by overthrowing the dictator Fulgencio Batista. Failing that, they would move their gambling and graft operations to the Dominican Republic. 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 3826-29  | Added on Thursday, August 14, 2014, 01:31 PM

The Mob liked Generalissimo Rafael Trujillo, an American ally who had held power in the Dominican Republic since 1930. He ruled by fear and fraud. His wealth, wrung from the soil of the island and the sweat of his subjects, was measured in hundreds of millions of dollars. His crimes included murder and kidnapping on American soil, the bribery and corruption of members of the United States Senate and House, and the subversion of rival Latin American leaders. 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 3835-38  | Added on Thursday, August 14, 2014, 01:33 PM

Hoover learned through secret intelligence that some of his strongest allies in the Senate had been pocketing bribes from Batista and Trujillo. Hoover had received a report from Angleton, based on a tip from the Cuban consul general in New York, that “Senator Homer E. Capehart has received the sum of $20,000 as a ‘fee’ to effect the entrance and asylum in the United States of Batista.” Capehart, an Indiana Republican, had been one of Hoover’s most vocal supporters in the war on communism in the Senate since 1945. 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 3846-48  | Added on Thursday, August 14, 2014, 01:33 PM

Hoover never pursued Eastland on charges of corruption; it would have been awkward in the extreme to investigate his favorite senator, the Democratic chairman of the Judiciary Committee and its Internal Security Subcommittee. But Hoover had told President Eisenhower that other members of Congress were in Trujillo’s pocket. 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 3928-32  | Added on Thursday, August 14, 2014, 01:49 PM

On May 13, 1960, the president summoned Farland and two of his State Department superiors to the White House. The president, according to notes taken by his military aide, told Farland that “he was being bombarded by people who are opposed to Castro and Trujillo”—and that “he would like to see them both sawed off.” President Eisenhower did not get the job done. The Kennedy administration inherited the conspiracies to commit murder in the Caribbean. 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 3934-36  | Added on Thursday, August 14, 2014, 06:58 PM

HE WAR BETWEEN J. Edgar Hoover and Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy was a scorched-earth campaign that burned throughout the 1960s. It threatened to consume the FBI, the Justice Department, and the White House. 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 3944-46  | Added on Thursday, August 14, 2014, 06:59 PM

He had not asked to be the attorney general, nor was he his brother’s first choice. But there was logic to it. JFK was the third president in a row to appoint his campaign manager as attorney general; the office had become a political post, requiring loyalty above all. 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 3958-61  | Added on Thursday, August 14, 2014, 07:03 PM

The FBI wiretapped the congressional office of House Agriculture Committee chairman Harold Cooley, the home of the committee’s clerk, the Dominican Republic’s embassy and consulates, and the law offices of Trujillo’s lobbyists. As far as can be determined by existing records, it was the first time since the Harding administration that an attorney general had ordered a member of Congress wiretapped. 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 4059-62  | Added on Monday, August 18, 2014, 10:21 AM

On January 8, 1962, Hoover advised the attorney general in writing that Levison was a secret agent of international communism. RFK remembered the moment he learned about Levison: “When I heard that he was tied up, perhaps, with some Communists, I asked the FBI to make an intensive investigation of him.” Kennedy and Hoover had a telephone conversation the next day about the techniques of wiretapping and bugging. The substance of their conversation remains classified fifty years later. 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 4069-73  | Added on Monday, August 18, 2014, 10:22 AM

The FBI had two hundred agents keeping an eye on the United Nations. Telephone taps on UN offices were easy; planting bugs in Soviet and Soviet-bloc offices was hard; black-bag jobs inside the UN were risky and rare. But the Bureau did all three, while keeping a weather eye out for disaffected diplomats who might defect to the United States. The FBI had the UN wired: When the Soviet deputy premier Anastas Mikoyan met with the Soviet delegation at the UN in the wake of the Cuban missile crisis later that year, Hoover sent President Kennedy real-time reports on the closed-door conversations. 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Bookmark Loc. 4087  | Added on Monday, August 18, 2014, 10:26 AM


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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 4087-89  | Added on Monday, August 18, 2014, 10:26 AM

Hoover never fully explained to the Kennedys why he maintained that Levison was a Communist agent. Protecting Solo was more important, the director wrote to his aides: “Under no circumstances should our informant be endangered.” 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 4094-96  | Added on Monday, August 18, 2014, 10:26 AM

The evidence suggests that Hoover let the president know what he knew about the interplay among the CIA, the attorney general, the continuing plots to kill Castro, the participation of the Mafia boss Sam Giancana, and the president’s dalliance with Giancana’s mistress, Judith Campbell. 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 4098-4102  | Added on Monday, August 18, 2014, 10:27 AM

On May 9, Hoover recorded, with evident satisfaction, his face-to-face meeting on the Castro assassination plots with Robert Kennedy. They discussed “the ‘gutter gossip’ ” surrounding the CIA and Giancana. “I expressed astonishment at … the horrible judgment in using a man of Giancana’s background,” Hoover wrote. RFK scribbled a note to his FBI liaison: “Courtney I hope this will be followed up vigorously.” 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 4102-6  | Added on Monday, August 18, 2014, 10:28 AM

Hoover followed up. It was evident to him that the mobster’s girlfriend had been having sex with the president (as were, by the FBI’s count, five other women not his wife). Hoover also knew that Robert Kennedy was overseeing new plots to eliminate Castro. Hoover’s knowledge of JFK’s private conduct and RFK’s political conspiracies were potentially lethal political weapons. He brandished them now. He let the president and the attorney general know that he knew they had committed mortal sins. 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 4146-49  | Added on Monday, August 18, 2014, 10:34 AM

The FBI relentlessly recorded Martin Luther King planning the August 1963 March on Washington, which brought 250,000 demonstrators to the capital in the largest public protest in American history. And in the months before the march, RFK and his aides personally warned King against his associations with Communists. So did the president of the United States. King became more circumspect about his relationship with Levison, but he kept him close. 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 4155-58  | Added on Monday, August 18, 2014, 01:03 PM

Sullivan kowtowed, the day after the “I Have a Dream” oration: “In the light of King’s powerful demagogic speech.… We must mark him now, if we have not done so before, as the most dangerous Negro of the future in this Nation from the standpoint of communism, the Negro and national security.” 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 4167-68  | Added on Monday, August 18, 2014, 01:04 PM

The FBI placed a total of eight wiretaps and sixteen bugs on King. The transcripts are sealed under judicial order until 2027. But their essence is an open secret. 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 4188-90  | Added on Monday, August 18, 2014, 01:07 PM

The Warren Commission’s official investigation was a wearisome sideshow for Hoover. He distrusted its leader, Chief Justice Earl Warren, and he kept close tabs on its work through a confidential informant who served as a member of the commission: Congressman Gerald R. Ford, the future president of the United States. 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 4195-98  | Added on Monday, August 18, 2014, 01:08 PM

Both Hoover and Allen Dulles, the CIA’s director from 1953 to 1961 and a member of the Warren Commission, made sure that no one breathed a word about American plans to kill Fidel Castro. If there had been a Communist plot to assassinate the president in revenge, if the Soviets or the Cubans had ordered President Kennedy killed, and if the United States had a shred of evidence to prove the case, it would have been the opening shot of a new world war. 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 4220-22  | Added on Monday, August 18, 2014, 01:10 PM

The new president pledged his allegiance to Hoover. “You’re my brother,” Johnson told Hoover a week after John Kennedy was killed. “You have been for twenty-five, thirty years.… I’ve got more confidence in you than in anybody in town.” 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 4234-36  | Added on Monday, August 18, 2014, 01:17 PM

“One of the troubles with dealing with the President was that he had that goddamned sewer J. Edgar Hoover flowing across his desk,” said the national security adviser McGeorge Bundy, a Kennedy man who served and suffered under LBJ. “Like many extremely skillful politicians, he had a weakness for under-the-rug information.” 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 4393-95  | Added on Monday, August 18, 2014, 01:36 PM

LBJ’s newly declassified diaries and telephone logs show he was in constant contact with Hoover during 1964 and 1965, sometimes two and three times a day, seeking political intelligence on many matters, most of them far from the field of law enforcement. 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 4416-24  | Added on Monday, August 18, 2014, 10:37 PM

LBJ had joined RFK on the campaign trail five days before the election as Kennedy campaigned for the U.S. Senate. The president began a guarded conversation about the political bombshells that had been kept in Jenkins’s office safe. He told Kennedy that the safe held FBI reports detailing the sexual debauchery of members of the Senate and House who consorted with prostitutes. The president wondered aloud whether they should be leaked selectively, against Republicans, before election day. “He told me he had spent all night sitting up and reading the files of the FBI on all these people,” Kennedy recounted. “And Lyndon talks about that information and material so freely. Lyndon talks about everybody, you see, with everybody. And of course that’s dangerous.” Kennedy had seen some of those files as attorney general. He felt their disclosure could “destroy the confidence that people in the United States had in their government and really make us a laughingstock around the world.” Nor were these the only sex files the FBI shared with the president. 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 4429-37  | Added on Monday, August 18, 2014, 10:38 PM

The FBI intelligence chief, Bill Sullivan, had run his own COINTELPRO against Martin Luther King. He had a package of the King sex tapes prepared by the FBI’s lab technicians, wrote an accompanying poison-pen letter, and sent both to King’s home. His wife opened the package. “King, look into your heart,” the letter read. The American people soon would “know you for what you are—an evil, abnormal beast.… There is only one way out for you. You better take it before your filthy, abnormal fraudulent self is bared to the nation.” The president knew Hoover had taped King’s sexual assignations. Hoover was using the information in an attempt to disgrace King at the White House, in Congress, and in his own home. DeLoach himself had offered newspaper reporters and editors a chance to hear the sex tapes. When Nicholas Katzenbach, now the acting attorney general of the United States, got wind of these offers to the press, he called DeLoach into his office and confronted him. 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 4443-45  | Added on Monday, August 18, 2014, 10:39 PM

LBJ’s estimation of Hoover hit an all-time high on March 25, 1965, after the murder of Viola Liuzzo, a white civil rights activist driving from Selma, Alabama, with a black passenger. A car pulled alongside her on a dark highway and a gunman shot her to death. The FBI broke the case immediately. An undercover informer named Gary Thomas Rowe was riding in the car with three fellow Klansmen. 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 4463-66  | Added on Monday, August 18, 2014, 10:41 PM

“We will not be intimidated by the terrorists of the Ku Klux Klan any more than we will be intimidated by the terrorists in North Vietnam,” Johnson said, surely the first time a president had denounced the cross burners and the Vietcong in the same breath. Hoover stood at LBJ’s right, silent and stony. 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 4469-71  | Added on Monday, August 18, 2014, 10:41 PM

Hoover and Johnson laughed heartily together, a rare sound in the annals of American history. That moment of mirth ended one of the last free-and-easy conversations the two men ever had. In eleven days Lyndon Johnson would face a crisis that he could not handle. He would have to turn to Hoover to save him. 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 4487-91  | Added on Monday, August 18, 2014, 10:43 PM

Within those ranks, Wallace F. Estill was unique. He was the special agent in charge of Puerto Rico. Not many men in Hoover’s FBI were as worldly. Born in 1917, Estill had joined the Bureau in 1941. He had investigated Nazi platinum smugglers in Uruguay, gathered intelligence on Russia from Eskimos in Alaska, served as Hoover’s official liaison with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, and somehow managed through it all to keep his cool, a rare quality after twenty-four years under Hoover. 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 4507-8  | Added on Monday, August 18, 2014, 10:45 PM

That night, a sleepless president, talking to the duty officer in the White House Situation Room at 3:30 A.M., monitored United States Air Force bombing runs over Vietnam. 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 4508-12  | Added on Monday, August 18, 2014, 10:45 PM

The following day, April 28, the president swore in a new CIA director, Admiral William F. “Red” Raborn, another fellow Texan, in the Cabinet Room at the White House. Every ranking member of the CIA was present. But when the six-minute ceremony was over, the first thing LBJ did was to retreat to the Oval Office for an eight-minute one-on-one conversation with Hoover. “Mr. Hoover expressed his deep concern for the communistic activities in this hemisphere as well as affecting the Vietnamese war,” according to the president’s daily diary records. 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 4513-18  | Added on Monday, August 18, 2014, 10:45 PM

As night fell, Johnson ordered four hundred United States Marines to the Dominican Republic, the first landing of American troops in the Western Hemisphere since 1928. At dawn on April 29, the marine guards at the U.S. Embassy in Santo Domingo came under fire from snipers. LBJ ordered one thousand more marines to hit the shores. That afternoon, Hoover came to the White House for a twenty-minute briefing, alone with the president. Hoover saw a global threat: as the Communists were moving in the Caribbean, and the Kremlin was driving the Vietcong, American Marxists and their masters in Moscow were mobilizing the antiwar movement in the United States. What was happening in the Dominican Republic was part of a worldwide pattern, he said. 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 4545-49  | Added on Monday, August 18, 2014, 10:48 PM

On May 5, LBJ talked to George Mahon, a thirty-year Democratic congressman from Texas. “With all these terroristic techniques that are developing in the world, I’m afraid that the time is coming, just like this thing in Santo Domingo, that they are refining the instruments of terror,” the congressman said. “They could even blow up the Capitol someday.” “No question about it,” LBJ replied. “And we’ve got to meet it head on.” 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 4552-58  | Added on Monday, August 18, 2014, 10:49 PM

The FBI’s Paul Brana was in the first wave of ten agents. “They fly us down in this C-130,” a military transport with master bedrooms in the main compartment, Brana said. “We land the C-130 in the Dominican Republic, and they have helicopters to fly us over. I said, ‘How come they’re flying us over in helicopters? How come we don’t drive over?’ ” A military officer responded: “Well, the enemy has the roads.” “I said, ‘The enemy has the roads?’ Nobody had told us that there was a combat operation going on. So we’re going up in this goddamned helicopter and I see this machine gun fire. I say, ‘Christ, nobody told us we were coming into combat.’ ” 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 4569-80  | Added on Monday, August 18, 2014, 10:50 PM

On the afternoon of May 17, the top State Department officer for the Dominican Republic, Kennedy Crockett, flew to New York for a hastily scheduled meeting with Balaguer. The White House wanted Balaguer on a 5:00 P.M. flight to Puerto Rico for a meeting with his rival Bosch; the plan was being improvised by LBJ’s lawyer, Abe Fortas. LBJ and Hoover spoke about the anticipated meeting with Balaguer at 3:02 P.M. “I arrived at the Regency Hotel at 3:40 P.M.,” Crockett wrote in a secret memo to the White House. “Balaguer was not there. At 3:50 P.M. he had still not appeared on the scene.” Fortas and Crockett cooled their heels in the plush hotel lobby. “Balaguer turned up at about 3:55 P.M,” Crockett wrote. “I told him time was short—I had a cab standing by—I would brief him on developments since our last meeting as we drove to Kennedy Airport. Balaguer said we would have to wait until 4:00 P.M., as his suitcase was in the car which had dropped him off at the hotel and it would not be back until 4:00 P.M. He suggested we ride out to Kennedy Airport in ‘his car.’ I objected, pointing out that I did not want to have anyone else listening in on our conversation. He said this would not be a problem as ‘his car’ had been provided by the FBI.” 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 4580-82  | Added on Monday, August 18, 2014, 10:50 PM

“ ‘Balaguer’s car’ turned up at 4:00 P.M. sharp,” Crockett wrote. “The senior Special Agent accompanying him was Heinrich Von Eckardt.” Balaguer was now a recruited source for the FBI; Von Eckardt was his handler. 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 4607-28  | Added on Monday, August 18, 2014, 10:53 PM

Fortas anxiously assured the president he almost had finished the master list of potential Dominican leaders, military and political, making sure they were free of the faintest taint of the left. Then the president cut Fortas off: “I’ve got Hoover waiting on the other line.” Not knowing whom to trust, he wanted Hoover’s help. “Now, Edgar, here’s the play,” he said. “Our State Department, far as I can tell, and I wouldn’t say this to anybody but you, is not worth a damn, they’re a bunch of sissy fellows and they never come up with a solution … “Now, Fortas, I called him in,” said LBJ, ever more intense. “He’s as close to me as you are. He wants to do what I want done if it can be honorably done … “Now!” the president barked. “We want a democracy. We want the will of the people. We want to help influence that will, and help direct it.… But let’s get an anti-communist government.… Most people are anti-American, ’cause we’ve acted such damn fools, throwing our weight around.” “Yes, we have, we have …,” said Hoover. “Now! I’ve got to decide today, I’ve got to decide,” LBJ said. “But I’m not going to decide on anybody that either you or Raborn or somebody responsible doesn’t tell me they’re not a communist.” “Yes, I understand,” said Hoover. “I don’t know, I’m not infallible,” said the president. “Hell, I’ve made mistakes in my life.” “We all do,” said Hoover. “So you get the best men you got to check these names,” LBJ said. “We’re getting on it and checking it now,” Hoover said. “We’ll have that information for you if possible by this evening.” “Check out everybody you can …,” LBJ said. “I don’t want to work a month and make a deal and send in 30,000 soldiers and then piss it off to the communists!” “That’s right,” Hoover said. “And you the man I’m depending on to keep me from pissing it off! Now that’s ugly language, but it’s expressive, and you know what I want.” “We won’t let you down,” Hoover said. 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 4644-49  | Added on Monday, August 18, 2014, 10:55 PM

four or five candidates could “provide excellent fodder for the Communists.” Hoover warned that perhaps two or three hundred “hard-core, skilled, trained Communists” remained at large on the island, and the provisional government “must identify these Communists and take them out of circulation right away; they have no guts if you pick them up and lock them up.” Hoover noted that the military were “too heavy-handed and ill-trained” for this type of work; a strong national police would better serve the cause. So the FBI would provide training and facilities to help create a new Dominican national intelligence force, a Department of Special Operations, a secret police to combat subversives. 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 4667-72  | Added on Monday, August 18, 2014, 10:56 PM

The United States proclaimed that a free election between Balaguer and Bosch would take place. But Richard Helms explained the facts of life to Desmond FitzGerald, his covert operations chief at the CIA: “The President,” Helms said, “expected the Agency to devote the necessary personnel and material resources in the Dominican Republic required to win the presidential election for the candidate favored by the United States Government. The President’s statements were unequivocal. He wants to win the election, and he expects the Agency to arrange for this to happen.” The United States provided as much cash as could be safely smuggled into Balaguer’s hands. 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 4674-75  | Added on Monday, August 18, 2014, 10:56 PM

Balaguer won the vote by a margin of 57 percent to Bosch’s 39 percent—a landslide built on American money, intelligence, and power. The American press universally reported that the vote was free and fair. 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 4680-83  | Added on Monday, August 18, 2014, 10:57 PM

Hoover had helped install a government led by an FBI informant and run by three dozen FBI-approved ministers, military chiefs, and judges. Joaquín Balaguer, the FBI’s man in Santo Domingo, was one of the last of the old-time Latin American strongmen. He ruled with a heavy hand for twenty-two years. 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 4685-87  | Added on Monday, August 18, 2014, 11:05 PM

B Y THE SPRING OF 1966, LBJ had sent almost a quarter of a million American soldiers to Vietnam. Thousands of American citizens protested. Hoover watched the marches with growing alarm. He saw long shadows hovering behind the antiwar movement, reaching from Hanoi to Harvard, Beijing to Berkeley. 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 4693-95  | Added on Monday, August 18, 2014, 11:06 PM

“Most holidays and weekends were taken up with the New Left demonstrating on one side of the road and the Klan and the Nazi Party on the other side of the road.” Like the road to the LBJ Ranch, America was cleft in two. 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 4696-4701  | Added on Monday, August 18, 2014, 11:07 PM

Hoover and his inner circle saw the protests through the old prism of the international Communist conspiracy. “The demonstrations have been marked by a growing militancy,” Hoover wrote in a letter to all FBI special agents. “With summer approaching, the potentialities for violent outbreaks will increase immeasurably, whether demonstrations are directed at opposition toward United States foreign policy in Vietnam or protests involving racial issues. We must not only intensify and expand our coverage … but also insure that advance signs of such outbreaks are detected.” Hoover told his men: “We are an intelligence agency and as such are expected to know what is going to or is likely to happen.” 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 4702-6  | Added on Monday, August 18, 2014, 11:07 PM

Hoover was becoming cautious about the Bureau’s time-honored techniques of black-bag jobs, break-ins, bugging, wiretapping, and mail openings. He had not lost his will for political warfare. Nor had the president lost his appetite for political intelligence. But the Supreme Court and members of Congress were becoming increasingly suspicious of the power and ubiquity of secret government surveillance. And neither LBJ nor Hoover wanted to be caught spying on Americans. 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 4710-16  | Added on Monday, August 18, 2014, 11:08 PM

He told Katzenbach that this power had been granted him in perpetuity by Franklin Delano Roosevelt a quarter of a century ago. “I was, frankly, astounded to hear this,” Katzenbach recounted. “I had no illusions that I was going to bring the FBI under my control. But I did think it was possible to institute a more orderly procedure.” He began to demand facts and figures from the FBI; the Bureau slowly disclosed them. Hoover had installed 738 bugs on his own authority since 1960; the Justice Department’s attorneys had been informed about only 158 of them, roughly one in five. Installing bugs in homes, offices, apartments, and hotel rooms generally required breaking and entering, which was illegal. The Bureau had conducted uncounted break-ins and black-bag jobs on Hoover’s say-so. 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 4722  | Added on Monday, August 18, 2014, 11:09 PM

A purely American protest against authority was inconceivable to him. 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 4737-41  | Added on Monday, August 18, 2014, 11:14 PM

Senator William Fulbright, Democrat of Arkansas and chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, was threatening to create a new committee to oversee the FBI’s intelligence work; President Johnson warned Hoover to keep a very close eye on Fulbright, whom he suspected was holding secret meetings with Soviet diplomats. A far less prominent Democratic senator, Edward Long of Missouri, had started a scattershot series of hearings on government wiretapping. “He cannot be trusted,” an FBI intelligence supervisor warned. 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 4749-57  | Added on Monday, August 18, 2014, 11:15 PM

Hoover used Justice Abe Fortas, newly appointed to the Court by LBJ, as a confidential informant in the case. Deke DeLoach, the FBI’s liaison to the White House, served as the go-between. Over breakfast at his home, Justice Fortas laid out a political strategy to blame the bug on Bobby Kennedy. “He was always willing to help the FBI,” DeLoach wrote, while noting that the justice’s conduct in discussing a case before the Court was “blatantly unethical.” Despite Hoover’s best efforts, the solicitor general of the United States, Thurgood Marshall, revealed the FBI’s conduct to the Court. (Marshall had been a target of FBI surveillance for many years, as the leading lawyer for the NAACP.) The Court overturned the conviction. In months to come, the justices would rule that the FBI’s electronic surveillance of a public telephone booth was unconstitutional, and it would compare government eavesdropping to the “general warrants” used by the British colonialists to suppress the American Revolution. 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 4758-59  | Added on Monday, August 18, 2014, 11:15 PM

Hoover had always controlled the force of secret information. Now that secrecy was starting to erode, and with it went a measure of his power. 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 4777-78  | Added on Monday, August 18, 2014, 11:17 PM

Opening mail was so patently illegal that Hoover had never thought to ask any attorney general or any president for that power. Was it worth the risk to the FBI? Hoover thought not. 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 4779-82  | Added on Monday, August 18, 2014, 11:17 PM

Hoover’s edicts created a furor inside the American intelligence community. The National Security Agency and the CIA had worked with the FBI since 1952 on a worldwide effort to steal the communications codes of foreign nations, friends and foes alike. A crucial element in that program was a gang of FBI and CIA safecrackers and burglars who could steal codebooks from foreign embassies and consulates. The ban on bag jobs threatened to bring breakthroughs in code cracking to a standstill. 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 4794-97  | Added on Monday, August 18, 2014, 11:19 PM

Hoover’s restrictions on illegal intelligence-gathering methods hobbled the FBI’s spy hunters. The Bureau’s increasingly relentless focus on American political protests drained time and energy away from foreign counterintelligence. The results were evident. For the next decade, from 1966 to 1976, the FBI did not make a single major case of espionage against a Soviet spy. 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 4811-15  | Added on Monday, August 18, 2014, 11:20 PM

The nation’s cities became war zones in the long hot summer of 1967. Black Americans fought the army and the National Guard as well as the police across the country; the forces of law and order suppressed seventy-five separate riots, sometimes with live ammunition and orders to shoot to kill. Forty-three people died in Detroit, where the army was deployed for eight days of combat and patrols; twenty-six in Newark, where the army was alerted for riot duty. In all, the nation suffered eighty-eight deaths and 1,397 injuries; the police arrested 16,389 people; economic damage was estimated at $664.5 million. 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 4816-17  | Added on Monday, August 18, 2014, 11:20 PM

As Detroit smoldered on the morning of July 25, 1967, Hoover called the president with some real-time intelligence: the transcript of a wiretapped conversation between Martin Luther King and Stanley Levison, who remained under FBI surveillance. 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 4827-33  | Added on Monday, August 18, 2014, 11:21 PM

Hoover publicly labeled King along with his more radical counterparts as the leading “rabble-rousers” and “firebrands” inciting black riots. BLACK HATE went hand in hand with the newly created “Ghetto Informant Program.” Within the year three thousand people had been enlisted as FBI sources—many of them respectable businessmen, military veterans, and senior citizens—to keep watch over the black communities of urban America. BLACK HATE and the Ghetto Informant ranks soon doubled in size and scope. In the fall of 1967, the urban riots ebbed but the peace marches grew. The protesters in Washington chanted: “Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?” The president ordered the FBI, the CIA, and the army to root out the conspiracy to overthrow his government. 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 4833-35  | Added on Monday, August 18, 2014, 11:22 PM

“I’m not going to let the Communists take this government and they’re doing it right now,” LBJ shouted at Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, Secretary of State Dean Rusk, and Director of Central Intelligence Richard Helms during a ninety-five-minute Saturday morning meeting on November 4, 1967. 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 4836-44  | Added on Monday, August 18, 2014, 11:22 PM

On his orders, liberal-minded men—like the new attorney general, Ramsey Clark, and his deputy Warren Christopher, later President Bill Clinton’s secretary of state—commanded the FBI to spy on Americans in concert with the United States Army and the National Security Agency. Some 1,500 army intelligence officers in civilian clothing undertook the surveillance of some 100,000 American citizens. Army intelligence shared all their reports with the FBI over the next three years. The CIA tracked antiwar leaders and black militants who traveled overseas, and it reported back to the FBI. The FBI, in turn, shared thousands of selected files on Americans with army intelligence and the CIA. All three intelligence services sent the names of Americans to the National Security Agency for inclusion on a global watch list; the NSA relayed back to the FBI hundreds of transcripts of intercepted telephone calls to and from suspect Americans. The president had created a concerted effort to organize a secret police. He was trying to synchronize the gears of the FBI, the CIA, and the army to create an all-pervasive intelligence machine that would watch citizens as if they were foreign spies. 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 4844-51  | Added on Monday, August 18, 2014, 11:23 PM

But the political forces at work in the world in 1968 were too powerful to control. None of the intelligence the president received calmed his troubled mind. By the time of the Tet offensive at the end of January 1968—with 400,000 Communist troops striking almost every major city and military garrison in South Vietnam—LBJ believed that his enemies had encircled him in Washington. He was a haunted man when he spoke to Hoover on February 14, 1968. “I don’t want anybody to know I called you,” LBJ said in a hoarse whisper, breathing heavily, sounding exhausted. “I want you personally to do one big job before you go out,” the president said. What he wanted was an intensified search for spies in Washington. He suspected that American politicians and political aides were serving the Communist cause. 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 4862-67  | Added on Monday, August 18, 2014, 11:24 PM

“Say to those committee chairmen, ‘The President has ordered us to check everybody.’ “Because when McNamara goes up and testifies before Fulbright that we are breaking the North Vietnamese code and a goddamn Commie sympathizer goes and tells it, they just change their codes.… Chase down every damn lead and see who they saw and who they talked to and when and how … You the only guy in the government that’s watching it. I just want to order you now to be more diligent than you’ve ever been in your life.” “I’ll give it my personal attention, Mr. President,” Hoover said. 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 4876-83  | Added on Monday, August 18, 2014, 11:25 PM

Four days after LBJ stood down from the presidential election, Hoover wrote to his field agents to be on guard against the forces he had labeled BLACK HATE: “The Negro youth and moderates must be made to understand that if they succumb to revolutionary teaching, they will be dead revolutionaries.” The next evening, Martin Luther King was assassinated in Memphis. The killing unleashed unfettered rage across the country; the flames burned close to the White House. Returning from King’s funeral in Memphis, Attorney General Ramsey Clark looked down upon Washington, D.C., from his airplane. The burning city, aglow as night fell, was in the grip of the most dangerous insurrection since the war of 1812. King’s killer, James Earl Ray, eluded the biggest manhunt in FBI history by taking a bus to Toronto and an airplane to London. A Scotland Yard detective arrested him sixty-six days later as he tried to board a flight for Brussels. 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 4888-92  | Added on Monday, August 18, 2014, 11:26 PM

More than one hundred campuses across the country had already been hit by student protests. The marches were breaking barricades, and at their fringes were militants willing to toss Molotov cocktails and more. Hoover sent out a fierce call to arms for his special agents in charge across America. “I have been appalled by the reaction of some of our field offices to some of the acts of violence and terrorism which have occurred … on college campuses,” he wrote. “I expect an immediate and aggressive response.” 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 4892-97  | Added on Monday, August 18, 2014, 11:26 PM

Hoover saw a gathering storm unlike anything since the great police, coal, and steel strikes that swept the nation as the American Left rose up after World War I. But the FBI had no answer to the violence and rage that shook America that spring. Robert Kennedy was assassinated in Los Angeles on June 6. Millions of Americans had put their hopes in him. Hoover was more cold-eyed. “He became a kind of Messiah for the generation gap and individuals who were pro-King and still are,” Hoover wrote in a memo to his top aides after RFK’s death. Kennedy’s election would have been the end of Hoover’s power. 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 4897-99  | Added on Monday, August 18, 2014, 11:26 PM

The murder left the path to the White House open for a man who vowed to restore the rule of law and order. Hoover now had reason to hope for a restoration, a return to Republican verities, and a renaissance for the FBI. His old friend Richard Nixon might be elected president in November. 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 4904-5  | Added on Monday, August 18, 2014, 11:27 PM

The FBI had detected evidence of a plot to sabotage LBJ’s plans for a cease-fire in Vietnam. The plot appeared to the president to be the work of the Nixon campaign. 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 4905-12  | Added on Monday, August 18, 2014, 11:27 PM

Three days before the election, LBJ said he was “personally watching the traffic”—telephone calls and telegrams being intercepted at the embassy of South Vietnam by the FBI and the National Security Agency—and that he had detected Nixon’s scheme to torpedo the peace talks. He ordered the FBI to place Anna Chennault, the most famous representative of Chinese anti-communism, under surveillance. LBJ suspected that she was Nixon’s go-between. FBI headquarters sent a top secret message to the president on Monday, November 4, the day before the election: “Anna Chennault traveled in her Lincoln Continental from her residence to the Vietnamese Embassy where she remained for approximately thirty minutes.” After that, the FBI reported, she went to 1701 Pennsylvania Avenue and entered room 205—an unmarked Nixon campaign office. 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 4915-18  | Added on Monday, August 18, 2014, 11:28 PM

Nixon won the presidency by a very narrow margin: fewer than half a million votes, roughly one-seventh of one percent of the electorate. A peace accord would surely have worked to Humphrey’s advantage. LBJ was convinced that Nixon had cut a secret bargain with the government of South Vietnam to win his victory. The essence was this: Don’t make a peace agreement with Johnson and Humphrey. Wait until I’m elected. I will get you a better deal. 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 4920-21  | Added on Monday, August 18, 2014, 11:28 PM

Nixon denied it to his dying day. But the conversation left him with the indelible impression that the president of the United States had used the FBI to spy on him. 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 4926-28  | Added on Monday, August 18, 2014, 11:28 PM

Nixon remembered the president saying: “If it hadn’t been for Edgar Hoover, I couldn’t carry out my responsibilities as Commander in Chief—period. Dick, you will come to depend on Edgar. He is a pillar of strength in a city of weak men.” 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 4955-60  | Added on Tuesday, August 19, 2014, 01:40 PM

Hoover told Nixon that he should be cautious about what he said on the telephone to LBJ during the days of the transition, and careful what he said on the telephone once he took office. He could be taped. Hoover explained that the Army Signal Corps controlled the presidential communications system and monitored all calls patched through the White House switchboard; the way Nixon understood it, a corporal could listen in on the president. The director then pointedly reminded Nixon about the powers of surveillance that were at a president’s command. Years later, Nixon was compelled by an order from Congress to give a formal statement about what Hoover had told him that day. 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 4960-68  | Added on Tuesday, August 19, 2014, 01:41 PM

Hoover emphasized that the FBI had “ conducted, without a search warrant,” black-bag jobs, break-ins, and bugging for every president since FDR, Nixon said. Its skills included “surreptitious entries and intercepts of voice and non-voice communications.” The Bureau was especially adept at hunting down leakers, Hoover confided. Wiretapping was “the most effective means” it had. Nixon also learned from Hoover how to lie to Congress about wiretapping without being caught. “That was Mr. Hoover’s common practice,” Nixon said in a secret sworn deposition to Watergate prosecutors, unsealed in November 2011. “He told me about it. He said, ‘You know, about a month or so before I ever go up to testify before the Appropriations Committee I discontinue all taps … so that when they ask me the question as to whether we are tapping anybody, I can say no.’ ” Once Hoover was done with his annual appearances in Congress, the FBI would turn the taps back on. 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 4981-88  | Added on Tuesday, August 19, 2014, 01:43 PM

students were the ones who worried Nixon the most. Nixon feared that they were a subversive threat as powerful as the Soviets, the Chinese, and the Vietcong. He spoke of the campus uprisings at American universities in one of his first major addresses. “This is the way civilizations begin to die,” he said. He quoted Yeats: “Things fall apart. The center cannot hold. None of us has the right to suppose it cannot happen here.” The correlation of forces was changing in America. Nixon would remake the Supreme Court by appointing right-wing justices. He vowed repeatedly to reestablish respect for the law and the power of the presidency. He had named the deeply conservative John N. Mitchell as attorney general to restore order to the United States, continuing the political tradition of hiring his campaign manager to run the Justice Department. 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 5012-14  | Added on Tuesday, August 19, 2014, 01:45 PM

Hoover said that the reporter was suspected of spying for the British and Czech intelligence services—and that the FBI had been wiretapping Brandon for years in search of the proof. This planted the seed of an idea in Nixon’s mind: wiretapping reporters was the way to find the leakers and their sources within the White House. 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 5027-31  | Added on Tuesday, August 19, 2014, 01:47 PM

“I told Mr. Hoover we would go forward with this program,” Nixon remembered. “I called Dr. Kissinger in and indicated to him that he should take the responsibility of checking his own staff.” Kissinger, of course, complied. “Here he was in this room with J. Edgar Hoover, John Mitchell, Richard Nixon,” said Kissinger’s aide, Peter Rodman. “They’re saying: ‘Let’s do some taps.’ And J. Edgar Hoover and John Mitchell say: ‘Yeah, we can do that. Bobby Kennedy did this all the time.’ ” 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 5018-21  | Added on Tuesday, August 19, 2014, 01:48 PM

Front-page stories on their strategies for dealing with the Soviet Union and Southeast Asia, seemingly taken directly from the minutes of the National Security Council, appeared almost every week. By Kissinger’s account, twenty-one newspaper articles based on leaks about the president’s secret foreign policies were published in the first hundred days of the administration. 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 5049-52  | Added on Thursday, August 21, 2014, 01:25 PM

In 1968, Congress had passed a law saying the president could authorize wiretaps to protect the United States from foreign spies and subversives. But the targets of these taps were not KGB agents. They were thirteen American government officials and four newspaper reporters. Over the next two years, though the leaks went on, the taps never revealed a shred of incriminating evidence against anyone. But they were the first step down the road to Watergate. 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 5066-72  | Added on Thursday, August 21, 2014, 01:28 PM

They put him on the four-to-midnight shift listening to members of the Students for a Democratic Society. The SDS formally convened in Chicago three weeks later. One faction declared it would begin an armed struggle against the government of the United States. Over the summer, and into the fall, Dyson listened as the members of the group argued, debated, and plotted. He was witnessing the violent birth of a terrorist gang. “I watched them become the Weathermen! I was with them when they became the Weathermen!” he said. “It was exciting. I was watching history.” Almost exactly fifty years before, in Chicago, in September 1919, J. Edgar Hoover’s agents had spied on the birth of the Communist Party of the United States. Dyson was following in their tradition. 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 5088-91  | Added on Thursday, August 21, 2014, 01:30 PM

it managed to take credit for a fresh outrage every few months during the Nixon years, taunting the FBI and the White House with wild-eyed communiqués, planting bombs at will in seemingly impenetrable places. A group barely one hundred strong—with a core of a dozen decision takers and bomb makers—began to drive the government of the United States half-mad with fear as the sixties became the seventies. 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 5094-96  | Added on Thursday, August 21, 2014, 01:31 PM

“They were able to get into the U.S. Capitol, build a bomb into a wall, and blow it up at will,” Dyson said. “They got into the Pentagon.… They were able to call up and say it’s going to go off in exactly five minutes and it would go off in five minutes. They were as good as any terrorist group in the world in terms of their sophistication.” 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 5097-98  | Added on Thursday, August 21, 2014, 01:31 PM

They carried out thirty-eight bombings. The FBI solved none. “We didn’t know how to investigate terrorism,” Dyson said. “We did not have enough intelligence on these people.” 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 5104-7  | Added on Thursday, August 21, 2014, 01:32 PM

“This was going to come and destroy us,” he said. “We were going to end up with FBI agents arrested. Not because what they did was wrong. But because nobody knew what was right or wrong.” Not knowing that difference is a legal definition of insanity. Dyson’s premonitions of disaster would prove prophetic. In time, the top commanders of the FBI in Washington and New York would face the prospect of prison time for their work against the threat from the left. So would the president’s closest confidants. 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 5177-83  | Added on Saturday, August 23, 2014, 03:13 PM

On Friday, June 5, 1970, Nixon called Hoover and Helms to the White House. They sat alongside Admiral Noel Gayler, director of the National Security Agency, and Lieutenant General Donald Bennett, chief of the Defense Intelligence Agency. “The President chewed our butts,” General Bennett remembered. Nixon was on the warpath abroad and at home. Campuses across the country had exploded after Nixon invaded Cambodia and escalated the war in Vietnam. National Guardsmen had shot and killed four students at Kent State University in Ohio. More than a hundred bombings, arson attacks, and shootings had followed in May. The Weathermen and the Panthers, whose leaders had been to Cuba and Algeria for indoctrination, had shown that they could hit draft boards, police stations, and banks at will. 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 5183-86  | Added on Saturday, August 23, 2014, 03:13 PM

The president said that “revolutionary terrorism” was now the gravest threat to the United States. Thousands of Americans under the age of thirty were “determined to destroy our society”; their home-grown ideology was “as dangerous as anything they could import” from Cuba, China, or Russia. “Good intelligence,” he said, was “the best way to stop terrorism.” 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 5187-88  | Added on Saturday, August 23, 2014, 03:13 PM

Nixon demanded “a plan which will enable us to curtail the illegal activities of those who are determined to destroy our society.” 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 5203-5  | Added on Saturday, August 23, 2014, 03:15 PM

The plan conformed to the president’s philosophy on national security: Do anything it takes. He knew that opening mail was a federal crime and that black-bag jobs were burglary. But they were the best means of gathering intelligence. And Nixon believed that if a president did it, it was not illegal. 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 5237-42  | Added on Saturday, August 23, 2014, 03:20 PM

While a growing cohort of his enemies inside the Nixon administration plotted to supplant him, Hoover’s foes on the left mounted a devastating and demoralizing attack on the secrecy and power of the Bureau itself. They pulled a black-bag job on the FBI. On the night of March 8, 1971, a band of thieves broke into the Bureau’s two-man office in Media, Pennsylvania, a placid suburb outside Philadelphia, jimmying the glass-paneled door in an office across the street from the county courthouse. The job was easy; the FBI had no security system to seal the secrets inside of room 204. They stole at least eight hundred documents out of the files. The group, which called itself the Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the FBI, 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 5274-80  | Added on Saturday, August 23, 2014, 03:22 PM

On June 17, Haldeman told the president that he thought the Brookings Institution, a think tank in Washington, might have files that could serve as evidence against Ellsberg. Nixon leaped at the idea of stealing them. “Do you remember Huston’s plan? Implement it,” said the president. “Goddamn it, get in and get those files. Blow the safe and get it.” Nixon wanted political intelligence so badly that he created his own secret squad of burglars and wiretappers. He authorized the creation of a secret White House unit that had the capability to conduct those kinds of missions. The group was nicknamed the Plumbers, because in the beginning they sought to plug the leaks that plagued the president. They would carry out black-bag jobs, wiretaps, and disinformation campaigns on his behalf. 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 5281-87  | Added on Saturday, August 23, 2014, 03:23 PM

Their mastermind was a strange kind of genius named G. Gordon Liddy. He had spent five years in Hoover’s FBI, from 1957 to 1962, rising to the rank of a supervisor at headquarters, where he had learned the dark arts of COINTELPRO. Liddy was installed in a cover job as general counsel for the Committee to Re-elect the President, whose chairman was John Mitchell. He drew up plans, which he presented in person in the office of the attorney general, to spend $1 million on secret agents who would kidnap antiwar leaders and spirit them off to Mexico, entrap liberal politicians with prostitutes working out of bugged houseboats, plant informants inside the campaigns of Nixon’s opponents, and wiretap the Democratic Party apparatus for the 1972 presidential campaign. Mitchell disapproved of kidnapping and blackmail—in retrospect, he said, he should have thrown Liddy out the window—but the espionage elements of the plan survived. 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 5296-97  | Added on Saturday, August 23, 2014, 03:24 PM

Many of the elements of the bill of impeachment drawn up against Nixon three years later grew out of his frustrations with the FBI, his thirst for the secrets Hoover no longer supplied, and the bugging and burglary that followed. 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 5342-45  | Added on Saturday, August 23, 2014, 03:27 PM

On July 6, he gave a speech to newspaper and television executives at the great columned building housing the National Archives and the original copy of the Constitution of the United States. “When I see those columns,” he said, “I think of what happened to Greece and Rome.” “They lost their will to live,” he said. “They became subject to the decadence that destroys civilization. The United States is reaching that period.” 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 5354-59  | Added on Saturday, August 23, 2014, 03:28 PM

Dreading the conversation, Nixon invited Hoover to breakfast at the White House at 8:30 on Monday, September 20. The director played it perfectly. “He was trying to demonstrate that despite his age he was still physically, mentally, and emotionally equipped to carry on,” Nixon recounted in his memoirs. “I tried to point out as gently and subtly as I could that as an astute politician he must recognize that the attacks were going to mount.” He was too subtle by half. Hoover replied: “More than anything else, I want to see you re-elected in 1972. If you feel that my staying on as head of the Bureau hurts your chances for re-election, just let me know.” 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 5367-71  | Added on Saturday, August 23, 2014, 03:29 PM

On the day he was forced out, Sullivan was struggling in vain to secure his files, including a copy of the poison-pen letter he had sent to Martin Luther King, among other potentially incriminating documents. In the corridor, he ran into the man Hoover had chosen to supplant him: a tall, suave thirty-year veteran of the FBI named Mark Felt, who was searching without success for the copies of the wiretap summaries that Sullivan had stolen. He was convinced that Sullivan had become a renegade, trying to claw his way to power by “playing on the paranoia and political obsessions of the Nixon administration.” 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 5371-72  | Added on Saturday, August 23, 2014, 03:29 PM

Felt called Sullivan a Judas. They came close to a fistfight. In a rage, Sullivan left the Bureau for the last time. 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 5405-7  | Added on Saturday, August 23, 2014, 03:31 PM

Nixon had come to the most perilous point of his presidency. He could ill afford to lose Hoover’s loyalty. What might the director do to hold on to his power? The hint of blackmail lingered. 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 5424-25  | Added on Saturday, August 23, 2014, 03:32 PM

Nixon would return time and again to the thought of making Sullivan the director of the FBI. “We got to get a professional in that goddamn place,” he once muttered. “Sullivan’s our guy.” 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 5448-55  | Added on Saturday, August 23, 2014, 03:34 PM

The president slowly pushed Hoover away from the White House. One last hurrah came at the end of 1971: an invitation to Nixon’s compound at Key Biscayne, Florida, over Christmas week, and a cake to celebrate Hoover’s seventy-seventh birthday aboard Air Force One during the return to Washington on New Year’s Eve. But after that, over the next four months the White House logs record only three telephone calls, lasting a total of eight minutes, between Nixon and Hoover. Silence descended. The last conversation with Hoover that anyone at the FBI recorded for posterity took place on April 6, 1972. Ray Wannall, who had spent thirty years hunting Communists for Hoover, went to the director’s office to receive a promotion. Hoover began a jeremiad, a wail of pain. “That son of a bitch Sullivan pulled the wool over my eyes,” he said. “He completely fooled me. I treated him like a son and he betrayed me.” His lamentation went on for half an hour. Then he said good-bye. 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 5467-72  | Added on Saturday, August 23, 2014, 03:40 PM

A few minutes after Hoover’s casket left the Capitol, the acting attorney general, Richard Kleindienst, telephoned his most loyal assistant at the Justice Department, L. Patrick Gray. “Pat, I am going to appoint you acting director of the FBI,” he said. “You have to be joking,” Gray replied. Gray was fifty-five years old, and he had never held an authority greater than the command of a submarine. He still had his navy crew cut. He was a bull-headed man with a jutting jaw, a straight-arrow Nixon acolyte. He had known the president for a quarter of a century, and he revered him. He had one qualification: he would do anything Nixon asked. Now the president was entrusting Hoover’s legacy to him. 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 5473-77  | Added on Saturday, August 23, 2014, 03:40 PM

In a state of awe, Gray came to the White House after Hoover’s burial on May 4. Nixon gave him some sound advice. “Never, never figure that anyone’s your friend,” the president said. “Never, never, never … You’ve got to be a conspirator. You’ve got to be totally ruthless. You’ve got to appear to be a nice guy. But underneath you need to be steely tough. That, believe me, is the way to run the Bureau.” Gray lacked steel. He was a malleable man. He was deeply unsure of how to take control of the FBI. 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 5480-83  | Added on Saturday, August 23, 2014, 03:41 PM

Thus began the dark ages of the FBI. In a matter of months, the joint conduct of Pat Gray; his new number-two man at the Bureau, Mark Felt; and his intelligence chief, Ed Miller, would come close to destroying the house that Hoover built. “Once Hoover died,” Miller remembered mournfully, “we were absolutely deluged.” 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 5496-5505  | Added on Saturday, August 23, 2014, 03:42 PM

Felt was in charge at headquarters for far longer than he had anticipated. Gray had set out across America to visit all of the FBI’s fifty-nine field offices and meet every special agent in charge. The acting director was on the road so often that agents at headquarters started calling him “Three-Day Gray.” On Friday, June 17, he checked into the fashionable Newporter Inn south of Los Angeles—as did John Mitchell, now chief of CREEP, the nickname for the Committee to Re-elect the President, and Mitchell’s trusted aide Robert Mardian, the former internal security chief at Justice. All hell broke loose in Washington that weekend. The District of Columbia police arrested five men inside the offices of the Democratic National Committee at the Watergate office complex. Among them was James McCord, a former FBI agent and CIA officer now working as chief of security for CREEP. The men had burglary tools, electronic devices, and a gadget that the police thought was a bomb disguised as a smoke detector. It was a sophisticated electronic-eavesdropping device. The suspects had crisp hundred-dollar bills and Watergate Hotel keys in their pockets. Their ringleaders were the gung-ho Gordon Liddy, the former FBI agent counseling CREEP; and E. Howard Hunt, a former CIA officer who, the FBI quickly determined, worked for the president of the United States. 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 5509-20  | Added on Saturday, August 23, 2014, 03:43 PM

“This is Agent Supervisor Dan Bledsoe,” he said. “Who am I speaking with?” “You are speaking with John Ehrlichman. Do you know who I am?” “Yes. You are the chief of staff there at the White House.” “That’s right. I have a mandate from the President of the United States,” Ehrlichman said. “The FBI is to terminate the investigation of the break-in.” Bledsoe was silent. “Did you hear what I said?” Ehrlichman thundered. “Are you going to terminate the investigation?” “No,” Bledsoe replied. “Under the Constitution, the FBI is obligated to initiate an investigation to determine whether there has been a violation of the illegal interception of communications statute.” “Do you know that you are saying ‘no’ to the President of the United States?” “Yes,” the FBI agent replied. “Bledsoe, your career is doomed,” Ehrlichman said, and hung up. Bledsoe called Mark Felt at home and recounted the conversation. “He laughed because he knew these people. In his high position, he knew what was occurring in the White House. He just laughed.” 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 5526-28  | Added on Saturday, August 23, 2014, 03:44 PM

Gray instructed his men that the president’s counsel, John Dean, would sit in on all the FBI’s interviews. Gray secretly planned to keep Dean posted about the Bureau’s every move by feeding him daily summaries of the FBI’s investigations and interrogations. 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 5532-37  | Added on Saturday, August 23, 2014, 03:45 PM

Shortly after 10:00 A.M. on June 23, President Nixon settled on a plan to scuttle the FBI investigation. “The FBI is not under control, because Gray doesn’t exactly know how to control them,” Haldeman told the president. They agreed that the newly appointed deputy director of Central Intelligence, Lieutenant General Vernon Walters, a Nixon crony of long standing, would tell Gray to back off. He would raise the flag of national security and secrecy. Gray and Felt would do as they were told, Haldeman predicted confidently. “Felt wants to cooperate because he’s ambitious,” he said. “And that will fit rather well because the FBI agents who are working the case, at this point, feel that’s what it is. This is CIA.” 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 5539-50  | Added on Saturday, August 23, 2014, 03:46 PM

Walters was in Gray’s office by 2:30 P.M. The investigation, he told Gray, could trespass into the CIA’s domain. Gray called Charles Bates the moment that Walters left his office. He made the case for standing down. Bates objected. “I again told him I felt the FBI had no choice but to continue our full investigation and obtain all the details.” Gray agonized until he answered an urgent summons from the White House at 6:30 P.M. on June 28. Inside John Ehrlichman’s office, John Dean handed Gray two white manila envelopes—the documents he had taken from Hunt’s safe. “These should never see the light of day,” he told Gray. “Then why give them to me?” “Because they are such political dynamite their existence can’t even be acknowledged,” Dean said. “I need to be able to say that I gave all Hunt’s files to the FBI. That’s what I’m doing.” Gray had a red wastebasket in his office, holding a burn bag for destroying secret documents. But he did not know what a burn bag was. Six months later, he set fire to the files in a trash bin in his backyard. “There is little doubt,” an internal FBI report later concluded, “that Mr. Gray made deplorable decisions of historic proportions.” 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 5581-84  | Added on Saturday, August 23, 2014, 03:49 PM

The world had been transfixed ten days before by the Black September killings at the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich. Eleven Israeli athletes (and eight Palestinian attackers) had died, most of them after a bungled rescue by the West German police. President Nixon had conferred on the counterterrorism problem with his national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, and his United Nations ambassador, George H. W. Bush. 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 5607-16  | Added on Saturday, August 23, 2014, 03:52 PM

The FBI veterans Liddy and McCord had been indicted on September 15, 1972, along with the five other Watergate burglars, for the bugging of the Democratic Party headquarters. But the charges ended there. The Watergate case had hit a stone wall. Felt and his inner circle at the FBI made a decision to fight the obstruction of justice. They had personal as well as professional motives. They acted on their instincts to dismantle the roadblocks in the path of the FBI’s investigation. They knew that the conspiracy and the cover-up had been orchestrated at the White House. They deeply resented the fact that the president had placed Pat Gray, a man they considered a political stooge, in charge of the FBI. “It hurt all of us deeply,” said Charles Bolz, the chief of the FBI’s accounting and fraud division. Felt was Hoover’s rightful heir. “Felt was the one that would have been the Director’s first pick. But the Director died. And Mark Felt should have moved up right there and then. And that’s what got him into the act. He was going to find out what was going on in there. And, boy, he really did.” 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 5616-18  | Added on Saturday, August 23, 2014, 03:53 PM

Felt and his allies began leaking the secrets of Watergate a few weeks before the November 1972 election. Felt became famous thirty-three years later when he confessed that he was the man known as “Deep Throat,” the FBI source who helped The Washington Post confirm the facts for its ground-breaking reports on the Watergate investigation. But he was not the only one. 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 5631-36  | Added on Saturday, August 23, 2014, 03:55 PM

So street-level FBI agents turned secrets into information, and senior FBI leaders brought that information to reporters, to prosecutors, to federal grand juries, and into the public realm. That was the beginning of the end of Richard Nixon’s presidency. Without the FBI, the reporters would have been lost. The Washington Post and Time magazine were the first to suggest that there were wheels within wheels in the Watergate case. The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times soon joined in. Not all of their stories were accurate. But the facts within them, taken together, sketched out a series of White House conspiracies to subvert the president’s political enemies with espionage and sabotage. 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 5638-57  | Added on Saturday, August 23, 2014, 03:56 PM

“We know what’s leaked and we know who leaked it,” Haldeman told the president on October 19. PRESIDENT NIXON: Is it somebody in the FBI? HALDEMAN: Yes, sir … And it’s very high up. PRESIDENT NIXON: Somebody next to Gray? HALDEMAN: Mark Felt. PRESIDENT NIXON: Now why the hell would he do that? HALDEMAN: It’s hard to figure. Then again, you can’t say anything about this, because we’ll screw up our source … Mitchell is the only one that knows this. And he feels very strongly that we should—we’d better not do anything because— PRESIDENT NIXON: Do anything? Never! HALDEMAN: If we move on him, then he’ll go out and unload everything. He knows everything that’s to be known in the FBI. PRESIDENT NIXON: Sure. HALDEMAN: He has access to absolutely everything … Gray’s scared to death. We’ve got to give him a warning … PRESIDENT NIXON: What would you do with Felt? … Christ! You know what I’d do with him? Bastard! 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 5662-65  | Added on Saturday, August 23, 2014, 03:56 PM

Gray fell seriously ill shortly after Nixon was re-elected in a landslide on November 7, 1972. He went into the hospital near his home in Stonington, Connecticut, for abdominal surgery. His doctor released him on December 3 but ordered him to rest at home until the New Year. Mark Felt ran the FBI during Gray’s two-month absence from headquarters. 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 5685-87  | Added on Saturday, August 23, 2014, 03:59 PM

You’ve got to be brutal, tough and respected … I understand leaking out of the CIA, those goddamned cookie-pushers. But if it leaks out of the Bureau, then the whole damn place ought to be fired.” 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 5687-91  | Added on Saturday, August 23, 2014, 03:59 PM

Nixon was now sputtering and fuming. “You’ve got to do it like they did in the war,” the president said. “In World War II, the Germans, if they went through these towns and then one of their soldiers, a sniper hit one of them, they’d line up the whole goddamned town and say until you talk you’re all getting shot. I really think that’s what has to be done. I mean, I don’t think you can be Mr. Nice Guy over there.” “I haven’t been,” Gray protested. “These guys know they can’t lie to me like they used to lie to Hoover.” 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 5692-96  | Added on Saturday, August 23, 2014, 04:00 PM

Nixon became imperious. “Frankly, I am referring to discipline of the highest sensitivity involving what may be political matters. Partisan political matters,” he said. “Let us suppose there’s a leak to a certain member of the press. I’ve got to have a relationship here where you go out and do something and deny on a stack of Bibles.” “Right,” said Gray. “I understand.” “I don’t have anybody else,” Nixon said. “I can’t hire some asshole from the outside.” 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 5704-6  | Added on Saturday, August 23, 2014, 04:01 PM

“As you know, I would never ask the Director of the Bureau to do anything that was wrong,” the president said. “But I am certainly going to have to ask the Director of the Bureau at times to do things that are going to protect the security of this country.” “No problem,” Gray said. 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 5727-32  | Added on Saturday, August 23, 2014, 04:02 PM

On March 5, linguists at the National Security Agency, which had just created a branch to handle the issue of international terrorism, began to translate a newly intercepted message from the Iraqi mission at the United Nations. The message had been sent to Baghdad and relayed to the PLO. It contained the outlines of a murderous plan. As the NSA started to read the message, a tow truck operator impounded a 1973 Dodge Dart from the corner of 43rd Street and Fifth Avenue. The next morning, a 1972 Plymouth Duster at 47th Street and Fifth was towed away. Both had been ticketed for standing in a no-standing zone. An Olin rent-a-car supervisor came to the impound lot at a pier on the Hudson River to claim the Dart. He opened the trunk and stared in wonder. 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 5737-40  | Added on Saturday, August 23, 2014, 04:03 PM

The police had stumbled upon the first bomb plot in the war between Arab terrorists and the United States. At 6:15 P.M. on March 6, the FBI joined the case. In Washington, the NSA told the Bureau about the coded message to Baghdad and warned that a third car bomb lay waiting outside the El Al terminal at JFK. Later that night, the FBI and the NYPD bomb squad found the Fury and opened the trunk. 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 5743-44  | Added on Saturday, August 23, 2014, 04:03 PM

The FBI lifted a fingerprint off the propane tank in the Fury. Eighteen years would pass before the Bureau matched the print with the bomb maker. 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 5775-80  | Added on Saturday, August 23, 2014, 04:42 PM

“The Bureau cannot survive, John,” President Nixon said to his White House counsel, John Dean, on March 1, 1973. “It cannot survive.” To Nixon’s horror, L. Patrick Gray had offered to let members of the Senate read the FBI’s raw files on the Watergate investigation during his confirmation hearings. Nixon had believed that Gray wanted the job so badly he would do anything the White House commanded—including covering up the crimes of Watergate. “For Christ’s sake,” the president growled, “he must be out of his mind.” 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 5786-88  | Added on Saturday, August 23, 2014, 04:43 PM

The White House would feed these stories to the Senate Judiciary Committee; the senators would use them to interrogate Gray. He could not answer them in candor. He would, in John Ehrlichman’s immortal phrase, twist slowly, slowly in the wind. His nomination would fail, and a more loyal man would be chosen to run the FBI. 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 5792-96  | Added on Saturday, August 23, 2014, 04:43 PM

The only member of the Judiciary Committee who had taken the time to read the raw Watergate files was Senator Roman Hruska, a law-and-order Republican from Nebraska. FBI agents delivered him twenty-six thick books, along with summaries and analyses, and he had spent six hours leafing through them, from four in the afternoon until ten at night. The senator had reached a conclusion, as FBI agent Angelo Lano reported to his superiors. “Dean had lied to us” by concealing the contents of the office safe of the Watergate burglar Howard Hunt. Lying to the FBI was a crime punishable by five years in prison. 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 5800-5811  | Added on Saturday, August 23, 2014, 04:45 PM

The president’s men convened in the Oval Office, filled with false bravado, after Gray’s devastating statement against Dean. Ehrlichman reported that the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, the FBI’s best friend in Congress, Senator James Eastland of Mississippi, had suspended the nomination hearings. “Gray is dead on the floor,” Ehrlichman told the president. “He accused your counsel of being a liar,” Haldeman chimed in. “He may be dead,” said Dean, “ ’cause I may shoot him.” Laughter all around—the last laugh captured on the White House tapes. Late on the evening of Sunday, April 15, Ehrlichman telephoned Gray at home with bad news. Facing indictment, John Dean had determined to save himself by revealing his darkest secrets to a federal grand jury. “Dean has apparently decided to make a clean breast of things,” Ehrlichman told Gray. “One of the questions that apparently they’ve been asking him is about the envelopes that he turned over to you.” Gray was horrified. “What the hell am I going to do about that?” he said. “The only thing I can do with this is to deny it.” Two days later, the FBI’s Watergate investigators, at Mark Felt’s command, knocked at the gates of the White House. “I’m worried,” Ehrlichman told the president. “The FBI has just served a subpoena on our White House police.” It sought the names of the people who had been cleared to enter the White House on June 18, 1972. 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 5827-33  | Added on Saturday, August 23, 2014, 04:47 PM

Gray had served 361 days as the acting director of the FBI. His future was bleak. He faced years of criminal investigation. He contemplated killing himself. He suffered in the deepest shame for the rest of his life. Mark Felt was certain he would be chosen to lead the FBI. He was fooling himself. He served as the acting director for three hours. Nixon instead chose a Republican factotum named William D. Ruckelshaus, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, the newly created agency in charge of America’s natural resources. His decision seemed inexplicable to all concerned, including the nominee. But Nixon urged the job on him with an increasing ferocity over the course of an hour. 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 5856-59  | Added on Saturday, August 23, 2014, 04:49 PM

Backed by federal grand juries and the prosecutors who led them, the FBI’s investigators preserved the rule of law against the obstruction of justice. And under law, the agents were accomplishing an act of creative destruction that the radicals of the Left could only dream of achieving. They were bringing down the president of the United States. 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 77 | Loc. 1114-16  | Added on Monday, August 25, 2014, 10:33 PM

In addition, the New Orleans Mafia was one of the few mob families to conduct hits on government officials; the only others who dared to take such measures even occasionally were Trafficante’s Tampa mob and the Chicago Mafia, both allies of Marcello in drug trafficking and the JFK hit. 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 78 | Loc. 1120-23  | Added on Monday, August 25, 2014, 10:35 PM

One hundred was also the number of members in the New Orleans Mafia by October 15, 1890, when mob hit men shot the city’s Police Chief, David Hennessey, using a shotgun and a revolver. He died the following day, and though nineteen mobsters were indicted for the hit, all were acquitted thanks to witness intimidation and bribed jurors. In response to Hennessey’s assassination and the resulting acquittals, the public rioted and killed eleven of the Mafia men. But within two years, the New Orleans Mafia had fully recovered and was stronger than ever. 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 79 | Loc. 1131-34  | Added on Monday, August 25, 2014, 10:37 PM

Marcello quickly learned that it was better to have others commit his crimes, so he had two teenagers rob a grocery store. While Marcello was planning a follow-up crime with the two—another bank robbery—the teens were arrested. One of them told the authorities everything, and the police also arrested Marcello. In the future, Marcello would come to rely on only close family members and associates who could be trusted not to talk. 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 84 | Loc. 1213-20  | Added on Monday, August 25, 2014, 10:50 PM

Marcello became more powerful, wealthier, and more influential in the Mafia—and in Louisiana politics—with each passing year. At that time, officials ranging from US Attorney General Howard McGrath to FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover publicly expressed skepticism that the Mafia even existed. However, Tennessee Democratic Senator Estes Kefauver knew the Mafia was a very real threat, so in 1950, as Chairman of the Special Committee to Investigate Organized Crime in Interstate Commerce, he began a well-publicized investigation. In addition to targeting national crime figures such as Frank Costello, Kefauver called Marcello “the evil genius of organized crime in New Orleans” and held hearings there, on the mob boss’s own turf. Kefauver possibly singled out Marcello not only because of New Orleans’s long-standing reputation for vice but also because of an article by prominent muckraking newspaper columnist Drew Pearson, who described the low-public-profile Marcello as “the crime czar” of the city. 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 85 | Loc. 1230-31  | Added on Monday, August 25, 2014, 10:51 PM

In the meantime, Marcello grew even more powerful under the new Republican administration of President Dwight Eisenhower and especially his vice president, Richard Nixon. 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 87 | Loc. 1251-52  | Added on Monday, August 25, 2014, 10:56 PM

Trafficante “had a standard operating procedure for murder, which included the importation of hired killers from out of town and setting up patsies to take the fall.” 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Bookmark on Page 87 | Loc. 1261  | Added on Monday, August 25, 2014, 10:57 PM


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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 87 | Loc. 1260-64  | Added on Monday, August 25, 2014, 10:57 PM

Santo Trafficante spoke fluent Spanish and continued to spend time in Cuba as well as Tampa, with frequent visits to the “open” mob city of Miami. Because of his lack of a passport and US citizenship, Marcello could not easily or safely travel to Cuba, which by the 1950s was the Mafia’s gambling mecca for well-heeled travelers from the United States. Trafficante was one of the two main casino owners in Havana with the other being mob financial genius Meyer Lansky. Trafficante completely controlled one casino, the Sans Souci, and had shares in three more. 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 88 | Loc. 1265-68  | Added on Monday, August 25, 2014, 10:58 PM

For years it was thought that Marcello’s inability to travel to Cuba prevented him from holding a share in the mob’s Havana gambling industry, but as revealed here for the first time, that wasn’t the case. Decades later, in prison, Marcello made an admission to Jack Van Laningham, who reported that “he was partners with a man that ran the Mafia in Florida, [Santo] Trafficante, [and] they were [also] partners in a casino in Cuba, and made millions before Castro took over and shut them down.” 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 88 | Loc. 1269-73  | Added on Monday, August 25, 2014, 10:58 PM

Mafia casinos in Cuba had flourished under the brutal dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista, whose regime was embraced by Vice President Richard Nixon and tolerated by President Eisenhower. Nixon reportedly had business interests on the island with his mob-connected best friend, Charles “Bebe” Rebozo. Nixon had visited the Mafia casinos and had been given honors by Batista. The repressive Cuban dictator had partnered with mob bosses like Meyer Lansky and Santo Trafficante, who gave him a lucrative piece of the growing Havana casino industry. Meanwhile, much of the Cuban populace suffered from bad nutrition, low wages, and Batista’s vicious police state. 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 89 | Loc. 1278  | Added on Monday, August 25, 2014, 10:59 PM

Surprisingly, the CIA and Trafficante played both sides, providing small quantities of arms to Fidel Castro and his men. 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 89 | Loc. 1285-93  | Added on Monday, August 25, 2014, 11:01 PM

The Administration’s tolerance of the Mafia was such that Trafficante felt safe to return to New York State for a meeting just two weeks later, along with almost a hundred other mob bosses from across the country. The ever-cautious Carlos Marcello didn’t attend and instead sent “his most trusted brother, Joe” and his top two Dallas lieutenants, Joseph Civello and Joe Campisi Sr. Their agenda ranged from replacing Anastasia to providing assistance for Batista and Fidel Castro. The mobsters met at a secluded country estate near the small town of Apalachin, New York. Marcello’s caution proved to be justified when local officers raided the unusual meeting, arresting fifty-eight mob leaders, including Trafficante and Joe Marcello. They were detained only briefly, but the huge meeting, combined with the recent sensational front-page news of Anastasia’s assassination, only served to fuel the frustration of many Americans—and some members of Congress—that the Mafia seemed to operate with near impunity under J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI and the rest of the Eisenhower–Nixon Administration. 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 91 | Loc. 1307-11  | Added on Monday, August 25, 2014, 11:03 PM

The assassination of Attorney General–elect Patterson generated huge headlines across the country. Though the Eisenhower–Nixon Administration, including FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, had basically taken a hands-off approach to organized crime, National Guard General Walter Hanna pressured the Alabama Governor, who finally got Eisenhower to take action. Phenix City was placed under “Martial Rule” by the National Guard, putting the city under US military occupation. That drastic step finally ran the rackets out of Phenix City, though after a time they simply reorganized on a smaller scale across the river in Columbus, Georgia. 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 92 | Loc. 1319-24  | Added on Monday, August 25, 2014, 11:04 PM

One might think the Phenix City assassination would have caused the Eisenhower–Nixon Administration to declare war on organized crime, but it didn’t. J. Edgar Hoover continued to turn a blind eye toward the Mafia in general and Marcello in particular. Time magazine in 1975 first revealed secret meetings and friendship between Hoover and mob boss Frank Costello, which were confirmed by William Hundley, the Justice Department organized crime chief during the Kennedy Administration. Hoover’s predilection for gambling on horse races is now well known, and it’s also possible Hoover was blackmailed by the Mafia over his closeted homosexuality. 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 92 | Loc. 1324-26  | Added on Monday, August 25, 2014, 11:05 PM

Carlos Marcello’s partners had gotten away with murder, but they had lost the lucrative cash cow that was Phenix City. However, they learned from their mistakes, and the next time Marcello’s associates assassinated a government official, a patsy would be on hand to be quickly blamed and killed to divert suspicion from organized crime. 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Bookmark on Page 93 | Loc. 1340  | Added on Tuesday, August 26, 2014, 08:36 AM


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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 93 | Loc. 1338-43  | Added on Tuesday, August 26, 2014, 08:36 AM

Johnny Rosselli was very active in Guatemala in the mid-1950s, and his biographers documented from two sources that “Rosselli’s primary concern in Guatemala was to protect and advance the interests of” a New Orleans company with ties to Carlos Marcello. In 1956 Marcello decided that “Guatemala would be the most appropriate country” from which to obtain a fake birth certificate, since it “was easily accessible to New Orleans by air, telephone, and telegraph.” President Castillo Armas ruled the country, having been installed as dictator after the Eisenhower–Nixon Administration used the CIA to overthrow the liberal government of the democratically elected Jacobo Árbenz in 1954. * 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 95 | Loc. 1369-75  | Added on Tuesday, August 26, 2014, 08:40 AM

As Marcello later explained to Jack Van Laningham, he “tried to get into gambling in Vegas” using a front man, and “all was going good until the Nevada Gaming Commission learned that Carlos Marcello was involved. They were shut down and lost a great deal of money in the venture [and] he stayed clear of Vegas after that.” Marcello always tried to stay out of the limelight and the newspapers, and he could have all the gambling he wanted in Louisiana without worrying about a state Gaming Commission. Marcello stayed out of Las Vegas after that, even in the 1970s when he had a chance to put up money for the real casino depicted in Martin Scorsese’s film Casino. Instead, Marcello simply brokered that deal to the Kansas City mob, getting an enormous onetime (and untraceable) “finder’s fee” in the process, something the FBI learned but never revealed to the public. 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 96 | Loc. 1378-80  | Added on Tuesday, August 26, 2014, 08:40 AM

But unlike with Marcello, the US government didn’t realize Rosselli wasn’t a citizen, and it wouldn’t learn that until 1966, setting off a chain of events that would help trigger Watergate and lead to Rosselli’s gruesome 1976 murder on Trafficante’s orders, with Marcello’s support. But in 1957 the fifty-two-year-old Rosselli and the forty-seven-year-old Marcello still got along well. 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 96 | Loc. 1382-87  | Added on Tuesday, August 26, 2014, 08:41 AM

Willie Bioff—the key witness whose testimony had sent Rosselli to prison and ended his glamorous Hollywood lifestyle—was living in Phoenix and was good friends with Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater. Despite Bioff’s friendship with, and political support of, Senator Goldwater, Rosselli and the Mafia got their revenge: Bioff was killed when his truck exploded in his driveway at his Phoenix home on November 4, 1955, destroyed by “a dynamite bomb.” No one was arrested for the murder. Three years later Rosselli approved the murder of another good friend of Goldwater’s, Gus Greenbaum, owner of the Riviera casino and “mayor” of the Las Vegas strip. 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 97 | Loc. 1391-93  | Added on Tuesday, August 26, 2014, 08:42 AM

Rosselli may well have used his mutual associate with Marcello—Santo Trafficante—to provide the hit men. Employing out-of-town hit men was a technique both Trafficante and Marcello increasingly used since it was difficult to tie them to a crime and locale. Five years later all three men would employ a variation of that approach against JFK. 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 99 | Loc. 1420-23  | Added on Tuesday, August 26, 2014, 08:46 AM

Marcello’s main office had one other notable feature, “a sign on the door leading out” that according to his biographer gave visitors a chilling reminder of whom they “were dealing with”: THREE CAN KEEP A SECRET IF TWO ARE DEAD 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 100 | Loc. 1436-44  | Added on Tuesday, August 26, 2014, 08:48 AM

There appeared to be no concerns for Carlos Marcello on the federal front since Richard Nixon enjoyed increasing power and respect as the 1950s advanced, due to a series of health issues plaguing President Eisenhower. Nixon had weathered the only two potential scandals he’d recently faced, aided in one case by his long-time patron, billionaire Howard Hughes. The other scandal involved exposure of the mob ties of attorney Murray Chotiner, Nixon’s closest advisor. Richard Nixon and Murray Chotiner had longtime and well-documented links to the Mafia. Los Angeles mobster Mickey Cohen admitted giving Nixon $5,000 (nearly $50,000 in today’s money) in Nixon’s first race for Congress in California, in 1946. Cohen upped that to $75,000 (almost $700,000 today) for Nixon’s 1950 Senate run. Chotiner, Nixon’s chief political aide and strategist from 1946 until the time of Watergate, had arranged those payoffs. Chotiner, an attorney, and his brother had represented 221 of Cohen’s bookmakers in just one four-year period. 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 101 | Loc. 1452-55  | Added on Tuesday, August 26, 2014, 08:50 AM

In 1957 Robert Kennedy teamed up with his brother, Senator John F. Kennedy from Massachusetts. They were investigating Teamster corruption starting with union president Dave Beck, the only major union leader to support the generally anti-union Eisenhower–Nixon ticket. After corruption charges forced Beck to step down, John and Robert Kennedy focused on his successor, Jimmy Hoffa. 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 102 | Loc. 1463-64  | Added on Tuesday, August 26, 2014, 08:51 AM

from newspaper headlines alone, there was clearly a need for someone to take on the Mafia in America since J. Edgar Hoover and the Eisenhower–Nixon Administration seemed so reluctant to do so. Starting in the late 1950s, John F. Kennedy took up that fight. 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 105 | Loc. 1495-1500  | Added on Tuesday, August 26, 2014, 08:54 AM

his top Washington attorney, Jack Wasserman, one of the country’s best immigration attorneys. The fact that he chose Wasserman instead of a criminal defense attorney or a high-profile Washington power attorney showed that what Marcello feared most was his lack of citizenship. Unlike Santo Trafficante, Marcello couldn’t duck the Kennedys’ subpoena by traveling to another country. As a noncitizen, if Marcello ever left the United States he might be denied reentry, so Wasserman told him he had no other recourse than to report for the hearing. With his bow tie and glasses, Wasserman looked nothing like a typical mob lawyer and more like a university professor. 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 107 | Loc. 1522-28  | Added on Tuesday, August 26, 2014, 08:57 AM

Senator Sam Ervin of North Carolina—later chairman of the famed Senate Watergate Committee—began by reminding Marcello of his two felony convictions and then asked “how a man with that kind of record can stay in the United States for five years, nine months, twenty-four days after he is found to be an undesirable alien. . . . How have you managed to stay here?” Marcello eventually answered, “I wouldn’t know.” Senator Ervin expressed his frustration at the current Eisenhower–Nixon Administration, saying, “[T]he American people are entitled to more protection at the hands of the law than to have an undesirable alien who has committed serious felonies remain in this country.” He summed up by essentially calling Marcello a leech who preyed “upon law-abiding people [and who] ought to be removed from this country.” 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 108 | Loc. 1537-41  | Added on Tuesday, August 26, 2014, 08:59 AM

On June 9, 1959, RFK verbally sparred with Sam Giancana, trying to draw him into a revealing response. RFK asked, “Would you tell us, if you have opposition from anybody, that you dispose of them by having them stuffed in a trunk? Is that what you do, Mr. Giancana?” Giancana appeared to stifle a laugh, not taking the Committee and RFK’s questions seriously, leading RFK to ask, “Is there something funny about it, Mr. Giancana?” and “Would you tell us anything about any of your operations, or will you just giggle every time I ask you a question? I thought only little girls giggled, Mr. Giancana.” 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 109 | Loc. 1545-51  | Added on Tuesday, August 26, 2014, 09:00 AM

As they sought to question additional mob leaders, Senator Kennedy and RFK were stymied on one occasion by the CIA, foreshadowing problems with the Agency that would plague the two men even after JFK become President. In a 1975 report for the New York Times that was confirmed by two RFK aides, Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Seymour Hersh discovered that in 1959 the CIA had given a “free pass” to one mob boss for his help in trying to assassinate Fidel Castro for the US government. When RFK and his aides tried to question him in private, the Mafia chief replied, “You can’t touch me. I’ve got immunity.” Robert demanded to know “who gave you immunity?” The Mafia boss replied, “The CIA. I’m working for them, but I can’t talk about it. Top Secret.” 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 110 | Loc. 1566-67  | Added on Tuesday, August 26, 2014, 10:19 AM

To show he wasn’t afraid of the Kennedys or the Committee, Trafficante had ordered another mob hit the previous day, and Robert had to announce in the hearing that he had been informed “there was another one yesterday.” Like the others, it would never be solved 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 111 | Loc. 1580-81  | Added on Tuesday, August 26, 2014, 10:22 AM

In Marcello’s organization, there was a man well suited for the role of messenger and courier between the two godfathers: Jack Ruby. 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 112 | Loc. 1588-91  | Added on Tuesday, August 26, 2014, 10:22 AM

Originally born Jack Rubenstein in Chicago on March 25, 1911, Jack Ruby dropped out of high school and began working for the mob. According to Seth Kantor—the respected journalist who saw Ruby at Parkland Hospital soon after JFK was shot—the young Ruby delivered “sealed envelopes at the rate of $1 per errand for Chicago’s No. 1 racketeer, Al Capone.” 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 112 | Loc. 1594-96  | Added on Tuesday, August 26, 2014, 10:23 AM

By 1939 Ruby was back in Chicago as a “secretary to the Waste Handlers Union” and was questioned “in connection with the murder of the secretary-treasurer of the local.” Even though the victim was Ruby’s friend, he gave no useful information to the police, showing those in power that he could be trusted not to talk. 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 113 | Loc. 1610-12  | Added on Tuesday, August 26, 2014, 10:26 AM

This was the first of many times Ruby would appear to cooperate with authorities in return for protecting his—and his superiors’—criminal activities or to find out what authorities knew. 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 114 | Loc. 1618-20  | Added on Tuesday, August 26, 2014, 10:26 AM

Jack Ruby’s close relationship to law enforcement, a major factor in the aftermath of JFK’s assassination, began to develop in the 1950s. It continued to grow into the early 1960s, when—according to one Warren Commission file—Ruby “was well acquainted with virtually every officer of the Dallas Police force.” 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 114 | Loc. 1622-25  | Added on Tuesday, August 26, 2014, 10:27 AM

It’s clear now, and confirmed by Carlos Marcello’s own comments about Ruby during CAMTEX, that Ruby was Marcello’s pay-off man for the Dallas Police. The police corruption wasn’t just about money, since Ruby was soon involved in various nightclubs and with strippers and prostitutes. It was said that policemen never had to pay for a drink at Ruby’s club and sometimes were even provided with women. 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 115 | Loc. 1635-37  | Added on Tuesday, August 26, 2014, 10:28 AM

Ruby appears to have had a small role in making sure Marcello’s heroin that flowed through Dallas from Mexico and the Texas ports stayed en route to Chicago. Declassified files show that that same heroin network would play a role in JFK’s murder: One female heroin courier who worked for Ruby tried to expose the plot to assassinate JFK just prior to his murder. 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 116 | Loc. 1643-47  | Added on Tuesday, August 26, 2014, 10:29 AM

Also in the late 1950s, FBI files—most provided to the Warren Commission—show that Ruby became involved in gunrunning to Cuba with several associates of Santo Trafficante, among them gangsters Norman Rothman and Dominick Bartone, as well as corrupt former Cuban president Carlos Prio. Los Angeles mobster Mickey Cohen was also running guns to Cuba at that time, and “Ruby told one of his business partners . . . he was a close friend of Mickey Cohen.” The FBI documented numerous ties between Ruby and Cohen’s girlfriend, a well-known burlesque dancer from Texas whose stage name was Candy Barr. 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 116 | Loc. 1651-55  | Added on Tuesday, August 26, 2014, 10:30 AM

IN 1959 RUBY’S Cuban gunrunning and arms deals with Castro’s men made him an excellent candidate to be a courier/messenger between Ruby’s boss Marcello and the detained Trafficante. But Ruby had an even better cover for his activities because he’d recently become an informant for the FBI. In March of 1959, Ruby had been interviewed by the Bureau and asked to become an informant. Ruby, no doubt after checking with mob superiors in Dallas such as Civello or Campisi, agreed. Such an arrangement could give him an extra degree of protection for his illegal activities and a way to find out what crimes the FBI was interested in. 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 117 | Loc. 1656-57  | Added on Tuesday, August 26, 2014, 10:30 AM

In 1959 Ruby reported to the FBI “on at least eight occasions,” but according to historian Gerald D. McKnight, the Warren Commission hid that fact from the American public. 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 117 | Loc. 1669-71  | Added on Tuesday, August 26, 2014, 10:31 AM

While Trafficante was in jail in Cuba, Jack Ruby attempted arms deals to help secure Trafficante’s release, according to several accounts. Scott Malone found that “Congressional investigators” noted in a “briefing memorandum” that “in 1959 Jack Ruby traveled to Cuba and visited Santo Trafficante in jail.” 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 118 | Loc. 1676-81  | Added on Tuesday, August 26, 2014, 10:32 AM

Ruby had many associates in common with Trafficante, but the most likely person to have taken Ruby to see Trafficante was gambling supervisor Lewis McWillie, whom Ruby described as “high class.” Even after the Revolution, McWillie was one of many mobsters still operating in Cuba. While most people think that Fidel Castro shut all the Mafia casinos when he took over, that’s only partially true. For economic reasons, they were quickly reopened. Frank Fiorini (who later renamed himself Frank Sturgis), a Trafficante hoodlum who’d fought alongside Fidel, was made the liaison between the Cuban government and the mob bosses who still ran—even if they no longer owned—the casinos. The former mob casinos would remain open until the fall of 1961. 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 120 | Loc. 1700-1704  | Added on Tuesday, August 26, 2014, 10:34 AM

Ruby had one more unusual role to play in Cuba, in early 1960. The Hoffa-brokered plots between the CIA and the Mafia to kill Fidel that began in 1959 were continuing in the early months of 1960, though neither Trafficante nor Ruby’s boss Marcello had any documented role in those plots. However, former Cuban mob powerhouse Meyer Lansky had reportedly placed a million-dollar bounty on killing Fidel Castro, since, unlike Trafficante, Lansky had been unable to reach an accommodation with the Castro brothers. 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 120 | Loc. 1713-15  | Added on Tuesday, August 26, 2014, 10:35 AM

A few journalists have asked if Jack Ruby was “supplying the pistols to McWillie so they could be [used in an assassination] plot against Castro.” Some evidence does indicate that the episode could have been part of the continuing plots to kill Fidel brokered by Hoffa between the CIA and the Mafia. 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 121 | Loc. 1721-23  | Added on Tuesday, August 26, 2014, 10:36 AM

One Colt Cobra definitely purchased by Jack Ruby in January 1960 would find greater infamy more than three years later. It was the pistol Ruby used to shoot accused assassin Lee Oswald on live television on November 24, 1963. Ruby’s notorious gun at the very least came out of his involvement with the Mafia and possibly from the mob’s early work with the CIA to kill Fidel. 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 122 | Loc. 1730-35  | Added on Tuesday, August 26, 2014, 10:37 AM

Ruby also owed large sums to the IRS throughout the early 1960s, first approaching $20,000 and by 1963 $40,000. In today’s dollars, that’s $240,000. Yet the House Select Committee on Assassinations found that Paul repeatedly loaned Ruby money, “which eventually may have totaled $15,000” plus an additional “larger sum of money (allegedly $15,000 to $17,000) to assist Ruby” with his taxes. In today’s dollars, that’s at least $180,000. Yet Ralph Paul was only the owner of a relatively small restaurant in Dallas, the Bull-Pen Drive-In, and it’s impossible to imagine he could have come up with those sums let alone continue to loan money to a man who owed the IRS so much money. 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 122 | Loc. 1742-45  | Added on Tuesday, August 26, 2014, 10:37 AM

House Select Committee investigators were confused when Joe Campisi said in an FBI interview that “Ralph Paul [was] his partner.” Campisi’s Egyptian Restaurant was large and popular, and Campisi was powerful, so he certainly didn’t need Ralph Paul as a partner. However, Joe Campisi’s comment makes perfect sense if he was funneling Marcello money to Paul as part of Paul’s fronting ownership of the Carousel for the mobsters. 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 123 | Loc. 1746-49  | Added on Tuesday, August 26, 2014, 10:38 AM

Still, by the later part of 1960, Ruby got to call the shots at the Carousel and act like a club owner, even though in reality he was simply taking a small percentage of the club’s revenues as a kind of salary for managing the club on behalf of Carlos Marcello. However, this arrangement would have huge ramifications for Marcello less than three years later, when it gave the godfather leverage to get Ruby to risk his life for the godfather after JFK’s murder. 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 125 | Loc. 1762-69  | Added on Tuesday, August 26, 2014, 10:40 AM

Eisenhower had left Washington the previous year when Fidel Castro had come to the United States, leaving it to Nixon to meet with the new Cuban leader. Instead of offering US financial aid as Castro had hoped (since the former US-backed dictator, Fulgencio Batista—a friend of Nixon—had fled with much of the Cuban treasury), Nixon had lectured Castro and offered no help. Nixon had also confided to others that he felt Castro was dangerous, and soon after that the CIA began working with Jimmy Hoffa to have the three northeastern mob leaders kill Fidel. Those plots had not worked, and now the 1960 election was rapidly approaching. Vice President Nixon apparently thought that if Castro was killed before the election, and US troops had to be sent into Cuba to protect Americans and American interests, the voting public would chose the eight-year veteran Vice President over the young and relatively inexperienced Senator Kennedy. Nixon told “a press aide [that] the toppling of Castro would be ‘a real trump card’” for the election, according to Anthony Summers. 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 128 | Loc. 1795-99  | Added on Tuesday, August 26, 2014, 10:42 AM

Robert Maheu (an ex-FBI agent and former partner of Guy Banister) later admitted that Richard Nixon was personally behind the ramped-up CIA–Mafia plots to assassinate Fidel Castro and that Nixon had chosen Maheu to be the CIA’s new cutout to the Mafia. Eight years later Maheu confided to his friend Pierre Salinger “that the CIA had been in touch with Nixon, who had asked them to go forward with this project. . . . It was Nixon who had him do a deal with the Mafia in Florida to kill Castro.” 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 130 | Loc. 1823-26  | Added on Tuesday, August 26, 2014, 10:46 AM

ONE IMPORTANT PART of the CIA–Mafia plots that began in 1960 wasn’t connected to those plots until 2012. This was the fact that the mob bosses involved in the plots—including Marcello, Trafficante, and Giancana—paid a huge bribe to Vice President Richard Nixon the same month the plots began. Nixon’s background shows how that bribe came about and why Nixon turned to the Mafia to kill Castro in the first place. 
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- Highlight on Page 130 | Loc. 1833-34  | Added on Tuesday, August 26, 2014, 06:54 PM

Nixon also received support from his first race onward from billionaire Howard Hughes. Once Nixon became Vice President, he received even more favors and illicit money from Hughes. Twice Hughes had his top covert operative, Robert Maheu, help Nixon with difficult problems. 
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- Highlight on Page 131 | Loc. 1836-38  | Added on Tuesday, August 26, 2014, 06:54 PM

“‘Santo,’ recalled his attorney Frank Ragano, ‘viewed Nixon as a realistic, conservative politician who was not a zealot and would not be hard on him and his mob friends. The Mafia had little to fear from Nixon.’” 
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- Highlight on Page 131 | Loc. 1838-41  | Added on Tuesday, August 26, 2014, 06:54 PM

Marcello and Trafficante wanted to do all they could to ensure a Nixon victory, especially since their ally Jimmy Hoffa was soon expected to face a federal indictment as a result of all the attention the Kennedys’ hearings had focused on him. Accordingly, Marcello began to gather money for Nixon, and in addition to Trafficante, Giancana later claimed that he had contributed, as did Tony Provenzano, a Mafia Teamster official in New Jersey who was close to Marcello. 
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- Highlight on Page 131 | Loc. 1842-50  | Added on Tuesday, August 26, 2014, 06:55 PM

In September 1960, Richard Nixon received a bribe of at least $500,000 from the same mob bosses who began working that month on his CIA–Mafia plot to kill Fidel. Prior to September 26, 1960, Teamster President Hoffa—facing an expected indictment for crimes exposed by the Kennedys—went to Louisiana “to meet Carlos Marcello.” As first revealed by Hoffa expert Dan Moldea, a Louisiana-based Hoffa aide, Grady Edward Partin, who later “turned government informant,” was with Hoffa at the meeting. Partin said, “Marcello had a suitcase filled with $500,000 cash which was going to Nixon.” That was only half of a promised total payment to Nixon of $1 million (more than $6 million in today’s dollars), with “the other half coming from the mob boys in New Jersey and Florida.” The Florida mobster contributing was Santo Trafficante, who was at the time joining the CIA–Mafia plots. Among the “mob boys” in New Jersey was Mafia capo Tony Provenzano, who was close to Marcello. In a boast to a family member, Sam Giancana claimed that he was also part of the group “giving the Nixon campaign a million bucks.” 
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- Highlight on Page 132 | Loc. 1858-61  | Added on Tuesday, August 26, 2014, 06:56 PM

However, Marcello’s illicit cash for Nixon had another important goal: According to Grady Partin, Marcello said he “hoped . . . to extract a pledge that a Nixon administration would not deport him.” Marcello’s huge bribe to the Vice President also raises the possibility that an earlier payment to Nixon might have been the reason Marcello hadn’t been deported during Nixon’s Vice Presidency. 
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- Highlight on Page 133 | Loc. 1865-66  | Added on Tuesday, August 26, 2014, 06:57 PM

That was really a primary reason the CIA wanted to use the Mafia in the first place, to give the public an entity other than the CIA or the US government to blame for the murder. 
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- Highlight on Page 133 | Loc. 1869-74  | Added on Tuesday, August 26, 2014, 06:58 PM

Two plots to poison Fidel can be documented in the weeks leading up to the 1960 Presidential election. One involved Richard Cain, a “made” Chicago mobster who also worked in Chicago law enforcement. The other effort included Frank Fiorini, the mob associate who had fought for Fidel’s forces and then become the liaison between Fidel and the mobsters who ran (and had owned) the Havana casinos. But Fiorini had since fled Cuba and was now working for the CIA. Years later Fiorini would change his name to Frank Sturgis and become infamous as one of the Watergate burglars working for E. Howard Hunt. Though Fiorini’s mob and CIA ties have since been documented, those links would not become widely known during the Watergate scandal. 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 133 | Loc. 1875-80  | Added on Tuesday, August 26, 2014, 06:58 PM

CIA officer E. Howard Hunt played a major role in the Agency’s covert plot to eliminate Fidel in the fall of 1960. If Castro was killed by mob assassins and US military forces were deployed to protect Americans in Cuba, it would take only a small group of trained exiles to help install another US-backed strongman or dictator. Hunt was helping oversee the political side of the training of such a small force (a few hundred men at that time). Though experienced with coups, at that point Hunt had no experience with the Mafia. To address that issue, in September 1960 longtime mob associate Bernard Barker was assigned as Hunt’s assistant, a position he would maintain for years. 
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- Highlight on Page 134 | Loc. 1881-85  | Added on Tuesday, August 26, 2014, 06:59 PM

He originally had dual American–Cuban citizenship but because of his service in Cuba’s brutal and corrupt secret police, his US citizenship was revoked in the mid-1950s. Barker and Hunt say that Barker worked for the CIA for several years in the 1950s, though according to Barker’s released CIA file, he began working for the Agency only in the spring of 1959, when he was forty-one. After Barker left Cuba (and possibly before), he became a longtime associate of Santo Trafficante’s mob, though an FBI memo says that since “the late 1940’s” Barker had been involved “in gangster activities in Cuba.” 
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- Highlight on Page 134 | Loc. 1885-89  | Added on Tuesday, August 26, 2014, 07:00 PM

FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover got wind of the secret plots, as verified by an October 18, 1960, memo to a high CIA official overseeing the plots, in which Hoover said that “during recent conversations with several friends, [Sam] Giancana [said] the ‘assassin’ had arranged with a girl, not further described, to drop a ‘pill’ in some drink or food of Castro’s.” Hoover’s description perfectly matches other descriptions of Frank Fiorini’s part of the CIA–Mafia plot. 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 135 | Loc. 1892-93  | Added on Tuesday, August 26, 2014, 07:00 PM

That the son of one of America’s richest men would need Giancana’s help to win in heavily Democratic Chicago, whose powerful Mayor, Richard Daley, was JFK’s close ally, strains credibility. 
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- Highlight on Page 135 | Loc. 1901-4  | Added on Tuesday, August 26, 2014, 07:01 PM

Despite those stories in the press, the Agency continued the CIA–Mafia assassination plots into December of 1960 and into 1961 without telling the new President. December 1960 was an especially active time. That month New Orleans private detective Guy Banister was linked to a CIA plot to stage a fake attack on the US naval base at Guantánamo, Cuba, to provide a pretext for a US attack on Cuba. However, Cuban authorities got wind of the plot and arrested forty Cubans involved. 
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- Highlight on Page 136 | Loc. 1909-10  | Added on Tuesday, August 26, 2014, 07:01 PM

In addition, “in late 1960, the Agency sent a sniper rifle to Havana via diplomatic pouch,” according to CIA Congressional testimony uncovered by historian David Kaiser. 
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- Highlight on Page 136 | Loc. 1912-16  | Added on Tuesday, August 26, 2014, 07:02 PM

As the CIA would reluctantly admit years later in Congressional hearings, it had begun a program in 1960 to eliminate problematic foreign leaders, ominously named ZR/RIFLE. The CIA was also using ZR/RIFLE to try to assassinate another foreign leader, the charismatic Patrice Lumumba of the Congo, an attempt that succeeded shortly before JFK was sworn in. Involved in that assassination effort was a European assassin recruiter for the CIA code-named QJWIN. As detailed later, QJWIN would also be used in the plots to kill Fidel Castro and would surface in relation to JFK’s murder. 
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- Highlight on Page 138 | Loc. 1935-39  | Added on Tuesday, August 26, 2014, 07:04 PM

The secret CIA exile training going on outside New Orleans gave Guy Banister and David Ferrie opportunities to become involved in the covert operation. In an unusual foreshadowing of events to come, it’s well documented that one of Banister’s associates even used the name “Oswald”—then in the Soviet Union—as an alias when trucks were purchased for Cuban exiles at a New Orleans Ford dealership. One of Banister’s associates involved had briefly employed Oswald when he was a teenager, which is probably why the name of the well-publicized defector was used. 
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- Highlight on Page 138 | Loc. 1939-40  | Added on Tuesday, August 26, 2014, 07:04 PM

More important, as New Orleans became a center of covert Cuban exile activity—a role that would continue into 1963—Marcello became involved in those operations. 
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- Highlight on Page 138 | Loc. 1944-48  | Added on Tuesday, August 26, 2014, 07:05 PM

Officially, Hunt worked with exile leaders such as Tony Varona and Manuel Artime (Hunt’s best friend), who were supposed to run Cuba after Fidel was gone. However, the CIA admits that Varona was also working at the same time on the CIA–Mafia plots with his associate Santo Trafficante, as was Artime. Much evidence shows the same was true for Hunt and Barker, who were also involved in the CIA–Mafia plots since the new exile leadership of Cuba would have to be ready to take over as soon as the Mafia assassinated Fidel. Barker’s work for Trafficante could help that coordination. 
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- Highlight on Page 139 | Loc. 1949-51  | Added on Tuesday, August 26, 2014, 07:05 PM

Confirmation of Hunt’s CIA work with Rosselli in March 1961 came only in 2006, when former CIA Agent Bayard Stockton wrote that “in March 1961 [Johnny] Rosselli went to the Dominican Republic, accompanied by Howard Hunt of the CIA.” 
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- Highlight on Page 140 | Loc. 1968-70  | Added on Tuesday, August 26, 2014, 07:07 PM

Even as the CIA Director ignored Commander Almeida’s comments and kept them—and the CIA–Mafia plots and fake Guantánamo attack plans—secret from JFK, President Kennedy expressed his dissatisfaction with the CIA’s proposed landing site near the city of Trinidad. 
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- Highlight on Page 140 | Loc. 1971-75  | Added on Tuesday, August 26, 2014, 07:07 PM

Accordingly, the CIA chose a new beachhead on Cuba’s southwest coast in an area called the Bay of Pigs. In a tragic irony of history, when Fidel divided command of Cuba into thirds for defense against the anticipated invasion, Commander Almeida was given control of the portion of Cuba that included the Bay of Pigs. If the CIA had told JFK about Almeida, who could have been encouraged to remain in place and assist the United States, history could have been radically different. 
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- Highlight on Page 140 | Loc. 1977-78  | Added on Tuesday, August 26, 2014, 07:08 PM

Tunisian-born Marcello, who wasn’t a citizen and had only falsified birth records from Guatemala. 
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- Highlight on Page 141 | Loc. 1980-82  | Added on Tuesday, August 26, 2014, 07:08 PM

On April 4, 1961, when Carlos Marcello went to the local INS office for what he thought was a routine visit, he was detained and then flown to Guatemala without a hearing. RFK publicly took full responsibility “for the expulsion of” Marcello and the following week had the IRS file “tax liens in excess of $835,000 against” Marcello and his wife. 
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- Highlight on Page 141 | Loc. 1985-89  | Added on Tuesday, August 26, 2014, 07:09 PM

The US-backed dictator of Guatemala, already under pressure from his country’s press and populace for allowing the US-supported Cuban exile training, faced new scrutiny for allowing a notorious American godfather to reside in the country. He ordered Marcello and his American attorney detained and escorted to the border. From there Marcello was taken “20 miles into Honduras [and] unceremoniously dumped . . . on a forested hilltop with no signs of civilization in sight.” The man who was America’s most powerful godfather now had to scramble through the jungle-lined back roads of Honduras in his expensive Gucci shoes. 
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- Highlight on Page 141 | Loc. 1989-96  | Added on Tuesday, August 26, 2014, 07:10 PM

According to Marcello biographer John Davis, “Still wearing their city clothes and their city shoes stuffed with cash,” Marcello and his associate “had little to drink or eat. . . . Marcello found breathing difficult along the mountain-top road. He collapsed three times in the dust, complaining that he could not go on any farther, that he was finished, and that it was that rich kid Bobby Kennedy who had done this to them. ‘If I don’t make it . . .’ Carlos told [his associate] at one point as he lay exhausted in a roadside gutter, ‘tell my brother when you get back, about what dat kid Bobby done to us. Tell ’em to do what dey have to do.’” Before arriving at a small airport, the exhausted Marcello plunged “down a pathless slope. They ended up in a burrow, bleeding from thorns, bruised by rocks, with Marcello complaining of a severe pain in his side” from “three broken ribs.” 
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- Highlight on Page 142 | Loc. 2006-8  | Added on Tuesday, August 26, 2014, 07:11 PM

The link between the September 1960 Mafia–Nixon bribe and the fact that most of those contributing—Marcello, Trafficante, and Giancana—were also working at the behest of Nixon on his CIA–Mafia plot to kill Fidel was not publicly made until the publication of my book Watergate: The Hidden History in 2012. 
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- Highlight on Page 143 | Loc. 2017-19  | Added on Tuesday, August 26, 2014, 07:12 PM

Shortly before President Kennedy took office, Eisenhower had closed the US Embassy in Havana, depriving the United States—and President Kennedy—of a valuable listening post (and spy base) in Cuba. This lack of clandestine information from observers on the scene left JFK almost completely at the mercy of CIA officials regarding the situation in Cuba. 
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- Highlight on Page 144 | Loc. 2023-24  | Added on Tuesday, August 26, 2014, 07:14 PM

Even without Hunt, the CIA–Mafia plots continued, with Cuban exile leader—and Trafficante associate—Tony Varona playing a key role. 
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- Highlight on Page 144 | Loc. 2025-29  | Added on Tuesday, August 26, 2014, 07:14 PM

However, the abrupt departure of Hunt—who handled exile leaders like Varona—left only a few officials who knew about the highly secret CIA–Mafia plots. Because Hunt was no longer involved, Varona was placed in a secure US military facility with the other exile leaders to await the outcome of the invasion and was unable to give the signal to poison Castro. That still left Dulles the fake attack plan on Guantánamo, set to be staged by the exiles trained near New Orleans. 
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- Highlight on Page 144 | Loc. 2032-33  | Added on Tuesday, August 26, 2014, 07:14 PM

They were there to risk their lives fighting Castro’s troops, not the US military. 
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- Highlight on Page 144 | Loc. 2033-37  | Added on Tuesday, August 26, 2014, 07:15 PM

The failure of those two operations, along with the lack of real secrecy about the operation and the CIA’s refusal to take advantage of Cuban Army Commander Almeida’s offer, primarily caused the Bay of Pigs disaster. JFK publicly took responsibility, but privately he was furious. Internal investigations followed, though they would not uncover the CIA–Mafia plots, the fake Guantánamo attack, or Commander Almeida’s offers. However, CIA Director Dulles and his second-in-command were eventually forced to 
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- Highlight on Page 145 | Loc. 2037  | Added on Tuesday, August 26, 2014, 07:15 PM

resign. 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 145 | Loc. 2044-46  | Added on Tuesday, August 26, 2014, 07:16 PM

Years later, after Watergate, Frank Fiorini—tired of the CIA’s spin that Hunt was a minor, bumbling CIA figure—said in a published interview that “Howard [Hunt] was in charge of other CIA operations involving ‘disposal’ [assassination] and . . . some of them worked.” 
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- Highlight on Page 146 | Loc. 2055-58  | Added on Tuesday, August 26, 2014, 07:17 PM

The FBI was fairly certain Marcello had been flown to Miami on a Dominican air force jet. An FBI memo later uncovered by John Davis suggests that “a high-ranking US government official may have intervened with the Dominican Republic on Marcello’s behalf,” identifying a key player as “Senator Russell Long of Louisiana, who had received financial aid from Marcello, [and who] had been very much concerned with the Marcello deportation.” Long would later serve on the Warren Commission. 
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- Highlight on Page 147 | Loc. 2074-77  | Added on Tuesday, August 26, 2014, 07:19 PM

That may be why Helms wouldn’t tell McCone about his use of the Mafia even when Helms began to expand the plots. To a later Senate committee, John McCone “testified that he was not briefed about the assassination plots by Dulles, Bissell, Helms, or anyone else,” something Helms confirmed in his own testimony. Also kept in the dark about the plots’ continuation were President Kennedy and Robert Kennedy. 
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- Highlight on Page 148 | Loc. 2080-81  | Added on Tuesday, August 26, 2014, 07:20 PM

Those plots would play a central role in helping Marcello and his partners kill JFK in a way that would force high CIA officials such as Richard Helms to cover up crucial information after JFK’s assassination. 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 148 | Loc. 2088-95  | Added on Tuesday, August 26, 2014, 07:21 PM

The prosecution of Cain’s associate had to be suppressed to avoid exposing the CIA–Mafia plots to kill Castro, which meant that RFK would have to be told something about the plots. On May 7, 1962, the CIA’s General Counsel and the Agency’s Director of Security told an angry Robert Kennedy about the CIA–Mafia plots from October 1960 to the Bay of Pigs and even into early 1962. However, the two assured RFK that the plots had been stopped. There are indications that a year earlier, RFK had learned in general terms about the CIA’s use of Giancana in some capacity during the Bay of Pigs, but it’s unclear whether he knew that Giancana was involved in assassinations or thought he was just helping to provide intelligence. In any event, the CIA admits that RFK was not told the plots were continuing even after he was assured they were over. 
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- Highlight on Page 149 | Loc. 2095-97  | Added on Tuesday, August 26, 2014, 07:21 PM

With lawyerly understatement, the CIA’s General Counsel, Lawrence Houston, later testified, “If you have seen Mr. Kennedy’s eyes get steely and his jaw set and his voice get low and precise, you get a definite feeling of unhappiness.” 
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- Highlight on Page 149 | Loc. 2097-2101  | Added on Tuesday, August 26, 2014, 07:22 PM

A frustrated Robert Kennedy said that because of the CIA, “It would be very difficult to initiate any prosecution against Giancana, as Giancana would immediately bring out the fact the US Government had approached him to arrange for the assassination of Castro.” That was a serious matter for Robert Kennedy, since the Chicago Mafia had been a particular target of his ever-increasing war against organized crime, along with Trafficante’s empire in Florida and Marcello’s organization in Louisiana. 
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- Highlight on Page 150 | Loc. 2109-14  | Added on Tuesday, August 26, 2014, 07:23 PM

In 1960 Sinatra had also introduced JFK to Judith Campbell, who later became his mistress. Shortly before JFK ended his friendship with Sinatra, J. Edgar Hoover sent “a top-secret memorandum to” Robert Kennedy “that summarized Judith Campbell’s telephone contact with the President as well as her association with Sam Giancana. A copy of the memo also went to a top JFK aide, with a cover note: ‘I thought you would be interested in learning of the following information which was developed in connection with the investigation of John Rosselli.’” * This event led to “Hoover’s lunch with the President on March 22, [1962],” which a JFK aide described as “bitter” and “which went on for no less than four hours.” 
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- Highlight on Page 150 | Loc. 2119-22  | Added on Tuesday, August 26, 2014, 07:24 PM

The fact that President Kennedy ended his relationships with two of Johnny Rosselli’s close friends was a critical blow to Marcello and Trafficante. Campbell and Sinatra had potentially represented ways that John or Robert Kennedy might have been pressured—or blackmailed—to back off from their massive assault on the Mafia. Now the mob bosses had few options to stop the Kennedys’ ever-increasing pressure on them. 
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- Highlight on Page 152 | Loc. 2148-52  | Added on Tuesday, August 26, 2014, 07:26 PM

The Northwoods proposals shocked President Kennedy, and he rejected them all. The plan apparently showed JFK that some of the Joint Chiefs—especially its Chairman, General Lemnitzer—were very much out of touch with JFK’s view of the world. Within months, JFK replaced Lemnitzer with General Maxwell Taylor, who had headed JFK’s Bay of Pigs investigation. General Taylor would remain Chairman of the Joint Chiefs throughout JFK’s Presidency and was so admired by RFK that he named one of his sons after him. 
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- Highlight on Page 153 | Loc. 2156-62  | Added on Tuesday, August 26, 2014, 07:27 PM

At first no one knew whether or not the Soviet missiles had nuclear warheads, but by September 19 evidence that they did had started accumulating. On September 27 the US military began preparing contingency invasion plans for Cuba. JFK was briefed on October 16 that “hard photographic evidence” from a U-2 spy plane flight confirmed that Soviet medium-range nuclear ballistic missiles were being installed in Cuba. He made plans to reveal the Crisis to the nation six days later, after having daily consultations with a full range of top military and civilian advisors. On October 22, 1962, at 7 p.m. (eastern time), President John F. Kennedy went on national television to tell the American people the country was on the brink of nuclear war. 
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- Highlight on Page 154 | Loc. 2165-67  | Added on Tuesday, August 26, 2014, 07:28 PM

As the Cuban Missile Crisis unfolded during those tense times, it’s important to remember that this is when recently returned “defector” Lee Oswald was allowed to take the job at the U-2 map firm in Dallas. The firm’s sensitive work would be visible on television throughout the Crisis, which makes it incredible that Oswald would be allowed to work there unless he had US intelligence connections. 
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- Highlight on Page 155 | Loc. 2188-92  | Added on Tuesday, August 26, 2014, 07:30 PM

Jimmy Hoffa, who had a number of criminal activities with Marcello and Trafficante, was under such intense pressure from the Kennedys that he decided to kill Robert Kennedy. In September 1962 Edward Partin, the Justice Department informant who had witnessed Marcello’s $500,000 bribe to Hoffa for Nixon, approached officials about becoming an informant after he heard Jimmy Hoffa discuss plans to assassinate Attorney General Kennedy. Partin had passed “a meticulous FBI polygraph examination” and had provided to RFK’s Justice Department a stream of information about Hoffa’s crimes. 
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- Highlight on Page 156 | Loc. 2208-10  | Added on Tuesday, August 26, 2014, 07:31 PM

Not content to depend on the aging and imperious Hoover, RFK had hired ten times more Justice Department Mafia prosecutors than were employed during the Eisenhower–Nixon Administration. The Kennedys’ pressure on Marcello, and on his close partners Santo Trafficante and Jimmy Hoffa, was unrelenting. Something had to be done. 
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- Highlight on Page 158 | Loc. 2221-25  | Added on Tuesday, August 26, 2014, 07:33 PM

Becker told the godfather that killing RFK would get Marcello “into a hell of a lot of trouble.” In answer, “Marcello invoked an old Italian proverb: ‘If you want to kill a dog, you don’t cut off the tail, you cut off the head.’” Becker says the implication was that “Bobby was the tail” and “if the President were killed then Bobby would lose his bite. Marcello added that he had a plan, to use ‘a nut’ to take the fall for the murder . . . then Marcello abruptly changed the subject, and the Kennedys were not mentioned again.” 
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- Highlight on Page 157 | Loc. 2211-25  | Added on Tuesday, August 26, 2014, 07:33 PM

In October 1962, Marcello briefly and unexpectedly explained his solution to the Kennedys’ war on the Mafia. The godfather was with two of his most trusted associates in the place he felt safest, the middle of his secluded sixty-four-hundred-acre Churchill Farms property outside New Orleans. With Marcello were his trusted longtime driver, Jack Liberto, and his favorite nephew, Carlo Roppolo. Joining the three was Ed Becker, a former public relations man for two Las Vegas casinos. Marcello felt comfortable talking to Becker not only because he’d worked for mob-run casinos but because Becker was now in business with Roppolo, who vouched for him. According to Becker, Marcello “pulled out a bottle and poured a generous round of scotch. The conversation wandered until Becker made an off-hand remark about Robert Kennedy and Marcello’s deportation. The reference struck a nerve, and Carlos jumped to his feet, exclaiming the Sicilian oath, ‘Livarsi na pietra di la scarpa!’ (Take the stone out of my shoe!).” Marcello didn’t speak Sicilian but was repeating an old saying he had heard many times from those who did. * As Becker later wrote, “Reverting to English, Marcello shouted, ‘Don’t worry about that Bobby son-of-a-bitch. He’s going to be taken care of.’” Becker told the godfather that killing RFK would get Marcello “into a hell of a lot of trouble.” In answer, “Marcello invoked an old Italian proverb: ‘If you want to kill a dog, you don’t cut off the tail, you cut off the head.’” Becker says the implication was that “Bobby was the tail” and “if the President were killed then Bobby would lose his bite. Marcello added that he had a plan, to use ‘a nut’ to take the fall for the murder . . . then Marcello abruptly changed the subject, and the Kennedys were not mentioned again.” 
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- Highlight on Page 158 | Loc. 2225-29  | Added on Tuesday, August 26, 2014, 07:33 PM

Many people knew that Robert Kennedy and Vice President Johnson hated each other, and one of them was the politically savvy Marcello, who “owned” US Senators, members of Congress, governors, and judges. If Marcello killed President Kennedy, then RFK’s status as the second-most-powerful man in America—with far more power than a typical Attorney General—would end, and with it so would RFK’s extraordinary war on Marcello and the Mafia. 
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- Highlight on Page 159 | Loc. 2250-53  | Added on Tuesday, August 26, 2014, 07:40 PM

“Aleman said that Trafficante” made the threat against JFK as “part of a long conversation that lasted from sometime during the day until late at night.” Aleman said the conversation with Trafficante “came about because” his cousin had helped get “someone out of a Cuban jail,” and Trafficante “wanted to help Aleman get out of his financial difficulties in return.” 
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- Highlight on Page 160 | Loc. 2261-65  | Added on Tuesday, August 26, 2014, 07:41 PM

Trafficante complained about JFK: “[H]ave you seen how his brother is hitting Hoffa . . . mark my word, this man Kennedy is in trouble and he will get what is coming to him.’ When Aleman disagreed with Trafficante and said he thought . . . Kennedy would be re-elected,” Trafficante said, “You don’t understand me. Kennedy’s not going to make it to the election. He is going to be hit.” Aleman told the government investigators “that Trafficante ‘made it clear . . . he was not guessing about the killing, rather he was giving the impression that he knew Kennedy was going to be killed.’” 
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- Highlight on Page 164 | Loc. 2318-29  | Added on Tuesday, August 26, 2014, 07:47 PM

Williams was near death when Castro’s army brought him to a makeshift field hospital. What happened next became the stuff of legend among Cuban exiles. As Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Haynes Johnson wrote, Williams and the other wounded men in a makeshift field hospital “were suddenly confronted by the person of Fidel Castro.” The badly wounded “Williams . . . recognized him at once. He groped under his thin mattress and tried to reach a .45 pistol he had concealed there earlier in the afternoon.” As Williams told me, and as other exiles confirmed to Haynes, Williams gathered enough strength to point the weapon at Castro and—at almost point-blank range—to pull the trigger. But the weapon only clicked—it was empty. Earlier, William’s compatriots had worried that he might be in such pain from his wounds and so depressed over the failure of the invasion and their capture that he might use the gun on himself, so they removed the bullets while Williams was unconscious. Castro’s men quickly set upon Williams, but Fidel ordered them not to harm the gravely injured man and instead ordered that Williams and the other wounded men be taken to a hospital in a nearby city. There, an old friend, Cuban Army Commander Juan Almeida, visited Williams. Almeida was no doubt frustrated that the United States had never acted on his clear signals of dissatisfaction with Castro. Commander Almeida told Williams that the time for action against Fidel was not right, that he was too powerful in the wake of his victory at the Bay of Pigs. 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 166 | Loc. 2339-43  | Added on Tuesday, August 26, 2014, 07:48 PM

JFK, RFK, their aides, and Williams were successful, and $53 million in food and medicine was transferred to Cuba. On Christmas Eve, the 1,113 prisoners returned to Miami. The Orange Bowl hosted a lavish ceremony for all the freed prisoners and their families, during which JFK made an impromptu pledge, promising to return the brigade’s flag to them “in a free Havana.” For President Kennedy, those weren’t just words. Operation Mongoose was officially over, but six months later, JFK, RFK, and Williams would have a new plan to topple Fidel, one that would trigger much of the secrecy that still surrounds JFK’s assassination. 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 168 | Loc. 2365-70  | Added on Tuesday, August 26, 2014, 07:50 PM

Even though the official record shows that Oswald moved to New Orleans on April 24, 1963, he had made at least one trip to the city well before that date, according to Congressional testimony cited in Chapter Two . The testimony was first obtained in 1975, meaning that critical information was not available to the Warren Commission. Oswald’s visit had occurred in March, February, or perhaps as early as January. His trip there involved some sort of Cuba-related activity, resulting in his being jailed in New Orleans and claiming to the INS to be a Cuban exile, even though he couldn’t speak Spanish. Within a few months, numerous witnesses would place Oswald as working with Guy Banister and David Ferrie. 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 169 | Loc. 2383-90  | Added on Tuesday, August 26, 2014, 07:51 PM

In early 1963—as Marcello and Trafficante were making plans to assassinate JFK—two related Congressional committees were looking into the Fair Play for Cuba Committee and into mail-order gun sales by the very firms from which Oswald ordered. Not only were both hearings in the newspapers of the time—making it easy to see where Banister or his associates got the idea to take advantage of them—but members of both Congressional committees had ties to Trafficante operatives Frank Fiorini and John Martino. Martino, who had finally been released from his Cuban prison the previous fall, was very bitter over his experience, blaming the Kennedy Administration for not securing his release sooner. In addition to his work for Trafficante, in 1963 Martino also became close to Johnny Rosselli, and the CIA admits that Martino—like Rosselli—became a CIA asset. Also like Rosselli (and Marcello and Trafficante), late in life Martino admitted his involvement in the JFK assassination plot. 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 170 | Loc. 2399-2402  | Added on Tuesday, August 26, 2014, 07:52 PM

As for the shooting at General Walker’s home, Banister belonged to the same white supremacist circles as General Walker, and associates of the two had been at a white supremacist conference in New Orleans just four days before someone shot into Walker’s home. Any role Oswald had in that incident was probably at Banister’s behest, an effort to plant evidence that would make Oswald look murderously violent after he was arrested for JFK’s assassination. 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 170 | Loc. 2402-9  | Added on Tuesday, August 26, 2014, 07:53 PM

A closer look at the timing of all these events shows just how intertwined they were and reveals other links to the Mafia’s role in JFK’s assassination. First, here’s a brief summary: Someone using the alias Alek Hidell and Oswald’s post office box in Dallas ordered a .38-caliber pistol on January 28 from a Los Angeles company and ordered a Mannlicher-Carcano rifle from a Chicago firm on March 12, 1963; both weapons were shipped the same day, March 20. On March 31 Oswald’s wife, Marina, photographed him in his backyard holding both weapons and the two Communist newspapers. * In the first week of April, Oswald was fired from his job at the U-2 map firm in Dallas, and he wrote his first letter to the head of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. On April 10 a bullet was fired into the Dallas home of General Walker. On April 24 Oswald moved to New Orleans, where he initially lived with his uncle, a bookie for Carlos Marcello. 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 171 | Loc. 2413-16  | Added on Tuesday, August 26, 2014, 07:53 PM

Hurt points out that under the laws at the time, “there would have been no record of his purchase and ownership” had he bought the guns at a store, as there would be for mail-order guns. By using the mails, Oswald appears to have deliberately left much more of a trail than if he had made the same purchase by spending a few minutes at a busy gun shop’s counter. 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 172 | Loc. 2425-28  | Added on Tuesday, August 26, 2014, 07:54 PM

Oswald may well have thought that if he followed the orders of Banister and Ferrie, he might someday be testifying before Congress like his boyhood hero from I Led Three Lives. Under that scenario, Oswald would think he was assisting the committees—by showing that a former Russian defector and a Fair Play for Cuba Committee member could easily order a rifle and pistol through the mail—when in actuality he was being set up. 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 173 | Loc. 2437-43  | Added on Tuesday, August 26, 2014, 07:56 PM

The shooting at General Walker’s was termed “an assassination attempt” by Walker and the Warren Commission, and when word of it emerged soon after JFK’s assassination, it seemed to some to clinch the case against the deceased Oswald. However, Walker’s background, the evidence, and the actions of Marcello associates such as Oswald and Ruby suggest a different interpretation of the shooting. General Walker became controversial in 1961 when JFK removed him from command of the Twenty-fourth Infantry Division in Germany for indoctrinating his soldiers with inflammatory material from the John Birch Society. That material made ridiculous claims, such as saying that former President Dwight Eisenhower was “consciously serving the Communist conspiracy, for all his adult life.” 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 174 | Loc. 2455-63  | Added on Tuesday, August 26, 2014, 07:57 PM

For the April 10 shooting at Walker’s, we have only the word of Walker that he was even in the room where the shot was fired. Otherwise, a shot fired into an empty room would be little more than a case of serious vandalism. Walker’s long-standing pattern of public lies and exaggerations in regard to civil rights and minorities calls into question his overly dramatic story of lowering his head just as the bullet was fired into the room. The Warren Commission and others have tried to pin the Walker shooting exclusively on Oswald to show a propensity for murderous violence that is otherwise missing in Oswald’s background. But numerous journalists and authors have pointed out serious problems with that theory. Witnesses saw at least two people at the shooting, and at least two cars were involved in suspicious activity around Walker’s house. None of the witnesses said any of the men looked like Oswald, and Walker’s night watchman said the driver of a suspicious 1957 Chevrolet he spotted casing the house a few days earlier looked “Cuban.” 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 175 | Loc. 2473-79  | Added on Tuesday, August 26, 2014, 07:58 PM

Guy Banister got what he wanted: publicity for a white supremacist ally, a test of whether he could manipulate Oswald into dealing with firearms, and several actions on Oswald’s part that would incriminate him after JFK’s death. Since Oswald had begun the Cuban phase of his covert activity just ten days before the Walker incident—with a letter to the national chairman of the small Fair Play for Cuba Committee—his actions in relation to Walker were probably designed to test his abilities for his new assignment. Unlike Oswald’s previous “defect and return” Russian assignment, anti-Castro operations demanded a new set of skills, from surreptitiously arranging and attending meetings (and keeping them secret from his wife) to dealing with firearms in a covert way. The Walker incident was a chance to see if Oswald, who had never served in combat, could handle that type of 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 175 | Loc. 2473-79  | Added on Tuesday, August 26, 2014, 07:59 PM

would incriminate him after JFK’s death. Since Oswald had begun the Cuban phase of his covert activity just ten days before the Walker incident—with a letter to the national chairman of the small Fair Play for Cuba Committee—his actions in relation to Walker were probably designed to test his abilities for his new assignment. Unlike Oswald’s previous “defect and return” Russian assignment, anti-Castro operations demanded a new set of skills, from surreptitiously arranging and attending meetings (and keeping them secret from his wife) to dealing with firearms in a covert way. The Walker incident was a chance to see if Oswald, who had never served in combat, could handle that type of assignment. 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 176 | Loc. 2484-87  | Added on Tuesday, August 26, 2014, 07:59 PM

John Davis said that Marcello received word that the “Supreme Court . . . declined to review the Marcello deportation action.” The decision was “prominently reported in the New Orleans papers” and “meant that all Carlos’s appeals were exhausted.” With that defeat, “the pressure increased many times over” on Marcello to take action against the Kennedys in order to preserve his freedom and his empire. 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 177 | Loc. 2494-97  | Added on Tuesday, August 26, 2014, 08:00 PM

His boss, Sam Giancana, was put under “lockstep” surveillance by the FBI at the urging of Robert Kennedy, crippling Giancana’s ability to function (and preventing him from having an active role in JFK’s assassination). Rosselli’s power in Las Vegas and Hollywood flowed from Sam Giancana’s high position with the Chicago mob, so unless Rosselli could eliminate RFK’s pressure on Giancana, Rosselli’s own future looked dim. 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 177 | Loc. 2502-4  | Added on Tuesday, August 26, 2014, 08:01 PM

While law-enforcement officials knew who did the killing, no one was ever tried and convicted for the crime. Such killings showed why Rosselli, Marcello, and Trafficante viewed a much more carefully planned hit on a much higher official as a viable solution to their mutual problems with the Kennedys. 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 178 | Loc. 2505-9  | Added on Tuesday, August 26, 2014, 08:02 PM

IN THE SPRING of 1963, Carlos Marcello made more documented remarks about assassinating President Kennedy, only this time his comments were not to Ed Becker. They were made to a much closer associate and were not disclosed until the publication of John Davis’s biography of Marcello in 1989. At that time, Marcello had been carefully planning JFK’s murder with his allies for about six months. Davis wrote that one spring weekend in 1963, Marcello was “at his [fishing] lodge” at Grand Isle, Louisiana, with “close friends from the old Sicilian families of New Orleans.” 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 178 | Loc. 2510-17  | Added on Tuesday, August 26, 2014, 08:02 PM

“While having a scotch with one of them in the kitchen,” a friend of Marcello’s friend “made a casual reference to an article he had read . . . about the Supreme Court upholding” Marcello’s deportation order. “At the mention of Robert Kennedy’s name, Carlos suddenly seemed to choke, spitting out his scotch on the floor. Recovering quickly, he formed the southern Italian symbol of . . . ‘the horn,’ with this left hand.” . . . “Holding the ancient symbol of hatred and revenge above his head, he shouted: ‘Don’t worry, man, ’bout dat Bobby. We goin’ to take care a dat sonofabitch.’” The friend asked if Marcello was going to “give it to Bobby,” but Marcello replied, “What good dat do? You hit dat man and his brother calls out the National Guard. No, you gotta hit de top man and what happen with de next top man? He don’t like de brother.” Marcello declared to his friend, “Sure as I stand here somethin’ awful is gonna happen to dat man.” 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 178 | Loc. 2518-21  | Added on Tuesday, August 26, 2014, 08:02 PM

Marcello knew that if he killed the Attorney General, JFK would simply order the National Guard or the Army into Marcello’s strongholds, much as had happened in 1954 in Phenix City, Alabama, after Trafficante’s associates killed the Alabama Attorney General–elect. That would render powerless the political figures in Louisiana and elsewhere that Marcello had corrupted and relied on for protection. For Marcello and his associates, that meant the answer was to kill JFK, not RFK. 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 179 | Loc. 2530-37  | Added on Tuesday, August 26, 2014, 08:04 PM

Many days later, Knight was talking to Kiger, and after a couple glasses of wine, Kiger became emotional when speaking about Marcello. Kiger said, “Something bad is going to happen to our President.” The distraught cook said that he had been cooking while Marcello and the Los Angeles mobster were talking. “They don’t think Kiger hears ’em”—but the man gleaned from their conversation that JFK was going to be the target of an attack planned by Marcello. Knight asked Kiger why Marcello would want to do such a thing to President Kennedy. Kiger replied that it was because of Robert Kennedy’s sudden deportation of Marcello and the harrowing ordeal Marcello had to endure. Not long after Marcello managed to sneak back into the United States, Kiger saw the godfather and said his hands and knees were still raw from injuries he had suffered in Central America. 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 180 | Loc. 2542-44  | Added on Tuesday, August 26, 2014, 08:04 PM

IN 1963 CARLOS Marcello actually had at least one face-to-face meeting with Lee Oswald. Marcello’s meeting with the nephew of his longtime bookie, Dutz Murret, was revealed by the godfather to Jack Van Laningham twenty-two years later, during the CAMTEX undercover FBI operation. 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 181 | Loc. 2555-60  | Added on Tuesday, August 26, 2014, 08:06 PM

BRILAB had grown out of the FBI investigation of a Teamster insurance scam involving Santo Trafficante. As a result of that investigation, a businessman named Joe Hauser agreed to become an informant for the FBI against Carlos Marcello. He wore a wire into Marcello’s office in the late 1970s, yielding the undercover BRILAB tapes that eventually sent Marcello to prison in the 1980s. According to FBI informant Hauser, Marcello told him that he and some of his men did indeed know Oswald: “I used to know his fuckin’ family. His uncle he work for me. Dat kid work for me, too.” Marcello indicated that Oswald had worked for a time as a runner for his gambling network, the same one that involved Oswald’s uncle. 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 181 | Loc. 2561-63  | Added on Tuesday, August 26, 2014, 08:06 PM

There are only two time periods when Oswald could have worked for Marcello as a runner: one in late April and early May 1963, while he was living with Dutz Murret, and the other in late July, August, and early to mid-September 1963, when Oswald was not officially employed but when several witnesses saw him working with Guy Banister and David Ferrie. 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 182 | Loc. 2574-76  | Added on Tuesday, August 26, 2014, 08:07 PM

In addition, Marcello told Van Laningham that he had brought two hit men over from Europe to shoot JFK, as mentioned in Chapter One and detailed in Chapter Twelve . Marcello’s admission about the two hit men was recorded on FBI undercover audiotape. 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 185 | Loc. 2607-12  | Added on Tuesday, August 26, 2014, 08:10 PM

Murret, Banister, and Ferrie weren’t the only links between Marcello and Oswald. The House Select Committee on Assassinations uncovered other ties between Oswald, his family, and the Marcello organization. As summarized in Vanity Fair, Oswald’s “childhood and youth had been spent in New Orleans [where] Oswald’s mother’s friends included a corrupt lawyer linked to Marcello’s crime operation and a man who served Marcello as bodyguard and chauffeur.” In the summer of 1963, Oswald was bailed out of jail by a man close to “one of Marcello’s oldest friends, Nofio Pecora,” the same man who was “called three weeks before the assassination by Jack Ruby.” 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Bookmark on Page 186 | Loc. 2623  | Added on Tuesday, August 26, 2014, 08:11 PM


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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 186 | Loc. 2621-30  | Added on Tuesday, August 26, 2014, 08:12 PM

By the spring of 1963, Jack Ruby owed a small fortune to the IRS—almost $160,000 in today’s dollars—and was desperate for money. The IRS filed tax liens against Ruby on March 13, 1963, and Ruby faced ruin unless he could find another source of money to pay his bills. According to Carlos Marcello, Ruby found the money he needed by taking it from cash that flowed through the Carousel Club. As Marcello explained to Jack Van Laningham years later, his organization actually controlled the Carousel strip club; Ruby merely managed it. Since the club was across the street from Dallas’s most distinguished hotel, the Adolphus, whenever conventions or company meetings were held at the hotel, business at the Carousel was especially brisk, and Ruby probably figured it would be easy to skim some of the proceeds for his own pressing financial needs. Marcello had hidden ownership of several clubs in Dallas, and his financial operatives would have known what all the clubs should be making at particular times of the year. When the Carousel came up short compared to in previous years or other clubs, it wouldn’t have been hard for Marcello’s people to confirm Jack’s ongoing theft. Marcello would have been furious that a longtime mobster like Ruby would take such action, knowing the deadly consequences if caught. 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 186 | Loc. 2632-36  | Added on Tuesday, August 26, 2014, 08:12 PM

Beginning in late April 1963, Ruby became of great interest to Marcello, and not just for his skimming. The former director of the House Select Committee on Assassinations wrote that “though the [Warren] Commission apparently believed that press speculation about the President’s trip [to Dallas] did not begin until September 13, 1963 . . . a story in the Dallas Times Herald on April 24, 1963 . . . quoted Vice President Johnson as saying that President Kennedy might ‘visit Dallas and other major Texas cities [that] . . . summer.’” 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 187 | Loc. 2638-43  | Added on Tuesday, August 26, 2014, 08:13 PM

Jack Ruby’s well-documented long-distance phone calls provide a clear record that he was becoming involved in something quite unusual by May 1963. After making fewer than ten long-distance calls in April 1963, Ruby suddenly more than doubled that total to twenty-five in May and more than thirty in June. He continued on that approximate pace through September, but after JFK’s trip to Dallas began firming up for November, Ruby’s total skyrocketed to more than 80 long-distance calls in October 1963 and more than 110 in just the first three weeks of November. Even in those calls, Ruby would have relied on coded words and phrases common in transacting Mafia business, often going through one or more intermediaries to get information to its ultimate destination. 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 187 | Loc. 2643-48  | Added on Tuesday, August 26, 2014, 08:13 PM

Carlos Marcello gave Jack Van Laningham the godfather’s own unvarnished view of Jack Ruby. According to the FBI file, in talking “about Jack Ruby,” Marcello said he “had met him in Dallas, Texas. He set him up in the bar business there. He said that Ruby was a homo son-of-a-bitch but good to have around to report to him what was happening in town. Marcello told us that all the police were on the take, and as long as he kept the money flowing they let him operate anything in Dallas that he wanted to. Ruby would come to Churchill Farms to report to Marcello, so the little man knew what was happening all the time.” 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 188 | Loc. 2651-57  | Added on Tuesday, August 26, 2014, 08:14 PM

Even the landmark biography of Ruby by Seth Kantor, 1978’s Who Was Jack Ruby?, doesn’t mention Marcello, though it was the first book to outline Ruby’s ties to numerous other mobsters. Dallas reporter Earl Golz was one of the first to clearly make the connection between Ruby and Marcello’s organization and Marcello’s control of vice in Dallas, a link soon confirmed by the 1979 House Select Committee on Assassinations report. However, it was not until the extensive print and television coverage that accompanied the twenty-fifth anniversary of JFK’s murder in November 1988—and publication of Marcello’s biography by John Davis in January 1989—that the general public really began to learn about Ruby’s ties to the mob. It’s important to note that Van Laningham’s report on Marcello’s remarks about Ruby was written up and in FBI files well before that. 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 189 | Loc. 2671-74  | Added on Tuesday, August 26, 2014, 08:16 PM

With the FBI holding such information close to its vest, journalists and historians had to ferret out the details of Ruby’s involvement with the mob and Marcello’s men bit by bit. Almost four years after Marcello’s 1985 admission to Jack Van Laningham—which was withheld from the public at the time and for the next twenty years—John H. Davis detailed tantalizing connections between Ruby and several Marcello associates. 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 190 | Loc. 2679-89  | Added on Tuesday, August 26, 2014, 08:23 PM

The most startling admission about Ruby that Carlos Marcello made to Van Laningham concerned a dramatic meeting that Ruby was summoned to, where the godfather confronted Ruby about stealing his money—and made him an offer he couldn’t refuse. Van Laningham is a large man with a deep voice, and he is normally good natured. However, when he first related to me what Marcello told him about that meeting, he took on the menacing tone that Marcello conveyed to Ruby at that meeting. Marcello confronted Ruby in the old farmhouse in the middle of his sixty-four-hundred-acre Churchill Farms property. Most of it had once been swampland, and some of it still was. Marcello disposed of the bodies of men who crossed him at Churchill Farms, a fact not lost on any member of the godfather’s organization summoned there for a meeting. Recall Marcello’s murder of Thomas Siracusa described in Chapter Four ; his body, according to the FBI, was “thrown into a tub of lye and after decomposition, the partially liquefied remains were poured into the swamp.” Ruby, knowing he was stealing money from Marcello, was probably already nervous when he arrived at the isolated farmhouse. One can only imagine his fear and pleading when Marcello confronted him about his thievery, and the fury Marcello unleashed on him. 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 190 | Loc. 2689-95  | Added on Tuesday, August 26, 2014, 08:24 PM

As Marcello described the scene to Van Laningham, Ruby was trembling and begging, willing to do anything to keep from paying the ultimate price for stealing from the godfather. If it eventually meant going into a crowded police basement full of well-armed cops, pulling out his gun, and shooting a prisoner, Ruby had no choice but to do it. As indicated by Ruby’s later remarks, it was likely not just Ruby’s life that was on the line but those of his family (two brothers, a sister, nieces, and nephews) as well. An undoubtedly grateful Ruby left the meeting with his life but would become increasingly involved in the dangerous JFK plot. As with any sensitive Mafia operation, Ruby’s participation would be on a need-to-know basis, getting only limited amounts of information about the plot when he needed to know it. 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 192 | Loc. 2708-16  | Added on Tuesday, August 26, 2014, 08:25 PM

In 1963 as in 1959, Jack Ruby was not a major player but had been given an offer he couldn’t refuse because he knew the right people in the right places. Ruby worked in a city controlled by Carlos Marcello, a city that was expected to be visited by JFK. In Cuba, Ruby had met and tried to help Santo Trafficante, and he was familiar with Tampa, having once lived there and sometimes visiting the city while scouting strip acts. Ruby had worked for Johnny Rosselli’s Chicago Mafia and knew that city well. Jimmy Hoffa’s son admits that his father knew Jack Ruby. The mob bosses and Hoffa had more than a dozen associates in common with Ruby, making it easy to communicate with Ruby through intermediaries, as Ruby’s phone records confirm. Ruby was also a small part of Marcello and Trafficante’s drug network, which would also figure into the JFK plot. Finally, Ruby had the connections with the Dallas Police to arrange for anyone blamed for the assassination in Dallas to be quickly killed. If that didn’t happen, Ruby would have to do the job himself, and the same would likely be true if the assassination occurred in a city besides Dallas. 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 193 | Loc. 2725-28  | Added on Tuesday, August 26, 2014, 08:28 PM

Ruby had one more set of skills that made him valuable to Marcello and Trafficante in their JFK plot: his experience with Cuba and gunrunning. Cuba would provide the godfathers the key they needed to kill JFK in a way that would prevent high US officials from conducting a truly thorough investigation to avoid exposing secrets that could trigger—in the words of one memo—“World War III.” 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 5753-57  | Added on Tuesday, August 26, 2014, 08:33 PM

Six years later, the same man was stopped and questioned by the border police in Bavaria as he drove out of Germany. He was carrying a phony French passport. In the trunk of the car, police found nine more passports—along with eighty-eight pounds of explosives, eight sets of electronic timers and detonators, and $12,500 in United States currency. The wrapping on the explosives came from a pastry shop in Beirut that was a known front for terrorists. The suspect was jailed for seven months, and questioned by German and Israeli intelligence officers. He never broke. The Germans deported him to Syria. The FBI never knew. 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 5839-44  | Added on Wednesday, August 27, 2014, 09:47 AM

Felt’s fate was sealed a few days later. Nixon had determined beyond doubt that Felt was the source of a devastating story, printed on page 18 of The New York Times on the morning of Friday, May 11, detailing the Kissinger wiretaps that Nixon had ordered placed on presidential aides and prominent newsmen starting in 1969. “Felt—everybody’s to know that he’s a goddamn traitor, and just watch him damn carefully,” Nixon said to his new chief of staff, General Al Haig, the next day. “He has to go, of course … the son-of-a-bitch.” 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 5844-46  | Added on Wednesday, August 27, 2014, 09:47 AM

Ruckelshaus, at the president’s command, ordered Felt to leave the FBI. His resignation imminent, Felt donned the cloak of Deep Throat for a clandestine meeting with Bob Woodward of The Washington Post. He said the president himself was the key conspirator in the Watergate case. 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 5846-47  | Added on Wednesday, August 27, 2014, 09:48 AM

The FBI set off on a frantic hunt to find the summaries and the transcripts of the Kissinger wiretaps, which Bill Sullivan had smuggled out of headquarters. 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 5865-71  | Added on Wednesday, August 27, 2014, 09:50 AM

Nixon flew out to Kansas City to swear Kelley into office. It was his first public appearance in a month. “I was shocked by the wounds of Watergate that were visible on the president’s face,” Kelley wrote later. Nixon was a haunted man. He had just proclaimed that he would not cooperate with the Senate investigation. His impeachment was the subject of serious discussion in the Congress. He was under investigation by a newly appointed special prosecutor, Archibald Cox, who was demanding that Nixon turn over his presidential documents and files. The revelation of the existence of the secret White House tapes was a week away. Cox instantly subpoenaed the tapes. Nixon defied him and fired him in October. Attorney General Elliot Richardson and his deputy Bill Ruckelshaus fell under Nixon’s fusillade in the upheaval that instantly became known as the Saturday Night Massacre. 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 5879-83  | Added on Wednesday, August 27, 2014, 09:51 AM

On December 5, 1973, he sent a written warning to every one of the Bureau’s 8,767 agents. He ordered them to refrain from “investigative activity that could abridge in any way the rights guaranteed citizens by the Constitution.” He began to dismantle the architecture of national security that Hoover had created. By the time he was done, the FBI had eliminated 94 percent of its domestic intelligence investigations, erased more than nine thousand open cases from its books, transferred the roles and functions of national security cases to the Criminal Investigative Division, and reassigned at least 645 agents from chasing radicals to tracking common criminals. 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 5890-92  | Added on Wednesday, August 27, 2014, 09:52 AM

The FBI fought in federal court to keep its COINTELPRO files sealed from the public. But when a single sheaf fell into the hands of an old enemy, and the secrets started seeping out, “the house of cards came crashing down,” said Homer Boynton, who served as the FBI liaison to the White House, Congress, and the CIA. 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 5893-94  | Added on Wednesday, August 27, 2014, 09:53 AM

The foe was the Socialist Workers Party, a leftist coalition with barely two thousand members. The party had worked within the American political system, 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 5906-8  | Added on Wednesday, August 27, 2014, 09:54 AM

The Bureau said its actions had been entirely lawful. It denied any part in black-bag jobs and break-ins. The files in the Bureau’s New York office were filled with evidence to the contrary. The FBI was lying to a federal judge and to its superiors in the Justice Department. It wasn’t the crime, as Nixon had said, it was the cover-up. 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 5909-11  | Added on Wednesday, August 27, 2014, 09:54 AM

The facts were secured in the office safe of the special agent in charge in New York, John Malone, who been burglarizing Communists since the Truman administration. Malone ran the New York office for thirteen years, from 1962 until his retirement in 1975. 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 5912  | Added on Wednesday, August 27, 2014, 09:54 AM

His underlings called him Cement Head. 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 5935-39  | Added on Wednesday, August 27, 2014, 09:57 AM

The first attacks came shortly after 3:00 A.M. on October 26, 1974, when five powerful explosions ripped through Wall Street and Rockefeller Center in Manhattan, causing upwards of a million dollars’ damage to banks and businesses. The second came at 11:03 P.M. on December 11, a booby-trap bomb in East Harlem that gravely wounded a rookie NYPD officer who happened to be Puerto Rican. The third came at 1:22 P.M. on January 24, 1975, in the heart of the financial district. 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 5946-49  | Added on Wednesday, August 27, 2014, 09:58 AM

Four people died; sixty-three were injured, some of them grievously. The FALN communiqué taking credit for the bombing was signed in the name of Griselio Torresola, who had been shot dead trying to assassinate Harry Truman. No one was ever arrested in the killings in New York. “It was just a continuing drumbeat of bombings and an inability to solve them,” Hahn said. The FBI had no clue about the FALN. 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 5964-65  | Added on Wednesday, August 27, 2014, 10:00 AM

Years later, a fellow agent asked Dyson what FBI headquarters thought about this endeavor. “We never told headquarters,” he replied. 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 5971-74  | Added on Wednesday, August 27, 2014, 10:00 AM

“Why not add the FBI?” the former director of central intelligence, Richard Helms, asked President Ford pointedly, face-to-face in the Oval Office. “You may as well get to the bottom of it.” Deputy Attorney General Laurence Silberman agreed. “The FBI may be the sexiest part of this,” he told the president’s national security team on February 20, 1975. “Hoover did things which won’t stand scrutiny, especially under Johnson.” 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 5990-92  | Added on Wednesday, August 27, 2014, 10:03 AM

The Bureau had started moving out of the Justice Department, across Pennsylvania Avenue. The new J. Edgar Hoover Building, officially dedicated on September 30, 1975, cost $126 million. It was the ugliest building in Washington: it looked like a parking garage built by the Soviet Politburo. 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 6002-5  | Added on Wednesday, August 27, 2014, 10:04 AM

The congressman demanded to see what else the Bureau had on him. He became one of the first Americans granted the request to see his own FBI file. It included a letter that a suspicious nun had sent to Hoover four years before, calling Father Drinan a Communist plant inside the Catholic Church. Such was the prevailing spirit when the Senate opened its first public hearings on the FBI on November 18, 1975. 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 6037-40  | Added on Thursday, August 28, 2014, 11:25 AM

Clarence Kelley had assured the press, the public, and the president time and again that the FBI had ceased committing black-bag jobs a decade before. His top aides had told him so; they said the same to Congress and the courts in sworn testimony. On August 8, 1976, four months after he had the facts in hand, he had been forced to admit he had been fooled by experts—“ knowledgeably, knowingly, intentionally deceived” by men at the top of the FBI’s chain of command. 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 6041-43  | Added on Thursday, August 28, 2014, 11:25 AM

“very little bad news was passed along to J. Edgar Hoover.” As Kelley recalled it, almost everyone at the Bureau was “afraid to tell Hoover the truth”; the boss had been “so domineering and his power over his people so intimidating” that agents concealed harsh facts from him. 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 6070-76  | Added on Thursday, August 28, 2014, 11:29 AM

The tensions at headquarters had been building ever since the FBI opened a criminal investigation of Mark Felt, the dismissed deputy director, during the denouement of the Watergate investigation. In the final days of the Nixon administration, Felt stood accused within the Bureau of smuggling documents out of the FBI and feeding them to The New York Times. The charge of stealing the Bureau’s records was punishable by up to ten years in prison. Felt was confronted by FBI agents and advised of his constitutional rights. He had lied about his role in the leaks, skillfully, first to the agents, then in a personal letter to the director. “Dear Clarence,” he had written. “To be treated as a prime suspect in a sordid example of crass disloyalty to the FBI is a humiliating and degrading experience.” He added: “Incidentally, I am not ‘Deep Throat.’ ” 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 6079-89  | Added on Thursday, August 28, 2014, 11:30 AM

Kelley ensured that the leak investigation was closed, and he eventually fired the man who had opened it for unspecified abuses of power. But by then, Felt’s troubles had multiplied tenfold. His wife was becoming ill, physically and mentally; she later committed suicide. His daughter had disappeared into a hippie commune in California. He became the subject of a second criminal investigation by the FBI. This one could not be quashed. On August 19, 1976, the FBI raided its own headquarters. Two teams of FBI agents, led by criminal investigators from the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department, executed the searches in Washington. A separate FBI squad went through the New York office of the Bureau. They discovered a cache of documents no outsider had ever seen. Hoover’s “Do Not File” filing system, first created before World War II, was designed to keep evidence of FBI burglaries and bugging concealed forever. It required FBI agents to destroy the original records of their secret intelligence investigations. But even Hoover occasionally erred in matters of national security. He had kept a folder in his office, labeled “Black Bag Jobs,” containing a detailed description of the “Do Not File” regulations. It had somehow survived the bonfire of his personal files after his death. It led the investigators in New York to discover twenty-five volumes of original records that had, inexplicably, been preserved. 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 6094-96  | Added on Thursday, August 28, 2014, 11:30 AM

I had heard directly that a number of the agents had gone to testify in a grand jury, and then I had a call, an unidentified caller, who said, ‘I had to give you up, John.’ ” Kearney was about to be indicted for conspiracy. He was the first ranking agent in the FBI to be charged with committing crimes against the United States. 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 6098-6101  | Added on Thursday, August 28, 2014, 11:31 AM

On August 26, a week after the initial raids, Mark Felt and Ed Miller, the FBI’s retired intelligence chief, were summoned to testify in secret before a federal grand jury. The two men decided on a dangerous legal strategy. They swore that they had authorized the black-bag jobs carried out by Squad 47. They said they had had the approval of the acting director of the FBI, Pat Gray. 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 6105-8  | Added on Thursday, August 28, 2014, 11:31 AM

Felt and Miller believed that, if they went to trial, they could convince a jury that the FBI had the power to bend the law in pursuit of national security, a power that flowed directly from the president of the United States. They thought they could prove that the president’s sworn duty to protect and defend the Constitution gave him to power to break and enter a citizen’s door. They would assert that a president could violate the rights of an individual to preserve the interests of the nation. 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 6116-18  | Added on Thursday, August 28, 2014, 11:34 AM

Ed Miller put it more elegantly years later. He took his argument from the common law of centuries gone by. A man’s home is his castle, he conceded. But no man can maintain a castle against the king. 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 6118-22  | Added on Thursday, August 28, 2014, 11:34 AM

The argument went back to the beginnings of the United States. “Safety from external danger is the most powerful director of national conduct,” Alexander Hamilton had written in 1787. “Even the ardent love of liberty will, after a time, give way to its dictates. The violent destruction of life and property incident to war, the continual effort and alarm attendant on a state of continual danger, will compel nations the most attached to liberty to resort for repose and security to institutions which have a tendency to destroy their civil and political rights. To be more safe, they at length become willing to run the risk of being less free.” 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 6133-38  | Added on Thursday, August 28, 2014, 11:37 AM

Pinochet and his allies—the right-wing leaders of five South American nations—had undertaken a global effort to exterminate their left-wing enemies. It was code-named Operation Condor. DINA employed murderous anti-Castro Cubans and an American soldier of fortune named Michael Townley as members of an international death squad. Before the assassination of Orlando Letelier, Henry Kissinger’s State Department and George H. W. Bush’s CIA were both well aware that Operation Condor contemplated political assassinations. But both expressed deep doubts that General Pinochet would risk the consequences of carrying out a terrorist act in Washington. Most American intelligence officers seemed to agree. One took exception. 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 6144-45  | Added on Thursday, August 28, 2014, 11:38 AM

Carter had an unusual take on the enemies of the United States. “Peace is not the mere absence of war,” Carter said when he received his nomination. “Peace is action to stamp out international terrorism.” 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 6169-71  | Added on Thursday, August 28, 2014, 11:50 AM

His first day at the Bureau, Webster made it clear that he wanted to be called “Judge.” His appointment began a presidential practice of placing judges in charge of the FBI, a tradition that endured for the rest of the twentieth century. 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 6176-80  | Added on Thursday, August 28, 2014, 11:51 AM

Webster was astonished to find that the FBI had no legal framework for its operations. The Bureau had no charter—a legal birth certificate from Congress spelling out its role. It had never had one. It still does not. Webster said from the outset that he wanted a law that defined “what people expected of us—not what we couldn’t do, but what they expected us to do.” He spent two years drafting it in consultation with Congress. Neither President Carter nor President Reagan acted upon it; the work was stillborn. 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 6193-96  | Added on Thursday, August 28, 2014, 12:05 PM

On April 10, the United States brought a thirty-two-count indictment against Ed Miller, once the FBI’s chief of intelligence; Mark Felt, once the deputy director; and Pat Gray, once the leader of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The charge—based on a sixty-year-old statute used principally to prosecute members of the Ku Klux Klan—was “conspiracy to injure and oppress citizens” with the weapon of warrantless searches. 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 6204-10  | Added on Thursday, August 28, 2014, 12:18 PM

The Intelligence Division, once the strongest branch of Hoover’s FBI, had been under siege by the Justice Department, and it dwindled in strength and expertise toward the end of the 1970s. Those who still served the cause wanted to revive the counterespionage effort against Soviet and Chinese spies in the United States, to hire and train FBI agents who could speak those languages, to make intelligence a career instead of a two-year tour. They wanted to hunt down the remaining fugitives of the Weather Underground and the furtive leaders of the FALN. Though the Ku Klux Klan had been defeated, a new wave of neo-Nazi groups was rising in the United States. So were armed partisans aiming to settle scores from epic battles in the Old World—the Serbs and the Croats, the Turks and the Armenians, the Irish Republican Army. Taken together, they added up to a hundred new cases a year of terrorism in America. 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 6213-17  | Added on Thursday, August 28, 2014, 12:18 PM

Robert Hanssen was a third-generation Chicago cop who joined the FBI in 1976. He spent twenty-five years in its service. He became a spy for Moscow, stealing an astonishing array of American secrets, and he went undetected by the FBI until after the turn of the century. Hanssen had learned at a very young age that a badge could be a shield of secrecy. His father had worked on the Red squad of the Chicago police department, hunting and harassing left-wingers, abusing his authority and power, as had his father before him. Hanssen knew some of that sordid history. 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 6230-34  | Added on Thursday, August 28, 2014, 12:22 PM

Hanssen’s supervisors had discovered his one outstanding talent a few weeks after he arrived on duty: he was one of the very few people in the FBI who understood how computers worked. They assigned him to create an automated database about the Soviet contingent of diplomats and suspected spies in New York. He had a knack for the technologies that would revolutionize the world in years to come—especially the ways in which networks were connected and information was transmitted. The Bureau was building a new security shield for its computers. Hanssen quickly found its flaws and chinks. 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 6245-51  | Added on Thursday, August 28, 2014, 12:23 PM

Hanssen’s responsibilities grew. He was given the task of preparing the budget requests for the Bureau’s intelligence operations in New York. The flow of money showed the FBI’s targets for the next five years—and its plans for projects in collaboration with the CIA and the National Security Agency. His third delivery to the Soviets detailed those plans. And then he decided to lie low. If Hanssen had stopped spying then and there, the damage he wrought still would have been unequaled in the history of the FBI. William Webster himself would conduct a postmortem after the case came to light in 2001. He called it “an incredible assault,” an epochal disaster, “a five-hundred-year flood” that destroyed everything in its path. 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 6253-57  | Added on Thursday, August 28, 2014, 12:23 PM

Joe Helmich in the summer of 1980. He was arrested a year later and sentenced to life in prison after he was convicted of selling the Soviets the codes and operating manual to the KL-7 system, the basic tool of encrypting communications developed by the NSA. He was a lowly army warrant officer with a top secret clearance; his treason had taken place in covert meetings with Soviet intelligence officers in Paris and Mexico City from 1963 to 1966; he was paid $131,000. He had sold the Soviets the equivalent of a skeleton key that let them decode the most highly classified messages of American military and intelligence officers during the Vietnam War. 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 6263-65  | Added on Thursday, August 28, 2014, 12:24 PM

“My fellow Americans, I’m pleased to tell you today that I’ve signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever,” Reagan once said with a smile during a sound check for his weekly presidential radio address. “We begin bombing in five minutes.” 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 6278-83  | Added on Thursday, August 28, 2014, 12:27 PM

The president underscored that principle in his pardon. “America was at war in 1972,” it said. “Felt and Miller followed procedures they believed essential to keep the Director of the FBI, the Attorney General, and the President of the United States advised of the activities of hostile foreign powers and their collaborators in this country.” The facts did not support that phrase: the FBI’s targets were not agents of foreign powers. But the pardon was a political decision. Reagan and his most powerful advisers wanted to reinstate the power of the government to spy at will within the United States, to abolish the rules instituted under Presidents Ford and Carter, and let the FBI write its own guidelines for wiretapping and bugging. 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 6296-6300  | Added on Thursday, August 28, 2014, 12:31 PM

El Salvador’s right-wing military regime, backed by the United States, was fighting a small armed leftist guerrilla force. The military and its death squads killed roughly 65,000 civilians, including priests, nuns, church workers, union leaders, students, and peasants. Three American nuns and a lay worker were among the dead. They were “four innocent church women who were trying to do their job of helping the poor,” Pimentel said. They had been hauled out of a van, kidnapped, raped, shot at close range, and dumped on the side of a dirt road in December 1980. It was a clear case of premeditated murder, an atrocious act in a dirty war. 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 6360-63  | Added on Thursday, August 28, 2014, 12:41 PM

But once the FBI began to investigate Walker, it took only three months before he was caught trying to deliver 129 highly classified navy documents to the KGB. He had been giving the Soviets the keys to unlock the encrypted messages of American naval forces since 1967. “There is little or no doubt he caused the death of an untold number of our troops in Vietnam,” said the FBI’s Robert W. Hunter, who arrested Walker. 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 6387-92  | Added on Thursday, August 28, 2014, 12:45 PM

Revell had created a small army inside the FBI in anticipation of the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles. The Black September attacks at the Munich games twelve years before were still fresh in the memories of the organizers. No one wanted a recurrence. The FBI formed a hostage rescue team of fifty agents—many of them Vietnam veterans trained in military commando tactics. The force grew, fed by fawning publicity. Its arsenal soon included helicopters, armored personnel carriers, and tanks. The Olympics went off with barely a hitch; the biggest scare was the discovery of two hang gliders, which the FBI suspected could be used in a kamikaze operation by Palestinian terrorists. Only one thing went wrong in Los Angeles that fall. 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 6416-20  | Added on Thursday, August 28, 2014, 09:07 PM

Revell sent the hostage rescue team to the island. On December 4, 1984, all hell broke loose. The team knocked heads with the FBI special agent in charge from Seattle. As they argued, Mathews opened fire. The FBI responded fiercely. Their tear gas canisters started a conflagration and the chalet burned to ashes. No rescue, much less an arrest, was possible. Mathews was incinerated. His death fed the angry fantasies of a generation of like-minded fanatics. One among them was Timothy McVeigh, the man who ignited the bomb that killed 168 Americans in Oklahoma City a decade later. The operation was considered a calamity. 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 6447-52  | Added on Thursday, August 28, 2014, 09:11 PM

Hanssen was true to his word. He sent the Soviets a complete compendium of double-agent operations being run by the FBI, a warning that the FBI was tunneling into the basement of the new Soviet Embassy, a rundown of the Bureau’s new efforts to recruit Soviet intelligence officers, a description of the National Security Agency’s decoding of Moscow’s communications satellite transmissions, the details of the CIA’s budget requests for the next five years, and much more. It was the biggest breach of American secrets in the history of the Cold War—with one exception. Aldrich Ames, the chief of the Soviet counterintelligence branch of the CIA’s clandestine service, had become a spy for Moscow that spring. 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 6461-67  | Added on Thursday, August 28, 2014, 09:14 PM

The hunt for the source of the leaks began with great energy and intensity. In two years’ time, it sputtered, stalled, and stopped. The FBI remained mystified. The CIA seemed indifferent. Their counterintelligence chiefs were furious at one another. They would not work together. They could not imagine what had gone wrong. Their investigation concluded that the problem had to be a bug, or a wiretap, or a computer. It could not conceivably be an American spy. Traitors like Hanssen and Ames could work undetected for years on end because American counterintelligence had become a shambles. The FBI and the CIA had not been on speaking terms for most of the past forty years. The sniping and the silences between them did more harm to American national security than the Soviets. 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 6470-74  | Added on Thursday, August 28, 2014, 09:15 PM

“ Reagan was preoccupied with the fate of the hostages,” remembered Bob Gates, then chief of the CIA’s intelligence directorate. “No loud words or harsh indictments—none of the style of Johnson or Nixon. Just a quizzical look, a suggestion of pain, and then the request—‘We just have to get those people out’—repeated nearly daily, week after week, month after month. Implicit was the accusation: What the hell kind of intelligence service are you running if you can’t find and rescue these Americans?” 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 6477-80  | Added on Thursday, August 28, 2014, 09:16 PM

Colonel North soon came up with another concept. The FBI would remove $2 million in cash from the Federal Reserve, treat it with a chemical solution, and deliver it over to the kidnappers in Lebanon. The ransom would self-destruct in two hours. Revell marveled at the Mission: Impossible concept. But he did not buy it. And Peter Kilburn was murdered on the orders of Libya’s Colonel Muammar Qaddafi before the plan could be carried out. 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 6497-99  | Added on Thursday, August 28, 2014, 09:18 PM

On July 30, 1986, North told Revell that Attorney General Ed Meese had signed off on a plan, approved by the president, to sell American missiles to the government of Iran in exchange for the release of the hostages. The Reagan administration was going to broker lethal weapons for American lives. 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 6499-6503  | Added on Thursday, August 28, 2014, 09:18 PM

Revell kept a poker face. But he was thinking: is this legal? He wondered why North had shared this explosive information. He surmised it was to keep the FBI from stumbling on something even more secret. His instincts were sound. He took his doubts to Webster; the Judge consulted Meese. “The Attorney General doesn’t seem to have a problem with it—which was amazing,” Revell recounted. Meese had told them—falsely—that all the weapons shipments had been approved in writing by the president. If the president did it, the FBI director concluded, that meant it was not illegal. 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 6516-23  | Added on Thursday, August 28, 2014, 09:22 PM

On the afternoon of November 13, 1986, the White House asked Revell to review a speech that President Reagan would deliver to the American people that evening. As he pored over the draft of the speech in North’s office, he pointed out five evident falsehoods. “We did not—repeat, did not—trade weapons or anything else for hostages, nor will we,” the president’s draft said. The United States would never “strengthen those who support terrorism”; it had only sold “defensive armaments and spare parts” to Iran. It had not violated its stance of neutrality in the scorched-earth war between Iran and Iraq; it had never chartered arms shipments out of Miami. Revell knew none of this was true. He warned Judge Webster, who alerted Attorney General Meese. He was ignored. “I was sort of odd man out,” Revell said. 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 6525-30  | Added on Thursday, August 28, 2014, 09:22 PM

Colonel North and his superior, the president’s national security adviser, Admiral John Poindexter, began shredding their records and deleting their computer files as fast as they could. But within the White House, one crucial fact emerged: they had skimmed millions of dollars in profits from the weapons sales to Iran and siphoned off the money to support the contras. “A real bombshell,” Vice President George H. W. Bush recorded in his new diary on November 22, after talking to Attorney General Meese. “It’s going to be a major flap … The president has asked us to shut up, and that is exactly what’s happening.” 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 6532-36  | Added on Thursday, August 28, 2014, 09:22 PM

Within hours, FBI agents were searching Oliver North’s office. They retrieved a document from North’s burn bag—an elaborately falsified statement about support for the contras, delivered in secret testimony to Congress. They dusted it and found the fingerprints of the chief of the CIA’s clandestine service, Clair George. It was the beginning of a six-year investigation that reached the highest levels of the American military and intelligence establishments, the most politically perilous case the Bureau had confronted since Watergate. 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 6541-47  | Added on Thursday, August 28, 2014, 09:23 PM

“For the past three months, I’ve been silent on the revelations about Iran,” Reagan said in a televised address to the nation on March 4, 1987. “And you must have been thinking: ‘Well, why doesn’t he tell us what’s happening? Why doesn’t he just speak to us as he has in the past when we’ve faced troubles or tragedies?’ Others of you, I guess, were thinking: ‘What’s he doing hiding out in the White House?’ “Well, the reason I haven’t spoken to you before now is this: You deserve the truth,” the president said. “I’ve paid a price for my silence,” he said. “A few months ago I told the American people I did not trade arms for hostages. My heart and my best intentions still tell me that’s true. But the facts and the evidence tell me it is not.” 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 6555-59  | Added on Thursday, August 28, 2014, 09:24 PM

The independent counsel would conclude that President Reagan, the secretary of defense, the director of Central Intelligence, and their aides had skirted or broken the law. But President George H. W. Bush eventually granted pardons to all who faced criminal charges—including the CIA’s covert operations chief, Clair George, and its counterterrorism director, Duane Clarridge. He did as Ronald Reagan had done in absolving Mark Felt and Ed Miller. He let national security trump the rule of law. The arrival of Judge Webster nonetheless was the end of an era at the CIA. 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 6559-63  | Added on Thursday, August 28, 2014, 09:25 PM

“We probably could have overcome Webster’s ego, his lack of experience with foreign affairs, his small-town America world perspective,” Clarridge reflected. “What we couldn’t overcome was that he was a lawyer. All of his training as a lawyer and a judge was that you didn’t do illegal things. He could never accept that this is exactly what the CIA does when it operates abroad. We break the laws of their countries. It’s how we collect information. It’s why we’re in business.” 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 6586-88  | Added on Friday, August 29, 2014, 09:40 AM

Pan Am 103 took off from London’s Heathrow Airport, bound for New York, at 6:25 P.M. on Wednesday, December 21, 1988. Half its passengers had made a tight connection from Frankfurt. Twenty-eight minutes later, an explosion tore the 747 apart. A rain of fire started falling over Lockerbie. 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 6588-89  | Added on Friday, August 29, 2014, 09:40 AM

One hundred eighty-nine Americans were among the two hundred fifty-nine passengers and crew. Eleven people were killed on the ground. 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 6592-94  | Added on Friday, August 29, 2014, 09:41 AM

“The FBI was not set up to deal with a major investigation like this,” said Richard Marquise. “I blame the institution.” Marquise was given command of the FBI’s task force on Lockerbie—four agents and three analysts—on January 3, 1989. 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 6594-96  | Added on Friday, August 29, 2014, 09:42 AM

He scanned the passenger list for weeks, looking for clues. The list was the stuff of conspiracy theories. It included a CIA officer, Matt Gannon, and an army intelligence major, Chuck McKee, who had been working ninety-hour weeks together in Beirut, trying to free the nine American hostages still being held in Lebanon. 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 6597-99  | Added on Friday, August 29, 2014, 09:42 AM

Six State Department officers and the chief Nazi-hunter at the Department of Justice died over Lockerbie. Another passenger, an American businessman, had the same name as a terrorist who had hijacked a Kuwaiti airliner years before. 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 6601-2  | Added on Friday, August 29, 2014, 09:42 AM

The FBI’s Buck Revell assumed the Iranians had done it: almost six months before, in July 1988, the USS Vincennes had shot down Iran Air 655 over the Persian Gulf, an unprovoked attack by an errant American admiral, killing 290 passengers. 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 6623-26  | Added on Friday, August 29, 2014, 10:02 AM

Then, in June 1990, came small favors that paid big returns. Stuart Henderson, the new senior investigator in Scotland, shared one piece of evidence with Marquise: a photograph of a tiny piece of circuit board blasted into a ragged strip of the Maltese clothing. The Scots had been to fifty-five companies in seventeen countries without identifying the fragment. “They had no idea. No clue,” Marquise said. “So they said, probably tongue-in-cheek, ‘You guys try. Give it a shot.’ ” 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 6626-29  | Added on Friday, August 29, 2014, 10:02 AM

The FBI crime laboratory gave the photo to the CIA. An Agency analyst had an image of a nearly identical circuit board, seized four years earlier from two Libyans in transit at the airport in Dakar, Senegal. On the back were four letters: MEBO. Nobody knew what MEBO meant. Eighteen months had passed since the bombing of Pan Am 103. 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 6632-33  | Added on Friday, August 29, 2014, 10:03 AM

Robert Swan Mueller III was named chief of the Criminal Division at the Justice Department at the end of July 1990. Agents instinctively liked him, despite his aristocratic demeanor. They called him Bobby Three Sticks. 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 6635-40  | Added on Friday, August 29, 2014, 10:04 AM

An official report from a December 11, 1968, battle in Quang Tri province praised his courage during a search-and-destroy mission. Confronting a force of two hundred North Vietnam Army troops, Second Lieutenant Mueller “fearlessly moved from one position to another, directing the accurate counter-fire of his men and shouting words of encouragement to them. With complete disregard for his own safety, he … personally led a team across the fire-swept terrain to recover a mortally wounded Marine who had fallen in a position forward of the friendly lines.” He was awarded, among other citations, the Bronze Star for valor. 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Bookmark Loc. 6654  | Added on Friday, August 29, 2014, 10:07 AM


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- Highlight Loc. 6652-58  | Added on Friday, August 29, 2014, 10:07 AM

he found out that an owner of the firm, Edwin Bollier, had hand-delivered a detailed letter to the U.S. Embassy in Vienna days after the Lockerbie bombing. The FBI never would have looked for it without the tip from the Scots. It said, in essence: Pan Am 103 was a Libyan operation. Bollier knew what he was talking about: Mebo had built twenty sophisticated timers for the Libyans. Bollier’s letter—vital evidence in an international terrorism investigation—had been sitting unread for almost two years. Marquise knew from bitter experience how often the FBI had no idea what was in its own files. The Bureau was a pyramid of paper, and it stayed that way well into the twenty-first century. 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 6686-90  | Added on Friday, August 29, 2014, 10:09 AM

The United States could try to kidnap Megrahi; it had nabbed terrorists overseas before. But snatching him in Libya was beyond the capabilities of the CIA or the military. It could try to kill him. That was beyond conscience at the time: shortly before the Lockerbie bombing, when Israel had sent a hit team to Tunis to kill Abu Jihad, the second in command of the Palestine Liberation Organization, the United States had openly condemned the act as a political assassination. 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 6692-94  | Added on Friday, August 29, 2014, 10:10 AM

President George H. W. Bush believed that terrorists were criminals, not enemy combatants. He chose to go to court. Mueller strongly concurred. They would follow the law where it led. 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 6718-20  | Added on Friday, August 29, 2014, 10:13 AM

The diary went unread for three years. At the time, the FBI had only one translator capable of reading and understanding Arabic. “If it had been properly translated, processed, authenticated and analyzed,” Buck Revell later testified, the FBI would have seen “a direct association between the assassin of Meir Kahane and the group that conspired and eventually did bomb the World Trade Center.” 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 6736-43  | Added on Friday, August 29, 2014, 10:15 AM

Salem visited Nosair at the notorious Attica state prison, making the long drive upstate and back with members of the sheikh’s circle. Soon he was listening in as they plotted to bomb the symbols of American power. Salem met the sheikh, the intellectual author of the plot, and he heard firsthand about the plans to bring the jihad to America. “Salem’s penetration had been so thoroughly successful that he’d had intimate access to Abdel Rahman himself, almost from the start,” marveled Andrew McCarthy, a gung-ho federal prosecutor in Manhattan. Salem gave the FBI the names and identities of almost every one of the men who were plotting to blow up the World Trade Center. He did not know their target. But his new friends told him it would be something big, something the world had never seen before. This was something new in the annals of the FBI: firsthand intelligence on a terrorist plot as it took shape. 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 6756-59  | Added on Friday, August 29, 2014, 10:16 AM

The sheikh had been on the State Department’s terrorist watch list, with good reason, yet he had won a visa to the United States in 1990. A CIA officer working undercover as a State Department consular official had issued it—an inexplicable snafu, since the CIA’s own files described him as “Egypt’s most militant Sunni cleric and a close associate of the Egyptian Jihad movement.” 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 6770-73  | Added on Friday, August 29, 2014, 10:17 AM

Nonetheless, the report was read as a political and personal indictment of the director’s integrity and character. “I must ask you to do the right thing for your Bureau and your country,” Revell wrote to Sessions. “Resign while you still have some semblance of dignity and before you do further harm to an agency that you have professed to honor and respect.” 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 6773-77  | Added on Friday, August 29, 2014, 10:18 AM

Every director of the FBI since Hoover had been confirmed by the Senate to serve a ten-year term, at the pleasure of the president. Bush could act upon the recommendation of his attorney general and remove Sessions from office before the next president was inaugurated on January 20. Or he could do nothing, and let Bill Clinton solve the problem. He decided to leave the problem to the new president, a malevolent parting gift. Proudly defiant, Sessions refused to acknowledge the accusations. 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 6785-91  | Added on Friday, August 29, 2014, 10:20 AM

By the time the FBI installed new information technology, it was already obsolete. Reno was shocked to discover that the FBI could not do basic database searches. The Bureau could not put its case files into a computerized system to store and retrieve information. Field offices worked in isolation from one another and from headquarters. Agents had no way to connect with one another. Even at the elite terrorist task forces, paper files stacked up on floors, potentially devastating wiretaps went unread for lack of translators, patterns went unseen. “Sometimes I thought we had made progress, but then we’d find something else that we didn’t know we didn’t have,” Reno said. “It was very difficult for the FBI to get that problem solved.” 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 6792-94  | Added on Friday, August 29, 2014, 10:20 AM

On Friday, February 26, 1993, a 1,500-pound bomb loaded into a rented truck detonated in the six-story basement parking garage underneath Tower One of the World Trade Center. It was the biggest terrorist explosion in the United States since the Black Tom blast shattered Manhattan and scarred the Statue of Liberty from across New York Harbor in 1916. 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 6797-99  | Added on Saturday, August 30, 2014, 12:21 PM

It was the great good fortune of the FBI that one of the conspirators was foolish enough to return to the Ryder rent-a-truck company, report the van stolen, and demand the return of his $400 deposit. 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 6831-35  | Added on Saturday, August 30, 2014, 12:24 PM

The arrests were swift—with one exception. The Blind Sheikh took refuge at a Brooklyn mosque. The argument over how to handle him caused great consternation at the FBI. No one in command authority wanted to make the case against him. From Sessions on down, to a man they demurred. They thought it best to ask President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt to extradite him. It would be so much easier to deport the sheikh—to make him disappear back into the Egyptian prison where he once belonged. The assistant director in charge of the FBI in New York, James Fox, was most adamantly against prosecuting the case in court. 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 6835-38  | Added on Saturday, August 30, 2014, 12:24 PM

The FBI’s leaders knew an indictment would raise some harsh questions. Street agents and their superiors in New York had known about the World Trade Center bombers for many months. The terrorist task force had held the Nosair diary in its hands—and never read it. The FBI had placed Salem as an informer among the jihadis fourteen months before the bombing—and let him go. 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 6852-56  | Added on Saturday, August 30, 2014, 12:26 PM

S HORTLY AFTER Louis Freeh was sworn in as the fifth director of the FBI on September 1, 1993, he turned in his White House pass. He refused to enter the Oval Office. His reasons were pure and simple. Freeh regarded President Clinton not as commander in chief but as the subject of a criminal case. The FBI had opened the first of a never-ending series of investigations into Clinton’s personal and political conduct. As a consequence, Freeh found it extraordinarily difficult to talk to Clinton on any matter. 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 6873-76  | Added on Saturday, August 30, 2014, 12:27 PM

Freeh infuriated the White House almost every day for more than seven years. One case among many was the FBI’s immense investigation into allegations that China’s intelligence services had bought political influence at the White House through illegal campaign contributions. When President Clinton expressed disbelief at the allegations, Freeh responded that the White House was lying. The Bureau spent far more time and energy on the case than it did on any terrorism investigation during the Clinton years. 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 6918-21  | Added on Saturday, August 30, 2014, 12:37 PM

On April 19, a rented Ryder truck loaded with 4,800 pounds of fuel oil and ammonium nitrate blew up the nine-story federal government headquarters in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. Terrorism experts on television immediately blamed the attack on Islamic fundamentalists. But the perpetrator was a patriotic American. A right-wing militant named Timothy McVeigh had chosen the second anniversary of the Branch Davidian disaster in Texas to attack an outpost of the government of the United States. 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 6925-30  | Added on Saturday, August 30, 2014, 12:42 PM

On April 24, the president of the California Forestry Association, the timber industry lobbying group, was killed by a bomb inside a package mailed to his office. It was the latest of sixteen deadly attacks attributed by the FBI to an unknown suspect. The investigation—called UNABOM because the first targets were universities and airlines—had been going on for seventeen years. This eleven-week barrage of bombs and plots seemed disconnected—a madman in the Midwest, a millennial cult in Japan, a jihad cell in Manila. But there were patterns in it. Bomb throwers once wanted to create political theater. Now they wanted to burn the theater down. Terrorism once had been a game of nations. Now it was starting to look like a global gang war. 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 6931-33  | Added on Saturday, August 30, 2014, 12:42 PM

After the Manila bomb plot was discovered, President Clinton sought a dramatic expansion of the FBI’s wiretapping and surveillance powers. The most conservative Congress in twenty years stopped him. Congress stripped the bill of its major statutes—and revived them all six years later in the Patriot Act. 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 6957-61  | Added on Saturday, August 30, 2014, 12:46 PM

Forging links with the FBI was one of the many seemingly impossible missions Tenet faced. He thought he could make it happen. He started by making friends with Freeh. Tenet’s parents ran a Greek diner in Queens. Freeh’s father had been a trucking company dispatcher in Brooklyn. The two men got along; they trusted each other. Maybe the FBI and the CIA could get along as well. They decided to trade counterterrorism chiefs. Four senior FBI agents were seconded to the Agency; four CIA officers were deputized at the Bureau. The swap became known as the hostage exchange program. Almost no one volunteered. 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 6998-7002  | Added on Saturday, August 30, 2014, 12:50 PM

While Freeh haggled with Saudi princes, the FBI opened a criminal case against the Saudi pariah Osama bin Laden in September 1996. He had been described in the CIA’s files up until then as a wealthy financier who bankrolled terrorism. But days before, bin Laden had issued his first declaration of war against the United States. In a message from Afghanistan, published by an Arabic-language newspaper in London, he had praised the Khobar bombing and warned America to withdraw its troops from Saudi Arabia. “Nothing between us needs to be explained,” bin Laden wrote. “There is only killing.” 
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Enemies: A History of the FBI (Tim Weiner)
- Highlight Loc. 7036-39  | Added on Saturday, August 30, 2014, 12:55 PM

O’Neill believed, and he would tell anyone who listened, <You have reached the clipping limit for this item>
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September

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The Stars, Like Dust (Isaac Asimov)
- Highlight Loc. 3643  | Added on Tuesday, September 02, 2014, 10:05 AM

‘The lies of lovers and diplomats shall be forgiven them.’
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 195 | Loc. 2738-40  | Added on Tuesday, September 02, 2014, 06:51 PM

THE SPRING of 1963, Carlos Marcello, Santo Trafficante, and Johnny Rosselli had the motive to assassinate President Kennedy—and in many ways the CIA–Mafia plots to kill Castro provided the means. 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Bookmark on Page 195 | Loc. 2741  | Added on Tuesday, September 02, 2014, 06:52 PM


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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 195 | Loc. 2741-43  | Added on Tuesday, September 02, 2014, 06:53 PM

By using people linked to those operations in their still-developing plan to assassinate JFK, the Mafia chiefs could employ people and equipment for what appeared to be CIA operations—but later some would seem to be linked to JFK’s assassination, forcing CIA officials such as Helms to cover up or destroy much crucial information. 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 196 | Loc. 2748-50  | Added on Tuesday, September 02, 2014, 06:53 PM

However, the godfathers also needed a way to force CIA Director John McCone, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, and new President Lyndon Johnson to withhold crucial information from the press and public, to prevent a potential nuclear confrontation with the Soviet Union at the height of the Cold War. 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 196 | Loc. 2752-54  | Added on Tuesday, September 02, 2014, 06:54 PM

These two attempts aren’t well known and are missing from the CIA’s later accounts of the CIA–Mafia plots. However, Cuban authorities extensively documented the two attempts, having captured many of the Cuban participants and much of their CIA-supplied armaments and communications equipment. 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 196 | Loc. 2755-57  | Added on Tuesday, September 02, 2014, 06:54 PM

Both of these attempts involved Mafia don Johnny Rosselli, operating under the supervision of CIA officer William Harvey. Harvey, a hard-drinking, rotund agent sometimes called America’s James Bond, 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 197 | Loc. 2767-69  | Added on Tuesday, September 02, 2014, 06:56 PM

In planting those and similar fake stories blaming JFK’s murder on Fidel, Rosselli, Trafficante, and Marcello not only diverted blame for JFK’s murder away from themselves but also ensured that it couldn’t be fully investigated without exposing dark secrets the CIA and other high officials didn’t want revealed. 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 197 | Loc. 2776-77  | Added on Tuesday, September 02, 2014, 06:56 PM

an embittered John Martino—an associate of Marcello, Trafficante, and Rosselli—helped concoct a plot designed to secure the backing of the CIA Director and the Kennedys, a plot that was really about providing the Mafia cover for its planned assassination of JFK. 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 199 | Loc. 2793-94  | Added on Tuesday, September 02, 2014, 06:59 PM

Mahoney wrote that it “fit nicely with Rosselli’s later claim that President Kennedy was assassinated by an anti-Castro sniper team sent in to murder Castro, captured by the Cubans, tortured, and redeployed in Dallas.” 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 199 | Loc. 2803-5  | Added on Tuesday, September 02, 2014, 07:00 PM

Kaiser points out that “ample evidence, however, shows that the raid was actually just another mob plot against Castro’s life, having nothing to do with Soviet technicians,” and that it was “sold to the Agency under a false cover.” As noted by historian Mahoney, the mob bosses’ real goal was to provide cover for JFK’s assassination. 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 199 | Loc. 2805-11  | Added on Tuesday, September 02, 2014, 07:01 PM

It’s important to note that by the spring of 1963, Trafficante, Rosselli, and Marcello would have no longer seen killing Fidel as their highest priority. The pressure on the mob chiefs from JFK and RFK had increased by that time. Carlos Marcello faced federal charges later in the year and knew he would be personally prosecuted by RFK’s men. Trafficante’s operations were under increasing assault, and their ally Jimmy Hoffa faced three trials for various crimes. Rosselli’s boss, Sam Giancana, was severely impacted by the FBI’s “lockstep” surveillance. Killing Fidel Castro while JFK and RFK were still in power would do the mob bosses little good, which meant that murdering JFK was much more important—and time sensitive—for the Mafia chiefs. 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 200 | Loc. 2812-15  | Added on Tuesday, September 02, 2014, 07:01 PM

Because they also knew nothing about the CIA–Mafia plots in March and April 1963, RFK would have no incentive to protect those operations if they appeared linked to his brother’s murder. Fortuitously for the mobsters, by the time Operation TILT ended in early summer 1963, a new US operation against Cuba had evolved. It was one the Kennedys fully supported and directed and that the three Mafia leaders would soon infiltrate. 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 201 | Loc. 2835-38  | Added on Tuesday, September 02, 2014, 07:06 PM

From January through April 1963, JFK had prominent New York attorney James Donovan working to secure their release. Donovan had helped Robert Kennedy negotiate the release of the Bay of Pigs prisoners, and his rapport with the Cuban government soon translated to a working relationship with Fidel, which included accompanying the Cuban leader on skin-diving trips. 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 202 | Loc. 2846-49  | Added on Tuesday, September 02, 2014, 07:06 PM

The lethal plans approved by Helms were never revealed to Donovan, CIA Director McCone, JFK, or RFK. Donovan was already in some danger, since the CIA’s March 1963 and April 1963 assassination operations (about which Donovan knew nothing) were being planned while he was in Cuba, negotiating with Fidel. Ironically, Castro actually talked with Donovan about the CIA’s attempts to kill him while the men were on a skin-diving excursion. 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 203 | Loc. 2852-54  | Added on Tuesday, September 02, 2014, 07:07 PM

The CIA fully admits to many well-documented Castro assassination attempts that were not authorized by JFK, RFK, even CIA Director John McCone. More importantly, the CIA’s attempts to assassinate Fidel began before JFK became President and continued long after he was dead. 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 204 | Loc. 2877-79  | Added on Tuesday, September 02, 2014, 07:09 PM

Word soon spread in the exile community—and even in Cuba—that Williams was essentially the gatekeeper for RFK and JFK. Those wanting the support of either man would have to go through Williams. Marcello, Trafficante, and Rosselli took notice as well. 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 206 | Loc. 2893-97  | Added on Tuesday, September 02, 2014, 07:13 PM

RFK and Harry Williams were furious when they saw the article revealing information about their secret plans. The information was probably leaked by Tony Varona, who had volunteered to become the first exile leader to join Williams’s operation, no doubt at the urging of Santo Trafficante. Varona had worked on the CIA–Mafia plots with Trafficante and Rosselli, and he was still working for Trafficante in 1963. That Varona was working on behalf of Trafficante and the Mafia was confirmed soon after Varona began working with Williams when the CIA received a report that Rosselli’s associates had paid a bribe of $200,000 to Varona. 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 206 | Loc. 2901-2  | Added on Tuesday, September 02, 2014, 07:13 PM

Commander Almeida reached out to Williams within forty-eight hours of seeing the article, getting a message to him to call a certain number in Cuba, a line that was safe from wiretaps. 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 207 | Loc. 2911-17  | Added on Tuesday, September 02, 2014, 07:54 PM

The logs show that on May 13, 1963, at 5:50 p.m., RFK took a call from President Kennedy. The very next call RFK accepted, at 6:05 p.m., was from Harry Williams. RFK told Williams that JFK had decided to accept Almeida’s offer to stage a coup to overthrow Fidel and that the US government would give Almeida its full backing for the attempt. That was the start of the JFK–Almeida coup plan, one of the most secret covert US operations since D-Day. In fact, that very term was used on May 29, 1963—just over two weeks after Almeida contacted the Kennedys via Williams—when Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman General Maxwell Taylor wrote a memo saying that it was “a matter of priority” to examine the possibility “of an invasion of Cuba at a time controlled by the United States in order to overthrow the Castro government”; the memo included “a proposed date for D-Day.” 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 208 | Loc. 2926-29  | Added on Tuesday, September 02, 2014, 07:55 PM

avoid the main problems that befell the Bay of Pigs operation, which had been a relatively open secret known to dozens of officials, aides, agents, and military officers in the US government, as well as to numerous journalists and even partially to Fidel. This time, any knowledge of the coup plan would be tightly held. Only about a dozen people—including JFK, RFK, CIA Director John McCone, and CIA Deputy Director for Plans Richard Helms—would know the full scope of the plan. 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 210 | Loc. 2963-66  | Added on Tuesday, September 02, 2014, 07:58 PM

The four exile leaders would represent a broad spectrum of politics, from the ultraconservative Manuel Artime, E. Howard Hunt’s best friend, to the extremely liberal Manolo Ray (and his group JURE) and Eloy Menoyo (and his SNFE). Among them, unfortunately, was Tony Varona, who was working for the Mafia. Within several months, CIA memos began to describe those disparate groups as working on a major plot to overthrow Castro. 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 211 | Loc. 2972-73  | Added on Tuesday, September 02, 2014, 07:58 PM

The JFK–Almeida coup plan didn’t start to become fully exposed until 2006, after the US government sent me a written determination that some files describing Commander Almeida’s secret work for JFK could be released. 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 212 | Loc. 2985-86  | Added on Tuesday, September 02, 2014, 11:01 PM

The goals of the Kennedy brothers were both noble and politically pragmatic: to bring democracy to Cuba while also keeping the volatile issue of Cuba—and whether all the Soviet missiles had really been removed—out of the 1964 elections. 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 212 | Loc. 2991-92  | Added on Tuesday, September 02, 2014, 11:02 PM

The Cuban populace could hardly be expected to rally around new leaders who boasted of having killed Fidel, whom the CIA admitted was still admired by many on the island. Thus, Williams told me, someone else would “take the fall” for Fidel’s death. 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 213 | Loc. 2997-99  | Added on Tuesday, September 02, 2014, 11:03 PM

Almeida had enough personal prestige that if he went on Cuban TV and announced that their beloved Fidel had been killed by a Russian or Russian sympathizer, the Cuban people would accept his word, the same way most US citizens at that time would accept a pronouncement by a trusted figure such as J. Edgar Hoover. 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 213 | Loc. 3004-8  | Added on Tuesday, September 02, 2014, 11:03 PM

When Secretary of State Dean Rusk confirmed the existence of the coup plan to Vanity Fair in 1994, the article’s authors asked Rusk about the Kennedys’ attempts to negotiate with Castro at the same time they were planning a coup against him. In pursuing the two strategies at the same time, “Rusk admits that the Kennedys were ‘playing with fire.’” Rusk told Vanity Fair, “Oh, there’s no particular contradiction there . . . it was just an either/or situation. That went on frequently.” 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 213 | Loc. 3009-12  | Added on Tuesday, September 02, 2014, 11:04 PM

JFK’s earlier-noted comments to John McCone reflect this dual strategy, as does Robert Kennedy’s Oral History at Boston’s John F. Kennedy Presidential Library. RFK said, “There were some tentative [peace] feelers that were put out by [Castro] which were accepted by us.” But in the very next sentence, RFK adds that at the same time “we were also making more of an effort [against Castro] through espionage . . . in . . . August, September, October [1963]. It was better organized than it had been before and was having quite an effect.” 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 214 | Loc. 3017-20  | Added on Tuesday, September 02, 2014, 11:04 PM

GIVEN THE DECADES of secrecy surrounding the JFK–Almeida coup plan, it’s shocking that a dozen associates of Carlos Marcello, Trafficante, or Rosselli knew about—and in seven cases actually worked on—the top-secret operation. Learning about the coup plan gave Marcello’s group the deadly secret it needed to prevent a full and public investigation of JFK’s murder, if the effort to overthrow Fidel could be linked to JFK’s murder. 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 215 | Loc. 3026-28  | Added on Tuesday, September 02, 2014, 11:05 PM

An FBI report written just weeks after JFK’s assassination quotes Jack Ruby as talking about something he must have learned before being jailed for shooting Oswald. According to the memo, Ruby talked about “an invasion of Cuba [that] was being sponsored by the United States Government.” 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 215 | Loc. 3031-33  | Added on Tuesday, September 02, 2014, 11:06 PM

JFK’s “no invasion pledge” regarding Cuba had never taken effect and that “the United States Government” really had been planning “an invasion of Cuba.” Those plans were withheld not only from the Warren Commission but also from the House Select Committee on Assassinations and all other Congressional investigating committees. 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 215 | Loc. 3037-40  | Added on Tuesday, September 02, 2014, 11:06 PM

FBI files show that Marcello’s pilot, David Ferrie, knew about the “second invasion” planned for Cuba (the Bay of Pigs being the first). According to an FBI memo, a close associate of Ferrie told the FBI about Ferrie’s “dealings with the late Attorney General Robert Kennedy [and] plans for a Cuban second invasion.” Guy Banister, Marcello’s private detective, knew about the coup plan as well. 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 216 | Loc. 3048-53  | Added on Tuesday, September 02, 2014, 11:10 PM

he taunted the FBI with his knowledge that “President Kennedy was engaged in a plot to overthrow the Castro regime by preparing another invasion attempt against Cuba.” Martino elaborated on the secret Kennedy scheme in an obscure newspaper article contained in an FBI file not released until 1998. In it Martino is quoted as saying—two months after JFK’s death—that when he died “Kennedy was embarked on a plan to get rid of Castro. There was to be another invasion and uprising in Cuba.” Martino accurately noted that “since the death of Kennedy the work on an invasion has virtually stopped.” 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 217 | Loc. 3056-62  | Added on Tuesday, September 02, 2014, 11:11 PM

Even Lee Oswald, who had connections to Marcello documented earlier, made an interesting remark about “an invasion of Cuba” by “the United States” at a time when almost no one was publicly speculating about such an operation. A long-overlooked New York Times article even quotes a Cuban exile—who had contact with Oswald in New Orleans in August 1963 and who knew David Ferrie—as saying that “Lee H. Oswald had boasted [about what he would do] if the United States attempted an invasion of Cuba.” In the summer of 1963, Oswald—accompanied by David Ferrie—reportedly visited a training camp near New Orleans that was affiliated with Manuel Artime, one of the key exile leaders for the JFK–Almeida coup plan. 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 217 | Loc. 3062-68  | Added on Tuesday, September 02, 2014, 11:11 PM

CIA memos I first published in 2005 confirm that in the early 1960s, Manuel Artime was also working on the CIA–Mafia plots, which also involved Trafficante, Rosselli, and Marcello. Artime, E. Howard Hunt’s best friend, would soon become part of Trafficante’s drug trafficking network. Artime was one of seven associates of the three mob bosses who were actually working on the JFK–Almeida coup plan. The same is true for Tony Varona, the first Cuban exile leader to join Harry Williams’s operation, all while he was still working with Santo Trafficante and Johnny Rosselli on the CIA–Mafia plots. It was their work on those unauthorized plots that allowed some of the mob bosses’ men to infiltrate the Kennedy brothers’ authorized operation, the JFK–Almeida coup plan. E. 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 218 | Loc. 3072-74  | Added on Tuesday, September 02, 2014, 11:12 PM

Barker was definitely involved in JFK’s murder, according to Harry Williams, RFK’s friend and aide for the JFK–Almeida coup plan. Long before files linking Barker to organized crime were declassified, Williams told me and my research associate that Barker had worked for Trafficante and was doing so in 1963—at the same time Barker was working on the JFK–Almeida coup plan. 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 219 | Loc. 3085-89  | Added on Tuesday, September 02, 2014, 11:13 PM

As the JFK–Almeida coup plan progressed, Barker assisted Hunt with two of the most sensitive parts of the plan. Barker helped Hunt with the covert payment of $50,000 to Commander Almeida through a foreign bank, the initial installment of an agreed-upon total sum of $500,000 (more than $3 million today). Robert Kennedy had authorized the money in the event the coup was unsuccessful and Almeida had to flee Cuba; if he was killed, the money would alternatively provide for his wife and two children. Barker was well suited for such a financial role, since one of his jobs before the Bay of Pigs invasion “was to deliver CIA cash laundered through foreign banks.” 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 219 | Loc. 3096-98  | Added on Tuesday, September 02, 2014, 11:14 PM

Barker filed reports about a meeting between Manuel Artime and Tony Varona to discuss unity and noting Artime’s meeting with Trafficante “bagman” Frank Fiorini in Dallas to buy an airplane. 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 220 | Loc. 3101-6  | Added on Tuesday, September 02, 2014, 11:14 PM

In 1963 Harry Williams—and Robert Kennedy—didn’t know that “Barker was connected to [Santo Trafficante],” as he later learned. Williams was not privy to FBI and CIA files (released decades later) tying Barker to the mob; nor did he realize that his associates Tony Varona and Manuel Artime also had ties to Trafficante. The JFK–Almeida coup plan gave Marcello and Trafficante the opportunity they needed to kill JFK in a way that would prevent even Robert Kennedy—as well as Lyndon Johnson and J. Edgar Hoover—from pursuing a full or public investigation of the murder. 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 222 | Loc. 3136-43  | Added on Tuesday, September 02, 2014, 11:18 PM

Johnny Rosselli, always looking for an advantage to exploit, soon turned the hard-drinking David Morales into a close friend; they even took a trip to Las Vegas together. For Rosselli, Morales was just another CIA agent he could use for his own ends—in this case, the JFK assassination. While Barker was helpful, he was only a CIA agent. But Morales was a high-ranking CIA officer who could control operations, who could order weapons shipped, and who was also working on the JFK–Almeida coup plan. Like Rosselli, David Morales would eventually confess late in life to having a role in the murder of JFK. Morales made his confession to his attorney and also to a lifelong friend after going on a tirade about JFK’s sole responsibility for the failure of the Bay of Pigs. Morales said he had “to watch all the men he had recruited and trained get wiped out because of Kennedy.” Morales then told his friends that “we took care of that son of a bitch” JFK. 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 223 | Loc. 3153-56  | Added on Tuesday, September 02, 2014, 11:19 PM

CARLOS MARCELLO’S ACCESS to the highly secret CIA–Mafia plots and those working on the JFK–Almeida coup plan gave the godfather, and his allies Trafficante and Rosselli, the connections he needed to create grave concerns at the highest levels of the US government—if those plans appeared linked to JFK’s murder. From August to November, Marcello and his men would move to compromise more key elements of the coup plan—and other covert CIA operations—as part of their plot to kill JFK. 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 226 | Loc. 3169-74  | Added on Thursday, September 11, 2014, 10:09 AM

Also, based on his later Congressional testimony, Helms apparently saw no real distinction between his CIA–Mafia plots and the Kennedys’ authorized efforts to stage a coup against Fidel. As Helms would testify to Senate investigators in 1975, “I believe it was the policy at the time to get rid of Castro, and if killing him was one of the things that was to be done in this connection, that was within what was expected.” If true, that belief doesn’t explain why Helms kept President Kennedy, CIA Director McCone, and Attorney General Robert Kennedy in the dark about his unauthorized operations—or why he used mobsters the Attorney General was trying to prosecute. 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 226 | Loc. 3178-79  | Added on Thursday, September 11, 2014, 10:09 AM

Helms might have thought that even if Almeida could initiate the coup, it would still be helpful to have Mafia or exile sharpshooters on hand to finish the job, just in case anything went wrong. 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 227 | Loc. 3188-90  | Added on Thursday, September 11, 2014, 10:14 AM

According to Cuban reports, David Morales actually met with Cubela in Paris in September 1963, and the CIA acknowledges that a series of meetings between Cubela and CIA personnel followed. Cubela says the CIA kept pressuring him to assassinate Fidel, while the CIA claims assassination was Cubela’s idea. 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 227 | Loc. 3190-92  | Added on Thursday, September 11, 2014, 10:14 AM

Rolando Cubela wasn’t part of the JFK–Almeida coup plan. As JFK’s Secretary of State Dean Rusk told me—and as CIA files clearly show—he had no following inside Cuba that would have allowed him to stage a coup on his own. 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 228 | Loc. 3207-11  | Added on Thursday, September 11, 2014, 10:16 AM

Clearly, having Fidel’s neighbor Cubela as part of that plot would be very advantageous: The CIA could use his house as the sniper’s nest and/or even blame him for Fidel’s murder. Cubela was both a disgruntled official and one who—because of his extensive travels—came in contact with Russians overseas more often than most Cuban officials. Blaming Cubela for Fidel’s murder might also let the CIA implicate Russia in Fidel’s assassination. 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 229 | Loc. 3211-15  | Added on Thursday, September 11, 2014, 10:16 AM

Someone in the CIA, most likely David Morales, arranged for Cubela to be in a meeting with his case officer in Paris on November 22, 1963, at the exact time JFK was scheduled to be riding in an open car through Dallas. If Morales arranged that as part of his work with Johnny Rosselli, it was the perfect way to force Helms to hide a great deal of information from internal CIA investigators and other high US officials, which is exactly what happened. Americans would not learn about the Cubela operation until twelve years after JFK’s murder, and it was never revealed to the Warren Commission. 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 230 | Loc. 3233-34  | Added on Thursday, September 11, 2014, 10:17 AM

Mertz was considered “untouchable” by French authorities, and he often visited America. He made a trip to Louisiana in 1963 using the alias of an anti–de Gaulle activist who’d had contact with the CIA. 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 232 | Loc. 3258-59  | Added on Thursday, September 11, 2014, 10:19 AM

Notorious Chicago hit man Charles Nicoletti, another member of Rosselli’s Mafia family, also joined the CIA–Mafia plots in the fall of 1963, according to the Miami Herald and United Press International. 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 232 | Loc. 3262-63  | Added on Thursday, September 11, 2014, 10:19 AM

Cuban officials and unconfirmed US accounts say that Nicoletti also became part of the mob’s plan to kill JFK, as did Herminio Diaz, another mob hit man who worked for Santo Trafficante. * 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 233 | Loc. 3265-70  | Added on Thursday, September 11, 2014, 10:20 AM

In 1963 Diaz began working on the CIA–Mafia plots for Trafficante and was also of great interest to David Morales’s supervisor, Miami CIA Station Chief Ted Shackley. The CIA was especially interested in Diaz because in his first interview in the United States with David Morales’s Cuban exile agents, Diaz mentioned Juan Almeida and Rolando Cubela as part of a group of disgruntled Cuban officials who wanted to act against Castro. Diaz had probably acquired the information second- or third-hand from Trafficante (or Bernard Barker), but even though Diaz got some of the details wrong, his mention of Almeida and Cubela was enough to get the CIA’s attention. 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 233 | Loc. 3271-74  | Added on Thursday, September 11, 2014, 10:21 AM

It was important for the success of the mob bosses’ plot to kill JFK that the trusted men they brought into the plan—Diaz, Charles Nicoletti, Michel Victor Mertz, and John Martino—all had intelligence ties. That gave them cover for their work on the plot, plus ways to feed disinformation to the agencies they worked for, before and after JFK’s murder. 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 236 | Loc. 3306-8  | Added on Thursday, September 11, 2014, 10:23 AM

As mentioned earlier, a summer 1963 CIA memo says that exile leader Tony Varona was bribed with $200,000 (more than $1 million today) from Rosselli’s boss Giancana. The CIA learned of the bribe from Mafia member Richard Cain, who had been involved in the CIA–Mafia plots since 1960. 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 236 | Loc. 3314-15  | Added on Thursday, September 11, 2014, 10:23 AM

But after JFK’s murder, Varona’s Mafia bribe would be yet another explosive piece of information that Helms would have to hide from his own CIA Director. 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 238 | Loc. 3342-45  | Added on Thursday, September 11, 2014, 10:27 AM

It was another example of explosive information—information that would cause problems for investigators and intelligence agencies when it surfaced—being planted months before JFK’s murder. Indeed, Odio’s story would cause major last-minute problems for the Warren Commission, until an associate of Trafficante—Loran Hall—indicated that it was he and his friends who made the visit, not Oswald. However, after the Warren Report was published, Hall denied making the visit. 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 239 | Loc. 3348-54  | Added on Thursday, September 11, 2014, 10:28 AM

As for Trafficante and Marcello, their motivation to kill JFK only increased during the summer and early fall of 1963. New developments in their cases help explain their extensive and careful plans to assassinate the President. Trafficante was fighting the IRS—the same organization that had sent Al Capone to prison—and three of his brothers were also named in the IRS complaint. Marcello faced an upcoming federal trial in New Orleans. The Justice Department attorney presenting the case against him would be one of RFK’s own Mafia prosecutors, meaning this was one trial that Marcello couldn’t buy his way out of with bribes to local or state authorities. Any conviction could result in another deportation, and Marcello was still scarred with the memory of that traumatic experience. 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 239 | Loc. 3355-60  | Added on Thursday, September 11, 2014, 10:29 AM

RFK’s pressure had resulted in the FBI’s wiretapping other mob leaders, who vented their rage at the Kennedys. Bureau agents heard one Philadelphia mobster complain, “With Kennedy, a guy should take a knife . . . and stab and kill that fucker, I mean it.” The mob chief of Buffalo went even further, saying of the Kennedys, “They should kill the whole family.” Marcello differed from them in two ways: He had more to lose, more quickly, from the Kennedys’ assault. And because Marcello headed America’s oldest Mafia family, he didn’t need approval from the other bosses on the national Mafia “commission” before pursuing major hits, like killing JFK. 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 240 | Loc. 3364-68  | Added on Thursday, September 11, 2014, 08:16 PM

Recipients of Teamster pension fund loans included Marcello and Trafficante, and the latter shared an attorney—Frank Ragano—with Hoffa. Kaiser points out that Ragano later said that on July 23, “he met Hoffa in Washington” before leaving to see Marcello and Trafficante. Hoffa gave him a message to take to the godfathers. Hoffa wanted Ragano to tell them, “Something has to be done. The time has come for your friend [Trafficante] and Carlos to get rid of him, kill that son-of-a-bitch John Kennedy. This has got to be done. Be sure to tell them what I said . . . we’re running out of time—something has to be done.” 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 240 | Loc. 3369-73  | Added on Thursday, September 11, 2014, 08:17 PM

According to Ragano, he delivered the message, and “the two men looked at one another in icy silence and did not respond.” Of course, by that time Marcello and Trafficante had already been carefully planning JFK’s murder for at least nine months. Ragano later wrote that he didn’t take Hoffa’s demand seriously. But Ragano’s behavior in the fall of 1963—including publicly toasting JFK’s murder with Trafficante on the night of the assassination and, as reported in an FBI file, handling a huge sum of cash for the assassination—indicates that Ragano played a larger role in JFK’s murder than the attorney ever admitted. 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 241 | Loc. 3389-91  | Added on Thursday, September 11, 2014, 08:18 PM

The CIA–Mafia plots were a deep secret even within the CIA, with only a handful of trusted officials like Desmond FitzGerald, Helms’s protégé E. Howard Hunt, David Morales, and William Harvey still working on them. 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 245 | Loc. 3431-34  | Added on Thursday, September 11, 2014, 08:25 PM

Banister and Ferrie were also acting on behalf of their employer, Carlos Marcello, making sure many of Oswald’s activities would later make him look guilty of JFK’s murder. Banister and Ferrie both hated Fidel, and aside from whatever Marcello was paying them, they no doubt hoped that blaming JFK’s death on a seemingly pro-Castro Communist would trigger the US invasion of Cuba that both men knew was being planned. 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 246 | Loc. 3447-51  | Added on Thursday, September 11, 2014, 08:26 PM

CIA files confirm that at the same time Oswald was generating remarkable publicity, David Atlee Phillips was working on Manuel Artime’s AMWORLD portion of the JFK–Almeida coup plan. The actions of Phillips and Oswald reveal that Oswald’s unusual pro-Castro publicity blitz was part of the CIA’s efforts to place US intelligence assets in Cuba. That would include a face-to-face meeting with Oswald within weeks of Oswald’s publicity blitz, followed by Oswald’s trip to Mexico City as he attempted to leverage that publicity into permission to fly to Cuba. 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 248 | Loc. 3477-84  | Added on Friday, September 12, 2014, 09:45 AM

historian Richard Mahoney documented that six witnesses saw Oswald with Ferrie or Banister in the summer of 1963; two of them said that Oswald was working for Banister at that time. Declassified files and Michael Kurtz later revealed additional witnesses. One uncovered by Kurtz, Consuela Martin, provides a new explanation of why Banister’s office address appeared on the pro-Castro leaflets. Kurtz writes that Martin’s office was next to Banister’s and that “she saw Oswald in Banister’s office at least half a dozen times in the late spring and summer of 1963. . . . On every one of these occasions, Oswald and Banister were together.” Oswald sometimes asked her to do translating work for him by typing documents into Spanish. Martin believes that the 544 Camp Street address was used in hopes of luring unsuspecting pro-Castro leftists to Banister’s office, thus yielding more information for Banister’s voluminous files on leftists, all of whom he viewed as Communists. 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 249 | Loc. 3494-98  | Added on Friday, September 12, 2014, 09:46 AM

The pamphlet’s author was ninety years old when researcher James DiEugenio located him, but he had saved a copy of the three-dollar “28 June 1961” purchase order he had received for forty-five copies from the “Central Intelligence Agency, Mailroom Library, Washington 25, D.C.” Those first-printing pamphlets had been ordered when David Atlee Phillips was running operations targeting the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, making Phillips a possible source of pro-Castro literature for Oswald’s PR efforts. 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 249 | Loc. 3503-8  | Added on Friday, September 12, 2014, 09:48 AM

Oswald’s name “was never included on either part of the [FBI’s] Security Index, not even after he went on to set up his highly visible Fair Play for Cuba chapter.” Oswald’s absence from the list was especially odd since he was a former defector to the Soviet Union, so Russell asks, “[H]ad the FBI received word from someone to keep a relative distance from Oswald . . . because he was considered part of another intelligence operation?” The Warren Commission was never able to satisfactorily answer that question because if Oswald had been on the Security Index, he would certainly have been subject to law-enforcement attention on the day of JFK’s motorcade in Dallas. 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 249 | Loc. 3666-69  | Added on Friday, September 12, 2014, 09:59 AM

This CIA document, and other information from French authorities, shows that assassin Michel Victor Mertz, a French Connection heroin trafficker who worked with Trafficante, was deported from Dallas shortly after JFK’s assassination, an important fact kept from the warren Commission. In addition, Marcello told the FBI’s CAMTEX informant that he imported two shooters from Europe for the JFK hit. 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 252 | Loc. 3744-46  | Added on Friday, September 12, 2014, 10:06 AM

On August 17, 1963, a WDSU radio host contacted Oswald and invited him to be interviewed on a weekly radio show. The radio personality “admits he had been briefed by the FBI on Oswald’s background.” 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 253 | Loc. 3754-56  | Added on Saturday, September 13, 2014, 09:56 AM

CIA OFFICER DAVID Atlee Phillips met with Oswald in Dallas in late August or early September 1963, apparently to debrief him after his New Orleans media appearances. Oswald had built a public and documented record as firmly pro-Castro and had handled a variety of situations well. 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 253 | Loc. 3757-61  | Added on Saturday, September 13, 2014, 09:56 AM

While the United States could use speedboats to sneak assets and agents into Cuba at night, those people couldn’t travel freely or openly talk to lower-level officials and the public and thus could not gauge the level of public support for the coup. Since the United States had no embassy or diplomatic relations with Cuba, and since travel to the island was severely restricted, the United States needed a number of assets who could travel openly. As a former defector to Russia, someone like Oswald was especially valuable because if he ever got into trouble, the United States could claim that the Russians were behind his activities. 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 254 | Loc. 3766-67  | Added on Saturday, September 13, 2014, 09:57 AM

Veciana’s story of meeting Oswald and Phillips in the lobby of the new Southland Building in Dallas has been controversial, though Congressional investigator Gaeton Fonzi concluded that such a meeting did take place. 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 255 | Loc. 3787-89  | Added on Saturday, September 13, 2014, 10:00 AM

In 1963 David Morales—who admitted helping to assassinate JFK—still outranked David Atlee Phillips and could easily have proposed to Phillips that he meet Oswald in public and that Veciana be allowed to see Oswald for some reason. 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 256 | Loc. 3797-99  | Added on Saturday, September 13, 2014, 10:02 AM

Oswald was not an experienced assassin, and the CIA would have no more trusted him to murder Fidel than the Mafia would have used the inexperienced Oswald to shoot JFK. However, as with JFK’s murder, Oswald did have the proper background to be an excellent patsy to take the blame for Castro’s death. 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 258 | Loc. 3823-27  | Added on Saturday, September 13, 2014, 10:04 AM

HISTORIAN JOHN NEWMAN, a twenty-year veteran of military intelligence, posed the question, “Why did Oswald come into contact with so many people with CIA connections in August and September 1963?” He named five individuals, but more have since emerged, including John Martino (whom the CIA admits was a CIA asset), David Ferrie, and David Atlee Phillips. One of those Newman named was William Gaudet, a CIA asset who worked for INCA’s founder. It’s now clear that Gaudet was part of the “tight” surveillance of Oswald mentioned earlier. 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 259 | Loc. 3847-51  | Added on Saturday, September 13, 2014, 10:08 AM

House Select Committee on Assassinations found additional evidence of the existence of photos of Oswald in Mexico City. However, only unrelated photos of someone else (who looked nothing like Oswald) would be furnished to the Warren Commission and eventually made public. That’s probably because the CIA’s photo surveillance operation in Mexico City was under the control of David Atlee Phillips, who was no doubt acting on orders from Richard Helms. One reason for withholding the Oswald–Mexico photos—and denying the CIA had known Oswald was in Mexico—would be that Oswald was involved in a highly sensitive, covert operation run by Phillips and Helms. 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 260 | Loc. 3855-57  | Added on Saturday, September 13, 2014, 10:08 AM

The Mafia had the connections to ensure that he never got to Cuba. A Mexican police agency involved with Trafficante’s heroin network monitored the Cuban and Russian embassy calls for the CIA while mobster (and active CIA asset) Richard Cain had formerly bugged a Communist embassy in Mexico City. 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 260 | Loc. 3860-61  | Added on Saturday, September 13, 2014, 10:09 AM

Washington Post reporter Jefferson Morley interviewed a former CIA official who told him that “CIA records suggested that members of [FitzGerald’s staff] seemed to be carefully guarding information about Oswald in the weeks before Kennedy was killed.” 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 261 | Loc. 3870-72  | Added on Saturday, September 13, 2014, 10:13 AM

After analyzing many recently declassified files, Naval War College professor and historian David Kaiser concluded in 2008 that “in all probability, Oswald’s attempt to reach Cuba via Mexico City . . . was designed to give him an opportunity to assassinate Castro.” 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 261 | Loc. 3878-82  | Added on Saturday, September 13, 2014, 10:14 AM

The training camp outside New Orleans where David Ferrie reportedly took Oswald was a sort of minor-league training camp for Manual Artime’s AMWORLD portion of the JFK–Almeida coup plan. The camp’s owner later said that “he bought arms from Ferrie, who in turn got them from US Army personnel who had stolen them.” Declassified files show that some arms reported stolen from National Guard armories in the Texas area were actually being supplied to Cuban exile leaders like Manolo Ray’s JURE group, which JFK and RFK wanted for their coup plan. 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 262 | Loc. 3883-88  | Added on Saturday, September 13, 2014, 10:15 AM

In October 1963 the Treasury Department tried to stop the trafficking in stolen arms with an undercover sting. Surprisingly, FBI and Treasury Department memos from that operation quote a Dallas gun dealer as giving a fairly accurate description of the upcoming JFK–Almeida coup plan. The Dallas gun dealer said that in “the last week of November 1963 . . . a large scale amphibious operation would take place against the Cuba mainland” and “United States military forces or government agencies would possibly be involved in this operation [which] involved an attack by rebel Cuban forces.” Writers for the Washington Post linked longtime gunrunner Jack Ruby to that same stolen-military-arms ring. 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 263 | Loc. 3898-3900  | Added on Saturday, September 13, 2014, 10:17 AM

Carlos Marcello knew he had to act before the coup took place and removed his only opportunity to force a cover-up by top US officials. Marcello had nothing to gain, and everything to lose, by allowing the JFK–Almeida coup plan to go forward. 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 263 | Loc. 3901-3  | Added on Saturday, September 13, 2014, 10:17 AM

The date for the coup was firming up to be sometime in early December 1963, something Marcello, Trafficante, and Rosselli could have learned from their CIA allies in the JFK plot, like David Morales and Bernard Barker. 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 263 | Loc. 3905-7  | Added on Saturday, September 13, 2014, 10:17 AM

With the coup date looming, Marcello and the others organized attempts to kill JFK in November 1963 during motorcades in three different cities: Chicago, Tampa, and Dallas. Marcello relied on his trusted associates—the Chicago mob’s Rosselli and Trafficante in Tampa—to help him oversee the plot. 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 264 | Loc. 3912-14  | Added on Saturday, September 13, 2014, 10:18 AM

The Mafiosi had come up with one basic plan that could be applied in each of the three cities. Because the opportunities were so close together, the bosses could use most of the same personnel for each attempt. Each of the three target cities had a key Mafia operative close to law enforcement who would monitor any leaks about—or investigations into—the JFK hit. 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 264 | Loc. 3915-16  | Added on Saturday, September 13, 2014, 10:18 AM

In Chicago, the mob’s top “made” man in law enforcement was Richard Cain, who was also chief investigator for the Cook County Sheriff. 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 264 | Loc. 3917-19  | Added on Saturday, September 13, 2014, 10:18 AM

In Tampa, Trafficante’s man was Sergeant Jack de la Llana, who had formed and become director of the Tampa Police Department’s first criminal intelligence unit. As revealed in Senate hearings in October 1963, when de la Llana testified while posing as an honest cop, he was also “chairman of the Florida Intelligence Unit, a statewide agency which coordinates information . . . throughout the State of Florida.” 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 265 | Loc. 3923-26  | Added on Saturday, September 13, 2014, 10:19 AM

In Dallas, Jack Ruby could serve a similar function. Though Ruby wasn’t a member of law enforcement, his friendly contacts with Dallas Police were long-standing and ran deep. According to government files, Ruby knew at least seven hundred of the twelve hundred Dallas policemen; several officers and Ruby associates claimed that Ruby actually knew EVERY Dallas policeman. Ruby was particularly close to several corrupt cops, and as noted earlier, one Warren Commission document called Ruby “the pay-off man for the Dallas Police Department.” 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 267 | Loc. 3957-61  | Added on Saturday, September 13, 2014, 07:55 PM

Brown pointed out the “relative infrequency with which such professional murders are successfully prosecuted” and explained why. He said that police had solved only one of twenty-three Mafia murders in Tampa, and the lone exception was not a typical Mafia hit. Brown said it was very “difficult to obtain evidence sufficient for successful prosecution of Mafia members, because the witnesses who might offer such evidence have always been reluctant to do so [due to] fear of Mafia reprisals, since it is common knowledge in Tampa that the Mafia does not hesitate to murder” those who talk to the authorities or testify. 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 269 | Loc. 3973-75  | Added on Saturday, September 13, 2014, 07:56 PM

To maintain deniability in case the secret talks were exposed, JFK had to work through William Attwood, who in turn talked to Fidel’s doctor, who dealt with Fidel. The parties were wary of each other, and the negotiations slow. 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 270 | Loc. 3988-91  | Added on Saturday, September 13, 2014, 07:58 PM

William Attwood said in a memo that they needed to “remove the Cuban issue from the 1964 campaign.” Talks with other Kennedy aides show that John and Robert Kennedy shared that opinion, and it was one factor in scheduling the JFK–Almeida coup plan for December 1, 1963, a date confirmed in a memo by CIA Director John McCone and by RFK’s top exile aide, Harry Williams. 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 273 | Loc. 4020-29  | Added on Saturday, September 13, 2014, 08:02 PM

To avoid those problems, the Kennedy aide cautiously indicated some of the conditions necessary for JFK to make an informed, reasoned response to the apparent assassination of a US official in Latin America. First, the United States would need to control and limit initial publicity to keep the news media from generating an outcry for an immediate military response against Cuba. To protect Almeida, any possible links between the assassination and the coup plan would have to be hidden from the press. US investigating agencies would need to take control of the investigation from local authorities as soon as possible, including gaining possession of important evidence. The autopsy would have to be conducted at a secure US military facility to ensure that information couldn’t be leaked to the press. All of this would give JFK the time and information needed to make an appropriate response. Some aspects of what many call the cover-up regarding JFK’s assassination—from controlling news accounts to his controversial military autopsy—were thus actually planned weeks and months before JFK’s murder but were intended to manage a completely different situation. 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 276 | Loc. 4063-65  | Added on Saturday, September 13, 2014, 08:05 PM

Yet another Trafficante associate, Bernard Barker, had helped CIA officer E. Howard Hunt with the initial payment of $50,000 to Almeida (out of a promised $500,000—almost $3 million in today’s dollars), to help get Almeida’s wife and children out of Cuba on a seemingly innocent pretext. 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 276 | Loc. 4072-73  | Added on Saturday, September 13, 2014, 08:06 PM

In 1985 Marcello confided to his cellmate, FBI informant Jack Van Laningham, that “two dagos came from Italy” to act as gunmen in JFK’s assassination. Marcello explained that the gunmen first came to Canada, then into Michigan. 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 277 | Loc. 4088-92  | Added on Saturday, September 13, 2014, 08:07 PM

Bringing the gunmen into the United States through Canada and then Michigan is significant for two reasons. First, that was part of a heroin smuggling route through Montreal used by Marcello’s French Connection associates. The Montreal heroin ring also ran an immigration and illegal-identity racket for “supplying false papers”—what would be called identity theft today. In addition to smuggling, the ring was also used for new Mafia recruits, immigrants fresh from Italy and Sicily who needed cover identities. 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 278 | Loc. 4102-3  | Added on Saturday, September 13, 2014, 08:09 PM

There were three cities planned for the assassination—Chicago, Tampa, and Dallas—and three fall guys to take the blame: Vallee, Lopez, and Oswald, one for each of the mob bosses (Rosselli, Trafficante, and Marcello). 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 282 | Loc. 4150-55  | Added on Saturday, September 13, 2014, 08:14 PM

Dallas FBI agent James Hosty had visited Marina Oswald on November 1 and again on November 5. After Oswald heard about it, he wrote a note to Hosty warning him away; Oswald personally dropped it off at the Dallas FBI office on November 12. Shortly after Oswald’s death, Hoover ordered the Dallas FBI office to destroy Oswald’s note. The note and its destruction were kept secret from the Warren Commission and the American public. The contents of the note and the circumstances of Oswald’s visit were the subject of three conflicting stories when Congress finally investigated the note in the mid-1970s. The essence of Oswald’s note was that Agent Hosty should “stop bothering my wife [and] talk to me if you need to.” The secretary in the Dallas office testified that she recalled a phrase about “blowing up” the FBI office. 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 283 | Loc. 4166-68  | Added on Saturday, September 13, 2014, 08:16 PM

SEVERAL OF OSWALD’S activities during the summer and fall of 1963 bore a remarkable similarity to those of another ex-Marine, Thomas Arthur Vallee—so much so that the Secret Service noted a few of them in a secret memo just three days after JFK’s murder. 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 284 | Loc. 4179-82  | Added on Saturday, September 13, 2014, 08:17 PM

According to investigative journalist Edwin Black, Vallee later told him that he had spent part of his time in the Marines in Japan at the Camp Otsu U-2 base, one of several U-2 bases used by the CIA operation. Recall that Oswald had served at a U-2 base at Atsugi, Japan. Like Oswald—whose outrageously pro-Russian remarks were never reprimanded by his Marine superiors—Vallee appears to have gotten special treatment in the Marines. 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 289 | Loc. 4250-53  | Added on Saturday, September 13, 2014, 08:25 PM

However, there was yet another young man—this time in Tampa—who had even more parallels to Oswald from August to November 1963: Gilberto Policarpo Lopez. Government files and sources show nineteen parallels in all, which indicate that Lopez was being manipulated as the perfect fall guy if the JFK assassination was in Tampa or if an additional patsy was needed for Dallas. 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 290 | Loc. 4265-68  | Added on Saturday, September 13, 2014, 08:27 PM

FBI and government files confirm that Lopez left Tampa shortly after the attempt to assassinate JFK during his motorcade there. He went to Texas, where an unconfirmed newspaper account places him in Dallas on November 22, 1963. CIA and FBI files show that Lopez then crossed the border when it was reopened after JFK’s assassination and went to Mexico City. From there, unlike Oswald, Lopez would be successful in getting into Cuba. 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 290 | Loc. 4274-77  | Added on Saturday, September 13, 2014, 08:28 PM

The Warren Commission got only fragments of information about Gilberto Lopez, though it did learn enough to write in one memo that Lopez was on a “mission” of some sort at the time of JFK’s assassination. However, the Warren Commission was never told about the attempt to assassinate JFK in Tampa, so it apparently considered Lopez of only minor interest. 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 292 | Loc. 4300-4305  | Added on Saturday, September 13, 2014, 08:32 PM

Since it was just a year after the Cuban Missile Crisis, CIA assets Trafficante, Marcello, and Rosselli knew that if JFK was murdered in public and it quickly emerged that his killer had connections to Cuba and even Russia, high US officials could wind up facing two difficult choices, either of which would be good for the mob bosses. US officials could give in to a public outcry to retaliate against Cuba, which would serve to limit the murder investigation of JFK at a crucial time as the United States went to war. Or US officials could tamp down such speculation and limit a true, full investigation of JFK’s murder to prevent calls for retaliation that could lead to World War III. 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 294 | Loc. 4332-35  | Added on Saturday, September 13, 2014, 11:58 PM

Still more information falsely implicating Fidel in JFK’s murder—almost all of it linked to associates of Trafficante, David Morales, Johnny Rosselli, or Bernard Barker—would emerge in the days, weeks, and months after the assassination. The Mafia chiefs knew those allegations were crucial to maintaining “the World War III pretext for a national security cover-up” that would protect Marcello, Trafficante, and Rosselli from close scrutiny. 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 307 | Loc. 4489-98  | Added on Sunday, September 14, 2014, 12:12 AM

On or about Thursday, October 31, 1963—one day after the Chicago agents’ pretext interview of Vallee—“Vallee’s landlady called the [Secret] Service office and said that Vallee was not going to work on Saturday,” according to the testimony of Agent Edward Tucker to Congressional investigators. The agent testified that because Saturday was “the day of JFK’s visit to Chicago,” this information “resulted in the [Secret] Service having the Chicago Police Department surveil Vallee.” A later FBI report says that as a result of the Secret Service request to the Chicago police, “a 24-hour surveillance was placed on Vallee and his activities by the Chicago Police Department.” On the morning of November 2, before JFK’s motorcade was canceled, Thomas Vallee was heading into the city. According to Congressional investigators, he had put one of his M-1 rifles and his pistol in the trunk of his car, where he also had three thousand rounds of ammunition. Vallee wore a shirt with an open collar and a jacket—similar to what at least one member of the four-man assassin team was wearing. 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 308 | Loc. 4507-12  | Added on Sunday, September 14, 2014, 12:13 AM

As for the heavily armed Vallee, the HSCA report says that he was “released from [Chicago Police] custody on the evening of November 2.” Vallee was apparently never even brought to the Secret Service office for an interview, then or in the coming weeks. The Secret Service didn’t even talk to ex-Marine Vallee in the days and weeks after the Dallas assassination was blamed on fellow ex-Marine Oswald, even though Secret Service records—some of which are still classified—show that the agency maintained an interest in Vallee for at least the next seven years. Clearly there was more to Vallee and the Chicago attempt than the records released so far reveal. 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 309 | Loc. 4515-20  | Added on Sunday, September 14, 2014, 12:14 AM

It’s long been documented that Marcello and Ferrie spent the weekend of November 9 and 10 working on strategy at the secluded farmhouse in the middle of the vast Churchill Farms property. Marcello’s federal trial continued in New Orleans, so the two later claimed to government investigators that they were working on trial strategy. However, Marcello had top attorneys to handle that, and Marcello’s main strategy involved bribing a key juror to ensure his acquittal, or at the very least a hung jury, and Ferrie was not involved with that. Their meetings at Churchill Farms were also unusual because Ferrie usually met with Marcello in the godfather’s office at the Town and Country Motel, as he had done several times in October. 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 314 | Loc. 4592-95  | Added on Sunday, September 14, 2014, 01:12 PM

The stakes were incredibly high for JFK and RFK, since just five days after the Chicago attempt, American newspapers reported that Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev had publicly warned the “US that attack on Cuba will lead to war.” That made it all the more crucial that no hint of the coup plan could emerge from any investigation of the Chicago threat, or any threats that might emerge during JFK’s upcoming trips to Tampa and Miami on November 18, 1963. 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 315 | Loc. 4601-4  | Added on Sunday, September 14, 2014, 01:13 PM

In Tampa JFK was scheduled to have a private—though widely publicized—meeting with the head of Strike Force Command (now Central Command) and other military brass, including some brought in from Washington. Coupled with the special lines in JFK’s speech, all this was designed to reassure Almeida that JFK would back him and the coup all the way, even with US military force. 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 317 | Loc. 4628-31  | Added on Sunday, September 14, 2014, 01:16 PM

According to one account, Lopez had another suspicious associate. The Tampa Tribune later reported that “on Nov. 17, 1963 [when] Lopez attended a meeting in the home of a member of the Tampa chapter of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee [also] thought to have been at that meeting was Lee Harvey Oswald.” The article goes on to say that “recently declassified FBI files quote ‘operatives’ as saying Oswald met with a member of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee in Tampa on that date [though] that information was never confirmed.” 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 321 | Loc. 4685-92  | Added on Sunday, September 14, 2014, 07:46 PM

The attempt to kill JFK in Tampa was withheld from the Warren Commission and all later government investigating committees—until I told the JFK Assassination Records Review Board about it, in writing, on November 24, 1994. According to the Review Board’s Final Report, just two months later, “January 1995, the Secret Service destroyed Presidential protection survey reports for some of President Kennedy’s trips in the fall of 1963,” including Tampa. The Secret Service informed the Board a week after it destroyed the records, “when the Board was drafting its request for additional information.” That destruction apparently broke the law, since the 1992 JFK Act that created the Review Board had required agencies to preserve all relevant records. However, when the Secret Service destroyed records for JFK’s Tampa trip in 1995, Commander Almeida was still alive in Cuba—and his secret work for JFK not been publicly exposed—giving the Secret Service a possible national security reason for its actions. 
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- Highlight on Page 321 | Loc. 4694-96  | Added on Sunday, September 14, 2014, 07:47 PM

The public’s faith in the Secret Service, already at a low ebb after Dallas, would have been shaken to the core if weeks or months after JFK’s death it was revealed that the agency had covered up an assassination attempt in Tampa that had so many parallels with Dallas. 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 323 | Loc. 4714-21  | Added on Sunday, September 14, 2014, 07:50 PM

ON THE EVENING of November 18, the President flew to Miami and gave his most important speech, with lines directed at Commander Almeida and his allies in Cuba. Those carefully crafted sentences were also designed so they would not upset JFK’s back-channel negotiations with Fidel. In his speech, JFK proclaimed: What now divides Cuba from my country . . . is the fact that a small band of conspirators has stripped the Cuban people of their freedom and handed over the independence and sovereignty of the Cuban nation to forces beyond the hemisphere. They have made Cuba a victim of foreign imperialism. . . . This, and this alone, divides us. As long as this is true, nothing is possible. Without it, everything is possible. Once this barrier is removed, we will be ready and anxious to work with the Cuban people. 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 324 | Loc. 4728-32  | Added on Sunday, September 14, 2014, 07:51 PM

After JFK returned to Washington, he expressed his relief at surviving the trip to his close aide David Powers. According to Kennedy biographer Ralph Martin, JFK told Powers, “Thank God nobody wanted to kill me today!” JFK explained that an assassination “would be tried by someone with a high-power rifle and a telescopic sight during a downtown parade when there would be so much noise and confetti that nobody would even be able to point and say, ‘It came from that window.’” 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 334 | Loc. 4864-65  | Added on Sunday, September 14, 2014, 08:36 PM

Marcello explained to his cellmate Jack Van Laningham the key role Campisi played in his plot. Campisi hid the two hitmen at his restaurant until it was time for them to go to Dealey Plaza, before JFK’s motorcade was scheduled to pass through that park-like part of downtown Dallas. 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 340 | Loc. 4956-62  | Added on Sunday, September 14, 2014, 11:32 PM

The owner of the Cellar club, Pat Kirkwood, knew both Jack Ruby and mob associate Lewis McWillie. Kirkwood claimed in a filmed interview for Jack Anderson in 1988 that several strippers who worked for Jack Ruby had come to the club late that night, and he indicated that Jack Ruby might have sent them over on purpose. Kirkwood also claimed that some of the agents “were drinking pure Everclear [alcohol].” Warren Commission documents confirm that some of Ruby’s strippers knew Kirkwood. Whether or not the women were sent by Ruby on purpose, the fact that Secret Service agents were out so late the night before Kennedy’s visit was important information for someone like Ruby. Their presence indicated that the Mafia’s plan for Dallas hadn’t leaked, as it had in Chicago and Tampa. None of the Secret Service limo drivers were involved, though several high-profile agents from the next day’s events were. 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Bookmark on Page 343 | Loc. 4990  | Added on Sunday, September 14, 2014, 11:35 PM


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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 343 | Loc. 4990-91  | Added on Sunday, September 14, 2014, 11:35 PM

Since most of the key events occurred in Texas, Central time is used unless otherwise indicated. JFK’s assassination occurred at 12:30 p.m. CST. 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 358 | Loc. 5204-12  | Added on Sunday, September 14, 2014, 11:59 PM

Weitzman described the man who claimed to be a Secret Service agent and said the man “produced credentials and told him everything was under control.” Deputy Weitzman said the man was of “medium height, [with] dark hair and wearing a light windbreaker.” Canfield then “showed him a photo of Sturgis [Frank Fiorini] and [Bernard] Barker” because the government had investigated reports—later proved false—that Fiorini and E. Howard Hunt had been photographed in Dealey Plaza after JFK’s murder. * Instead of reacting to Fiorini’s photo, Weitzman “immediately stated, ‘Yes, that’s him,’ pointing to Bernard Barker.” Just to be sure, “Canfield asked, ‘Was this the man who produced the Secret Service credentials?’ Weitzman responded, ‘Yes, that’s the same man.’” Weitzman even said he’d be willing “to make a tape recorded statement for official investigators,” and he recorded a statement for Canfield, in which he reaffirmed the Barker identification. 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 358 | Loc. 5213-19  | Added on Sunday, September 14, 2014, 11:59 PM

In the late 1990s, when researchers showed Malcolm Summers a photo of Bernard Barker, he had identified Barker as the armed man he had encountered on the knoll moments after JFK was assassinated. Could CIA agent and later Watergate burglar Bernard Barker have been one of the fake Secret Service agents in Dealey Plaza? Michael Canfield was party to a lawsuit involving E. Howard Hunt in which he and his coauthor obtained a sworn deposition from Barker. When their attorney asked Barker where he was on November 22, 1963, Barker initially remarked, “This is a question that came up during the Watergate Hearing,” but review of Barker’s Watergate testimony reveals no such questioning. In Barker’s deposition, he said that “I was working for the Agency, they know exactly everywhere I was, I reported to them daily.” 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 372 | Loc. 5410-16  | Added on Monday, September 15, 2014, 12:22 AM

Aside from Clemons, the Warren Commission did not hear from two other important witnesses. According to researcher Larry Harris, “Frank Wright, who lived on the next block . . . heard gunshots, went out to see what was happening and saw a man standing near a police car. He insisted the man ran and jumped in a gray car parked beyond” Tippit’s car “and sped away west on Tenth Street. Jack Tatum told House Assassination Committee investigators that he . . . had just passed a police car when the shooting broke out; Tatum paused and watched the gunman walk behind the squad car and take careful, deliberate aim before firing one more shot into Tippit.” The House Select Committee on Assassinations said, “This action, which is commonly described as a coup de grace, is more indicative of an execution,” something one might expect of an experienced hit man. 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 382 | Loc. 5548-55  | Added on Monday, September 15, 2014, 12:35 AM

After John McCone arrived at RFK’s estate, probably between 2:45 and 3:00 (EST), Mahoney writes that Robert “went out on the lawn with him. ‘I asked McCone,’ Kennedy was to tell his trusted aide Walter Sheridan, ‘if they had killed my brother, and I asked him in a way that he couldn’t lie to me and [McCone said] they hadn’t. ’” Mahoney points out that “McCone was one of Bobby’s closest friends in the Administration, and this extraordinary question revealed a deep and terrible suspicion about the CIA, something born of some knowledge, or at least intuition, and not simply the incontinence of grief.” Of course, neither McCone or RFK knew about the ongoing CIA–Mafia plots, or the assassination side of the Cubela (AMLASH) and QJWIN operations. RFK’s question likely referred to some aspect of the JFK–Almeida coup plan that both men knew about, particularly the AMWORLD portion with exile leader Manuel Artime. Not long after the assassination, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. notes, CIA Director McCone told RFK that “he thought there were two people involved in the shooting.” 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 382 | Loc. 5556-58  | Added on Monday, September 15, 2014, 12:36 AM

By 5:00 (EST), McCone was back at CIA Headquarters, meeting with officials who knew about the JFK–Almeida coup plan, including Richard Helms and Lyman Kirkpatrick. Helms told neither man that he had continued the CIA–Mafia plots to kill Fidel, or that a CIA officer had been meeting with Roland Cubela about Fidel’s assassination at the very moment that JFK was shot. 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 387 | Loc. 5630-36  | Added on Monday, September 15, 2014, 12:47 AM

AROUND 5:15 P.M. (EST), J. Edgar Hoover issued an internal memo stating that police “very probably” had Kennedy’s killer in custody, calling Oswald a nut and a pro-Castro extremist, an “extreme radical of the left.” Hoover soon began to exert pressure on senior FBI officials to complete their investigation and issue a factual report supporting the conclusion that Oswald was the lone assassin. Though it wasn’t a federal offense for one person acting alone to kill a president, it WAS a federal offense for two or more people to conspire to “injure any officer of the US engaged in discharging the duties of his office.” Thus, proclaiming Oswald the “lone assassin” kept it a local and not a federal prosecution—and kept it out of the hands of Robert Kennedy’s Justice Department. 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 399 | Loc. 5800-5804  | Added on Monday, September 15, 2014, 09:54 AM

As Powers told my research associate—and as Powers and O’Donnell both confirmed to former House Speaker Tip O’Neill—they clearly saw shots from the front, from the grassy knoll. Powers and O’Donnell had known and worked with RFK for years; the Attorney General would have trusted their observations. In addition, White House physician Admiral George Burkley—the only doctor at Bethesda who had also seen JFK at Parkland—later stated that he believed JFK had been killed by more than one gunman. 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 400 | Loc. 5809-13  | Added on Monday, September 15, 2014, 09:55 AM

Only a few basic facts are not in dispute. All agree that the Bethesda doctors didn’t realize JFK had been shot in the throat, since a tracheotomy incision obscured that wound. The Bethesda doctors did find JFK’s small back wound, so they initially assumed he had been shot once in the back and once in the head, and that Connally had been hit by a separate shot. Not until the next day, Saturday, did lead autopsy physician Dr. James Humes learn about the throat wound, and he burned his first draft of the autopsy report on Sunday, November 24. 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 401 | Loc. 5819-21  | Added on Monday, September 15, 2014, 09:56 AM

Robert Kennedy’s concerns about the exposure of the Almeida coup plan would have been shared by other officials in the know, like Joint Chiefs Chairman General Maxwell Taylor, who had ultimate authority over a military facility like Bethesda. 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 401 | Loc. 5821-23  | Added on Monday, September 15, 2014, 09:56 AM

One of the main points of RFK’s subcommittee’s making the Cuba Contingency Plans—the one about the possible “assassination of American officials”—had been to avoid a situation in which the premature release of information could back the President into a corner and cause a crisis that could go nuclear. The thinking behind that planning appears to have been implemented to deal with JFK’s death. 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 401 | Loc. 5830-32  | Added on Monday, September 15, 2014, 09:57 AM

A laboratory technician at the autopsy, Paul O’Connor, said that “Admiral Burkley controlled what happened in that room that night, through Robert Kennedy and the rest of the Kennedy family.” O’Connor said that when Burkley came into the autopsy room, he “was very agitated—giving orders to everybody, including higher-ranking officers.” 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 402 | Loc. 5836-39  | Added on Monday, September 15, 2014, 09:58 AM

Burkley was basically supervising everything that went on in the autopsy room, and that the commanding officer was also responding to Burkley’s wishes.” Dr. Burkley himself stated in his oral history at the JFK Library that “during the autopsy I supervised everything that was done . . . and kept in constant contact with Mrs. Kennedy and the members of her party, who were on the seventeenth floor.” 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 404 | Loc. 5866-68  | Added on Monday, September 15, 2014, 10:01 AM

While the official autopsy was jammed with officers and other personnel, an earlier unofficial national security autopsy would have been conducted with only a few people present. This scenario could also explain other documented discrepancies. 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 405 | Loc. 5878-84  | Added on Monday, September 15, 2014, 10:04 AM

A brief national security autopsy before the official one, as well as national security concerns following the official autopsy, could also account for the many problems surrounding the autopsy photographs and X-rays. Douglas Horne was the Chief Analyst of military records for the congressionally created JFK Assassination Records Review Board for three years in the 1990s. In addition to the problem with JFK’s throat wound, Horne recently wrote, “There is something seriously wrong with the autopsy photographs of the body of President Kennedy. . . . The images showing the damage to the President’s head do not show the pattern of damage observed by either the medical professionals at Parkland Hospital in Dallas, or by numerous witnesses at the military autopsy at Bethesda Naval Hospital. These disparities are real and are significant.” 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 407 | Loc. 5909-12  | Added on Monday, September 15, 2014, 10:06 AM

ON THE EVENING of November 22, my confidential Naval Intelligence source was called back to his office. Now that Lee Oswald’s name had surfaced in JFK’s murder, he and his co-workers were given new orders: to destroy and sanitize much of the “tight” surveillance file their group had maintained on Oswald since his return from Russia. 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 408 | Loc. 5928-31  | Added on Monday, September 15, 2014, 10:08 AM

AT 9:00 A.M. (EST) on November 23, 1963, CIA Director John McCone talked to Robert Kennedy. McCone was set to meet with new President Lyndon Johnson at 12:30 to start briefing him on the most pressing intelligence matters, so it’s not hard to imagine that McCone and RFK must have discussed what McCone was going to tell LBJ about the coup plan with Almeida. At that point, LBJ had had no involvement in the plan and probably didn’t even know it existed. 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 411 | Loc. 5976-81  | Added on Monday, September 15, 2014, 10:13 AM

However, neither man realized that stories like the one they saw were not only later discredited, but also linked to the Mafia. One CIA cable that weekend tried to urge caution in dealing with such reports, but it went unheeded, at least initially. The bottom line was that high US officials like LBJ and McCone—and lower officials who gained power in later decades like Haig and Califano—were left with the false impression that Castro had killed JFK. That mistaken impression has helped to essentially freeze US–Cuba relations since the time of JFK’s murder. However, at the time, it also served to divert attention and suspicion away from the Mafia. 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 413 | Loc. 6001-3  | Added on Tuesday, September 16, 2014, 09:53 AM

either or both men would have made excellent patsies for JFK’s death if anything had happened to Oswald or if someone else was needed to shoulder some of the blame. At the same time, each may also have been serving (or thought he was serving) some legitimate role for US intelligence. 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 413 | Loc. 6005-7  | Added on Tuesday, September 16, 2014, 09:53 AM

John Whitten was Helms’s Covert Operations Chief for all of Mexico and Central America. In a detailed report that he wrote soon after JFK’s death, one kept classified for thirty years, Whitten said that after “word of the shooting of President Kennedy reached the [CIA] offices . . . when the name of Lee Oswald was heard, the effect was electric.” 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 414 | Loc. 6010-14  | Added on Tuesday, September 16, 2014, 09:55 AM

Historian Michael Kurtz has written that Hunter Leake, the Deputy Chief of the New Orleans CIA office at the time, told him “that on the day after the assassination, he was ordered to collect all of the CIA’s files on Oswald from the New Orleans office and transport them to the Agency’s headquarters in Langley, Virginia.” Kurtz wrote that “[along with] other employees of the New Orleans office, Leake gathered all of the Oswald files. They proved so voluminous that Leake had to rent a trailer to transport them to Langley. 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 414 | Loc. 6015-18  | Added on Tuesday, September 16, 2014, 09:55 AM

Leake later learned that many of these files were . . . ‘deep sixed.’ Leake explained that . . . the CIA dreaded the release of any information that would connect Oswald with it. Leake thought that his friend Richard Helms, the Agency’s Deputy Director for Plans, was probably the person who ordered the destruction of the files because Helms had a paranoid obsession with protecting the ‘Company.’” 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 415 | Loc. 6029-34  | Added on Tuesday, September 16, 2014, 09:57 AM

IN A PHONE call recorded at 10:01 a.m. on November 23, J. Edgar Hoover admitted to Lyndon Johnson that “the case, as it stands now, isn’t strong enough to be able to get a conviction.” Yet the Saturday-morning newspapers were conveying just the opposite impression by establishing the basic “lone assassin” scenario that some people still believe today. In hindsight, it seems absurd to think that all the relevant information about the shooting, and an unusual former defector like Oswald, could be uncovered less than twelve hours after the shooting—and that clearly wasn’t the case. 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 416 | Loc. 6037-39  | Added on Tuesday, September 16, 2014, 09:57 AM

In those pre-Watergate times, they could simply be told that certain information was too sensitive, could compromise US operations, or might force a confrontation with the Soviets—and just a year after the Cuban Missile Crisis, this last explanation might be all that was required, since Oswald’s Soviet and Cuba connections had been so widely reported. 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 416 | Loc. 6040-43  | Added on Tuesday, September 16, 2014, 09:58 AM

As mentioned in Chapter One , when information linking Oswald to David Ferrie first started to surface during the weekend after JFK’s murder, an NBC cameraman related that “an FBI agent said that I should never discuss what we discovered for the good of the country.” That same phrase, “for the good of the country,” would be used to stop Dave Powers and Kenneth O’Donnell from revealing they had seen shots from the grassy knoll, and it was probably used to silence others as well. 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 417 | Loc. 6053-57  | Added on Tuesday, September 16, 2014, 10:00 AM

Texan Dan Rather’s career-making scoop was his role as the first journalist to view and report on the Zapruder film, though so firmly entrenched by the weekend was the “official” story of the lone-assassin-shooting-from-behind that Rather claimed the home movie showed JFK’s “head went forward with considerable violence” after he was shot. The public wouldn’t get to see the film for themselves—and learn that JFK was pitched backward, not forward—for another twelve years. 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 417 | Loc. 6059-61  | Added on Tuesday, September 16, 2014, 10:00 AM

While covering the assassination helped their careers, it sometimes impeded any questioning of the “official” version of the lone assassin, both at the time and for years to come. 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 419 | Loc. 6093-95  | Added on Tuesday, September 16, 2014, 10:03 AM

The fact that the CIA discovered later that someone had been using the name of Souetre would also allow an official like Helms (or Angleton or Harvey) to ask INS officials to remove the information about the deportation from their files, on national security grounds. 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 420 | Loc. 6099-6104  | Added on Tuesday, September 16, 2014, 10:04 AM

EVEN AS EVIDENCE tying Oswald to Cuba and Russia caused concern among officials in Washington, and would soon break in the press, Marcello continued the pressure to have Oswald killed. With the authorities still seeking David Ferrie, the whole plot could unravel and point to people working for Marcello. The godfather could make only limited efforts to contain Oswald’s public statements and cooperation with police, which is why two attorneys linked to Marcello had been asked to represent the still lawyerless Oswald. (They were Clem Sehrt, an associate of Carlos Marcello who had known Oswald’s mother since the 1950s, and Dean Andrews, who knew David Ferrie.) But only killing Oswald could guarantee his silence. 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 422 | Loc. 6126-29  | Added on Tuesday, September 16, 2014, 10:07 AM

The plan was for Ruby to wire Carlin the money the next day, from a Western Union office only one block from the police station where Oswald would be moved. The following day, Ruby’s time-stamped Western Union receipt would be designed to “prove” that Ruby just happened to be near the police station when Oswald was being moved. It’s clear this was only a cover story, since there were two Western Union offices much closer to Ruby’s Oak Cliff apartment. 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 424 | Loc. 6163-70  | Added on Tuesday, September 16, 2014, 08:23 PM

Upstairs, in Detective Fritz’s office, a small group of officials were questioning Oswald, but at 11:15 a.m. they were told their time was up. However, the transfer car wasn’t in position, so the group with Oswald had to slow its passage toward the basement. The basement was packed with at least seventy policemen and forty newsmen. At Western Union, Ruby wired Carlin the money at 11:17 a.m. and then headed back to the police station, only a block away. The timing was tight for Ruby to have any hope of claiming a “sudden passion” defense, but he had plenty of associates who could signal when he should arrive. For example, only one minute after Ruby left the Western Union office, his attorney entered the police station and saw Oswald coming out of the jail elevator. Ruby’s attorney turned to leave, telling a police detective, “That’s all I wanted to see.” 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 425 | Loc. 6177-80  | Added on Tuesday, September 16, 2014, 08:24 PM

As Oswald was rushed to Parkland Hospital, the apprehended Ruby appeared to police officer Don Ray Archer as “being extremely agitated and nervous, continually inquiring whether Oswald was dead or alive.” Oswald died at 1:07 p.m. It was only after Ruby was told that his victim was dead that “Ruby calmed down,” according to Marcello’s biographer, John H. Davis. 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 427 | Loc. 6207-11  | Added on Tuesday, September 16, 2014, 08:28 PM

Marcello knew that Ruby was a long-time mob associate who could be trusted not to talk. But the godfather realized there were still avenues investigators could pursue that could lead to his associates. So, even as the government continued to scramble to deal with the aftermath of two assassinations—including the national security implications of JFK’s murder and the coup plan that was on hold—Marcello, Trafficante, and Rosselli implemented plans to keep attention focused away from themselves, and toward Fidel Castro. 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 429 | Loc. 6221-25  | Added on Tuesday, September 16, 2014, 08:29 PM

Marcello and Trafficante used the legitimate national security concerns surrounding the coup plan with Almeida to keep the pressure on US officials to withhold key information from investigators, the press, and the public, to protect the US government’s ally high in the Cuban government. That pressure included continuing to have their men float “Castro killed JFK” stories that would find their way to occasionally receptive officials in Washington. 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 430 | Loc. 6225-27  | Added on Tuesday, September 16, 2014, 08:30 PM

Commander Almeida would remain high in the Cuban government and unexposed for decades, so protecting his life and his family would be a legitimate national security concern for a series of Presidents and CIA Directors, from 1963 until Almeida’s death in 2009. 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 430 | Loc. 6230-32  | Added on Tuesday, September 16, 2014, 08:30 PM

National security concerns were also used to hide not just the “tight” surveillance of Oswald but the structure that allowed a massive program of domestic surveillance by a raft of agencies—including the CIA, FBI, and military intelligence—to be conducted on thousands of Americans in the 1960s, including some in the JFK investigation. 
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The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (Lamar Waldron)
- Highlight on Page 431 | Loc. 6239-42  | Added on Tuesday, September 16, 2014, 08:33 PM

One of the consequences of Oswald’s death was the creation of the Warren Commission. Sometimes misperceived as something solely created by LBJ so he could control the investigation, the Warren Commission was actually created due to the efforts of several Robert Kennedy associates. Neither President Johnson nor J. Edgar Hoover wanted the Warren Commission, whereas RFK’s associates apparently saw a commission as preferable to having the whole investigation in the hands of LBJ and Hoover. 
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- Highlight on Page 431 | Loc. 6248-49  | Added on Tuesday, September 16, 2014, 08:34 PM

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Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (The Institution for Social and Policy St) (James C. Scott)
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Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (The Institution for Social and Policy St) (James C. Scott)
- Highlight on Page 4 | Loc. 203-4  | Added on Friday, September 19, 2014, 06:21 PM

The first element is the administrative ordering of nature and society—the transformative state simplifications described above. 
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Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (The Institution for Social and Policy St) (James C. Scott)
- Highlight on Page 4 | Loc. 207-9  | Added on Friday, September 19, 2014, 06:21 PM

The second element is what I call a high-modernist ideology. It is best conceived as a strong, one might even say muscle-bound, version of the self-confidence about scientific and technical progress, the expansion of production, the growing satisfaction of human needs, the mastery of nature (including human nature), and, above all, the rational design of social order commensurate with the scientific understanding of natural laws. 
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The third element is an authoritarian state that is willing and able to use the full weight of its coercive power to bring these high-modernist designs into being. The most fertile soil for this element has typically been times of war, revolution, depression, and struggle for national liberation. 
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A fourth element is closely linked to the third: a prostrate civil society that lacks the capacity to resist these plans. War, revolution, and economic collapse often radically weaken civil society as well as make the populace more receptive to a new dispensation. 
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In sum, the legibility of a society provides the capacity for large-scale social engineering, high-modernist ideology provides the desire, the authoritarian state provides the determination to act on that desire, and an incapacitated civil society provides the leveled social terrain on which to build. 
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The formal scheme was parasitic on informal processes that, alone, it could not create or maintain. 
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Throughout the book I make the case for the indispensable role of practical knowledge, informal processes, and improvisation in the face of unpredictability. 
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as I make clear in examining scientific farming, industrial agriculture, and capitalist markets in general, large-scale capitalism is just as much an agency of homogenization, uniformity, grids, and heroic simplification as the state is, with the difference being that, for capitalists, simplification must pay. 
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Today, global capitalism is perhaps the most powerful force for homogenization, whereas the state may in some instances be the defender of local difference and variety. (In Enlightenment’s Wake, John Gray makes a similar case for liberalism, which he regards as self-limiting because it rests on cultural and institutional capital that it is bound to undermine.) 
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A relatively unskilled and inexperienced labor crew could adequately carry out its tasks by following a few standard rules in the new forest environment. Harvesting logs of relatively uniform width and length not only made it possible to forecast yields successfully but also to market homogeneous product units to logging contractors and timber merchants. 
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What is striking about these endeavors is that they are attempts to work around an impoverished habitat still planted with a single species of conifers for production purposes. 27 In this case, “restoration forestry” attempted with mixed results to create a virtual ecology, while denying its chief sustaining condition: diversity. The metaphorical value of this brief account of scientific production forestry is that it illustrates the dangers of dismembering an exceptionally complex and poorly understood set of relations and processes in order to isolate a single element of instrumental value. 
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Society must be remade before it can be the object of quantification. Categories of people and things must be defined, measures must be interchangeable; land and commodities must be conceived as represented by an equivalent in money. There is much of what Weber called rationalization in this, and also a good deal of centralization. —Theodore M. Porter, “Objectivity as Standardization” 
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There is, then, no single, all-purpose, correct answer to a question implying measurement unless we specify the relevant local concerns that give rise to the question. Particular customs of measurement are thus situationally, temporally, and geographically bound. 
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While the formal custom governing feudal dues and wages would thus remain intact (requiring, for example, the same number of sacks of wheat from the harvest of a given holding), the actual transaction might increasingly favor the lord. 43 
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The conquerors of our days, peoples or princes, want their empire to possess a unified surface over which the superb eye of power can wander without encountering any inequality which hurts or limits its view. The same code of law, the same measures, the same rules, and if we could gradually get there, the same language; that is what is proclaimed as the perfection of the social organization. . . . The great slogan of the day is uniformity. —Benjamin Constant, De I’esprit de conquete 
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Three factors, in the end, conspired to make what Kula calls the “metrical revolution” possible. First, the growth of market exchange encouraged uniformity in measures. Second, both popular sentiment and Enlightenment philosophy favored a single standard throughout France. Finally, the Revolution and especially Napoleonic state building actually enforced the metric system in France and the empire. 
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Beyond a certain point, however, much of commerce is composed of long chains of transactions, often over great distances, between anonymous buyers and sellers. Such trade is greatly simplified and made legible by standard weights and measures. Whereas artisanal products were typically made by a single producer according to the desires of a particular customer and carried a price specific to that object, the mass-produced commodity is made by no one in particular and is intended for any purchaser at all. In a sense, the virtue of the mass commodity is its reliable uniformity. 
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The following petition from Brittany is typical of the way in which an appeal for unitary measures could be assimilated to devotion to the Crown: “We beg them [the king, his family, and his chief minister] to join with us in checking the abuses being perpetrated by tyrants against that class of citizens which is kind and considerate and which, until this day has been unable to present its very grievances to the very foot of the throne, and now we call on the King to mete out justice, and we express our most sincere desire for but one king, one law, one weight, and one measure” 
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The metric system was at once a means of administrative centralization, commercial reform, and cultural progress. The academicians of the revolutionary republic, like the royal academicians before them, saw the meter as one of the intellectual instruments that would make France “revenue-rich, militarily potent, and easily administered.” 53 Common measures, it was supposed, would spur the grain trade, make land more productive (by permitting easier comparisons of price and productivity), and, not incidentally, lay the groundwork for a national tax code. 54 But the reformers also had in mind a genuine cultural revolution. “As mathematics was the language of science, so would the metric system be the language of commerce and industry,” serving to unify and transform French society. 55 A rational unit of measurement would promote a rational citizenry. 
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depended on that other revolutionary political simplification of the modern era: the concept of a uniform, homogeneous citizenship. 
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For the Encyclopedists, the cacophony among measurements, institutions, inheritance laws, taxation, and market regulations was the great obstacle to the French becoming a single people. They envisioned a series of centralizing and rationalizing reforms that would transform France into a national community where the same codified laws, measures, customs, and beliefs would everywhere prevail. It is worth noting that this project promotes the concept of national citizenship—a national French citizen perambulating the kingdom and encountering exactly the same fair, equal conditions as the rest of his compatriots. In place of a welter of incommensurable small communities, familiar to their inhabitants but mystifying to outsiders, there would rise a single national society perfectly legible from the center. 
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For those who grew up in its various quarters, Bruges would have been perfectly familiar, perfectly legible. Its very alleys and lanes would have closely approximated the most common daily movements. For a stranger or trader arriving for the first time, however, the town was almost certainly confusing, simply because it lacked a repetitive, abstract logic that would allow a newcomer to orient herself. The cityscape of Bruges in 1500 could be said to privilege local knowledge over outside knowledge, including that of external political authorities. 1 It functioned spatially in much the same way a difficult or unintelligible dialect would function linguistically. 
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Stopping short of redesigning cities in order to make them more legible (a subject that we shall soon explore), state authorities endeavored to map complex, old cities in a way that would facilitate policing and control. Most of the major cities of France were thus the subject of careful military mapping (reconnaissances militaires), particularly after the Revolution. When urban revolts occurred, the authorities wanted to be able to move quickly to the precise locations that would enable them to contain or suppress the rebellions effectively. 
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“Long before the invention of bulldozers,” Mumford adds, “the Italian military engineer developed, through his professional specialization in destruction, a bulldozing habit of mind: one that sought to clear the ground of encumbrances, so as to make a clear beginning on its own inflexible mathematical lines.” 
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A bird’s-eye view of central Chicago in the late nineteenth century (William Penn’s Philadelphia or New Haven would do equally well) serves as an example of the grid city 
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outsider—or a policeman—finding an address is a comparatively simple matter; no local guides are required. The knowledge of local citizens is not especially privileged vis-a-vis that of outsiders. If, as is the case in upper Manhattan, the cross streets are consecutively numbered and are intersected by longer avenues, also consecutively numbered, the plan acquires even greater transparency. 12 The aboveground order of a grid city facilitates its underground order in the layout of water pipes, storm drains, sewers, electric cables, natural gas lines, and subways—an order no less important to the administrators of a city. 
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With a T-square and a triangle, finally, the municipal engineer could, without the slightest training as either an architect or a sociologist, ‘plan’ a metropolis, with its standard lots, its standard blocks, its standard width streets. . . . The very absence of more specific adaptation to landscape or to human purpose only increased, by its very indefiniteness, its general usefulness for exchange”. 
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Antiquated sewers and cesspools, the droppings of an estimated thirty-seven thousand horses (in 1850), and the unreliable water supply made Paris literally pestilential. The city had the highest death rate in France and was most susceptible to virulent epidemics of cholera; in 1831, the disease killed 18,400 people, including the prime minister. And it was in those districts of revolutionary resistance where, because of crowding and lack of sanitation, the rates of mortality were highest. 
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equivalent of what the Faubourg Saint-Antoine had been earlier—an illegible, insurrectionary foyer. “The problem was not that Belleville was not a community, but that it became the sort of community which the bourgeoisie feared, which the police could not penetrate, which the government could not regulate, where the popular classes, with all their unruly passions and political resentments, held the upper hand.” 32 
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Family names in early fifteenth-century Tuscany were confined to a very few powerful, property-owning lineages (such as the Strozzi). For such lineages, a surname was a way of achieving social recognition as a “corporate group,” and kin and affines adopted the name as a way of claiming the backing of an influential lineage. Beyond this narrow segment of society and a small urban patriciate that copied its practices, there were no permanent family names. 
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What evidence we have suggests that second names of any kind became rarer as distance from the state’s fiscal reach increased. Whereas one-third of the households in Florence declared a second name, the proportion dropped to one-fifth for secondary towns and to one-tenth in the countryside. It was not until the seventeenth century that family names crystallized in the most remote and poorest areas of Tuscany— the areas that would have had the least contact with officialdom. 
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Many of these fourteenth-century surnames were clearly nothing more than administrative fictions designed to make a population fiscally legible. 
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State naming practices, like state mapping practices, were inevitably associated with taxes (labor, military service, grain, revenue,) and hence aroused popular resistance. The great English peasant rising of 1381 (often called the Wat Tyler Rebellion) is attributed to an unprecedented decade of registrations and assessments of poll taxes. 52 For English as well as for Tuscan peasants, a census of all adult males could not but appear ominous, if not ruinous. 
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The confusion for which the decree is the antidote is largely that of the administrator and the tax collector. Universal last names, they believe, will facilitate the administration of justice, finance, and public order as well as make it simpler for prospective marriage partners to calculate their degree of consanguinity. 
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The great cultural barrier imposed by a separate language is perhaps the most effective guarantee that a social world, easily accessible to insiders, will remain opaque to outsiders. 62 Just as the stranger or state official might need a local guide to find his way around sixteenth-century Bruges, he would need a local interpreter in order to understand and be understood in an unfamiliar linguistic environment. A distinct language, however, is a far more powerful basis for autonomy than a complex residential pattern. 
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It is also the bearer of a distinctive history, a cultural sensibility, a literature, a mythology, a musical past. 63 In this respect, a unique language represents a formidable obstacle to state knowledge, let alone colonization, control, manipulation, instruction, or propaganda. 
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linguistic centralization was assured of some success since it went hand in hand with an expansion of state power. By the late nineteenth century, dealing with the state was unavoidable for all but a small minority of the population. 
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“There can be no clearer expression of imperialist sentiment, a white man’s burden of Francophony, whose first conquests were to be right at home.” 66 Where the command of Latin had once defined participation in a wider culture for a small elite, the command of standard French now defined full participation in French culture. 
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The linguistic centralization impelled by the imposition of Parisian French as the official standard was replicated in a centralization of traffic. Just as the new dispensation in language made Paris the hub of communication, so the new road and rail systems increasingly favored movement to and from Paris over interregional or local traffic. 
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The army had also adopted the Ponts et Chaussees logic, believing that direct rail lines to the borders would be militarily advantageous. They were proven tragically wrong in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71. 
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This retrofitting of traffic patterns had enormous consequences, most of which were intended: linking provincial France and provincial French citizens to Paris and to the state and facilitating the deployment of troops from the capital to put down civil unrest in any department in the nation. It was aimed at achieving, for the military control of the nation, what Haussmann had achieved in the capital itself. It thus empowered Paris and the state at the expense of the provinces, greatly affected the economics of location, expedited central fiscal and military control, and severed or weakened lateral cultural and economic ties by favoring hierarchical links. At a stroke, it marginalized outlying areas in the way that official French had marginalized local dialects. 
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Officials of the modern state are, of necessity, at least one step—and often several steps—removed from the society they are charged with governing. They assess the life of their society by a series of typifications that are always some distance from the full reality these abstractions are meant to capture. Thus the foresters’ charts and tables, despite their synoptic power to distill many individual facts into a larger pattern, do not quite capture (nor are they meant to) the real forest in its full diversity. 
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The only way to accomplish this is to reduce an infinite array of detail to a set of categories that will facilitate summary descriptions, comparisons, and aggregation. The invention, elaboration, and deployment of these abstractions represent, as Charles Tilly has shown, an enormous leap in state capacity—a move from tribute and indirect rule to taxation and direct rule. 
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The discriminating interventions that a legible society makes possible can, of course, be deadly as well. A sobering instance is wordlessly recalled by a map produced by the City Office of Statistics of Amsterdam, then under Nazi occupation, in May 1941 ( figure 13 ). 76 Along with lists of residents, the map was the synoptic representation that guided the rounding up of the city’s Jewish population, sixty-five thousand of whom were eventually deported. The map is titled “The Distribution of Jews in the Municipality.” Each dot represents ten Jews, a scheme that makes the heavily Jewish districts readily apparent. The map was compiled from information obtained not only through the order for people of Jewish extraction to register themselves but also through the population registry (“exceptionally comprehensive in the Netherlands”) 77 and the business registry. If one reflects briefly on the kind of detailed information on names, addresses, and ethnic backgrounds (determined perhaps by names in the population registry or by declaration) and the cartographic exactitude required to produce this statistical representation, the contribution of legibility to state capacity is evident. The Nazi authorities of course, supplied the murderous purpose behind the exercise, but the legibility provided by the Dutch authorities supplied the means to its efficient implementation. 78 That legibility, I should emphasize, merely amplifies the capacity of the state for discriminating interventions—a capacity that in principle could as easily have been deployed to feed the Jews as to deport them. 
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State simplifications have at least five characteristics that deserve emphasis. Most obviously, state simplifications are observations of only those aspects of social life that are of official interest. They are interested, utilitarian facts. Second, they are also nearly always written (verbal or numerical) documentary facts. Third, they are typically static facts. 79 Fourth, most stylized state facts are also aggregate facts. Aggregate facts may be impersonal (the density of transportation networks) or simply a collection of facts about individuals (employment rates, literacy rates, residence patterns). Finally, for most purposes, state officials need to group citizens in ways that permit them to make a collective assessment. Facts that can be aggregated and presented as averages or distributions must therefore be standardized facts. However unique the actual circumstances of the various individuals who make up the aggregate, it is their sameness or, more precisely, their differences along a standardized scale or continuum that are of interest. 
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Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (The Institution for Social and Policy St) (James C. Scott)
- Highlight on Page 83 | Loc. 1637-39  | Added on Saturday, September 27, 2014, 03:59 PM

The categories used by state agents are not merely means to make their environment legible; they are an authoritative tune to which most of the population must dance. 
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- Highlight on Page 87 | Loc. 1644-49  | Added on Saturday, September 27, 2014, 04:00 PM

Modern science, which displaced and replaced God, removed that obstacle [limits on freedom]. It also created a vacancy: the office of the supreme legislatorcum-manager, of the designer and administrator of the world order, was now horrifyingly empty. It had to be filled or else. . . . The emptiness of the throne was throughout the modern era a standing and tempting invitation to visionaries and adventurers. The dream of an all-embracing order and harmony remained as vivid as ever, and it seemed now closer than ever, more than ever within human reach. It was now up to mortal earthlings to bring it about and to secure its ascendancy. —Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust 
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Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (The Institution for Social and Policy St) (James C. Scott)
- Highlight on Page 87 | Loc. 1649-52  | Added on Saturday, September 27, 2014, 04:01 PM

All the state simplifications that we have examined have the character of maps. That is, they are designed to summarize precisely those aspects of a complex world that are of immediate interest to the mapmaker and to ignore the rest. To complain that a map lacks nuance and detail makes no sense unless it omits information necessary to its function. 
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Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (The Institution for Social and Policy St) (James C. Scott)
- Highlight on Page 87 | Loc. 1654  | Added on Saturday, September 27, 2014, 04:01 PM

the purpose of mapping, which is to abstract and summarize. 
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Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (The Institution for Social and Policy St) (James C. Scott)
- Highlight on Page 87 | Loc. 1658-59  | Added on Saturday, September 27, 2014, 04:03 PM

A private corporation aiming to maximize sustainable timber yields, profit, or production will map its world according to this logic and will use what power it has to ensure that the logic of its map prevails. 
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Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (The Institution for Social and Policy St) (James C. Scott)
- Highlight on Page 87 | Loc. 1659-61  | Added on Saturday, September 27, 2014, 04:03 PM

What the state does at least aspire to, though, is a monopoly on the legitimate use of force. That is surely why, from the seventeenth century until now, the most transformative maps have been those invented and applied by the most powerful institution in society: the state. 
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Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (The Institution for Social and Policy St) (James C. Scott)
- Note on Page 88 | Loc. 1661  | Added on Saturday, September 27, 2014, 04:05 PM

google street view
but alot of privatemaps still rely heavily on state entities
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Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (The Institution for Social and Policy St) (James C. Scott)
- Highlight on Page 89 | Loc. 1696-1703  | Added on Saturday, September 27, 2014, 05:11 PM

What is high modernism, then? It is best conceived as a strong (one might even say muscle-bound) version of the beliefs in scientific and technical progress that were associated with industrialization in Western Europe and in North America from roughly 1830 until World War I. At its center was a supreme self-confidence about continued linear progress, the development of scientific and technical knowledge, the expansion of production, the rational design of social order, the growing satisfaction of human needs, and, not least, an increasing control over nature (including human nature) commensurate with scientific understanding of natural laws. 10 High modernism is thus a particularly sweeping vision of how the benefits of technical and scientific progress might be applied—usually through the state—in every field of human activity. 
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Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (The Institution for Social and Policy St) (James C. Scott)
- Highlight on Page 90 | Loc. 1710-13  | Added on Saturday, September 27, 2014, 05:12 PM

Given the stunning advances in chemistry, physics, medicine, math, and engineering, anyone even slightly attentive to the world of science would have almost come to expect a continuing stream of new marvels (such as the internal combustion engine and electricity). The unprecedented transformations of the nineteenth century may have impoverished and marginalized many, but even the victims recognized that something revolutionary was afoot. 
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Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (The Institution for Social and Policy St) (James C. Scott)
- Highlight on Page 91 | Loc. 1729-30  | Added on Saturday, September 27, 2014, 05:14 PM

While factories and forests might be planned by private entrepreneurs, the ambition of engineering whole societies was almost exclusively a project of the nation-state. 
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Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (The Institution for Social and Policy St) (James C. Scott)
- Highlight on Page 91 | Loc. 1741-43  | Added on Saturday, September 27, 2014, 05:16 PM

Ian Hacking explains how a suicide or homicide rate, for example, came to be seen as a characteristic of a people, so that one could speak of a “budget” of homicides that would be “spent” each year, like routine debits from an account, although the particular murderers and their victims were unknown. 
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Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (The Institution for Social and Policy St) (James C. Scott)
- Highlight on Page 92 | Loc. 1756-59  | Added on Saturday, September 27, 2014, 05:17 PM

The metaphor of gardening, Zygmunt Bauman suggests, captures much of this new spirit. The gardener—perhaps a landscape architect specializing in formal gardens is the most appropriate parallel—takes a natural site and creates an entirely designed space of botanical order. Although the organic character of the flora limits what can be achieved, the gardener has enormous discretion in the overall arrangement and in training, pruning, planting, and weeding out selected plants. 
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Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (The Institution for Social and Policy St) (James C. Scott)
- Highlight on Page 93 | Loc. 1763-67  | Added on Saturday, September 27, 2014, 05:18 PM

One of the great paradoxes of social engineering is that it seems at odds with the experience of modernity generally. Trying to jell a social world, the most striking characteristic of which appears to be flux, seems rather like trying to manage a whirlwind. Marx was hardly alone in claiming that the “constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social relations, everlasting uncertainty and agitation, distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier times.” 
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- Highlight on Page 93 | Loc. 1775-77  | Added on Saturday, September 27, 2014, 05:19 PM

The real thing is that this time we’re going to get science applied to social problems and backed by the whole force of the state, just as war has been backed by the whole force of the state in the past. —C. S. Lewis, That Hideous Strength 
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Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (The Institution for Social and Policy St) (James C. Scott)
- Highlight on Page 95 | Loc. 1811-13  | Added on Saturday, September 27, 2014, 05:21 PM

The temporal emphasis of high modernism is almost exclusively on the future. Although any ideology with a large altar dedicated to progress is bound to privilege the future, high modernism carries this to great lengths. The past is an impediment, a history that must be transcended; the present is the platform for launching plans for a better future. 
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- Highlight on Page 96 | Loc. 1835-40  | Added on Saturday, September 27, 2014, 05:23 PM

Aided by hindsight as it is, this unsympathetic account of high-modernist audacity is, in one important respect, grossly unfair. If we put the development of high-modernist beliefs in their historical context, if we ask who the enemies of high modernism actually were, a far more sympathetic picture emerges. Doctors and public-health engineers who did possess new knowledge that could save millions of lives were often thwarted by popular prejudices and entrenched political interests. Urban planners who could in fact redesign urban housing to be cheaper, more healthful, and more convenient were blocked by real-estate interests and existing tastes. Inventors and engineers who had devised revolutionary new modes of power and transportation faced opposition from industrialists and laborers whose profits and jobs the new technology would almost certainly displace. 
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- Highlight on Page 97 | Loc. 1849-51  | Added on Saturday, September 27, 2014, 05:24 PM

a range of historical soils have seemed particularly favorable for the flourishing of high-modernist ideology. Those soils include crises of state power, such as wars and economic depressions, and circumstances in which a state’s capacity for relatively unimpeded planning is greatly enhanced, such as the revolutionary conquest of power and colonial rule. 
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Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (The Institution for Social and Policy St) (James C. Scott)
- Highlight on Page 97 | Loc. 1863-67  | Added on Saturday, September 27, 2014, 05:26 PM

If one were required to pinpoint the “birth” of twentieth-century high modernism, specifying a particular time, place, and individual— in what is admittedly a rather arbitrary exercise, given high modernism’s many intellectual wellsprings—a strong case can be made for German mobilization during World War I and the figure most closely associated with it, Walther Rathenau. German economic mobilization was the technocratic wonder of the war. That Germany kept its armies in the field and adequately supplied long after most observers had predicted its collapse was largely due to Rathenau’s planning. 
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Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (The Institution for Social and Policy St) (James C. Scott)
- Highlight on Page 98 | Loc. 1867-73  | Added on Saturday, September 27, 2014, 05:27 PM

An industrial engineer and head of the great electrical firm A.E.G (Allgemeine Elektricitats-Gesellschaft), which had been founded by his father, Rathenau was placed in charge of the Office of War Raw Materials (Kriegsrohstoffabteilung). 36 He realized that the planned rationing of raw materials and transport was the key to sustaining the war effort. Inventing a planned economy step by step, as it were, Germany achieved feats—in industrial production, munitions and armament supply, transportation and traffic control, price controls, and civilian rationing—that had never before been attempted. The scope of planning and coordination necessitated an unprecedented mobilization of conscripts, soldiers, and war-related industrial labor. 
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Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (The Institution for Social and Policy St) (James C. Scott)
- Highlight on Page 99 | Loc. 1888-92  | Added on Saturday, September 27, 2014, 05:28 PM

What is most remarkable about both traditions is, once again, how widely they were believed by educated elites who were otherwise poles apart politically. “Taylorism and technocracy were the watchwords of a three-pronged idealism: the elimination of economic and social crisis, the expansion of productivity through science, and the reenchantment of technology. The vision of society in which social conflict was eliminated in favor of technological and scientific imperatives could embrace liberal, socialist, authoritarian, and even communist and fascist solutions. Productivism, in short, was politically promiscuous.” 
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Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (The Institution for Social and Policy St) (James C. Scott)
- Highlight on Page 99 | Loc. 1898-1902  | Added on Saturday, September 27, 2014, 05:29 PM

A combination of Rathenau’s broad training in philosophy and economics, his wartime experience with planning, and the social conclusions that he thought were inherent in the precision, reach, and transforming potential of electric power allowed him to draw the broadest lessons for social organization. In the war, private industry had given way to a kind of state socialism; “gigantic industrial enterprises had transcended their ostensibly private owners and all the laws of property.” 43 The decisions required had nothing to do with ideology; they were driven by purely technical and economic necessities. 
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- Bookmark on Page 102 | Loc. 1953  | Added on Saturday, September 27, 2014, 05:32 PM


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Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (The Institution for Social and Policy St) (James C. Scott)
- Highlight on Page 102 | Loc. 1952-57  | Added on Saturday, September 27, 2014, 05:32 PM

Rulers, he notes, do not go hungry, and they are unlikely to learn about and respond readily to curb famine unless their institutional position provides strong incentives. The freedoms of speech, of assembly, and of the press ensure that widespread hunger will be publicized, while the freedoms of assembly and elections in representative institutions ensure that it is in the interest of elected officials’ self-preservation to prevent famine when they can. In the same fashion, high-modernist schemes in liberal democratic settings must accommodate themselves sufficiently to local opinion in order to avoid being undone at the polls. 
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Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (The Institution for Social and Policy St) (James C. Scott)
- Highlight on Page 104 | Loc. 1977-81  | Added on Saturday, September 27, 2014, 05:34 PM

Le Corbusier embraced the huge, machine-age, hierarchical, centralized city with a vengeance. If one were looking for a caricature—a Colonel Blimp, as it were, of modernist urbanism—one could hardly do better than to invent Le Corbusier. His views were extreme but influential, and they were representative in the sense that they celebrated the logic implicit in high modernism. In his daring, his brilliance, and his consistency, Le Corbusier casts the high-modernist faith in sharp relief. 
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Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (The Institution for Social and Policy St) (James C. Scott)
- Highlight on Page 104 | Loc. 1982-83  | Added on Saturday, September 27, 2014, 05:34 PM

In The Radiant City (La ville radieuse), published in 1933 and republished with few changes in 1964, Le Corbusier offers the most complete exposition of his views. 
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Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (The Institution for Social and Policy St) (James C. Scott)
- Highlight on Page 107 | Loc. 2028-32  | Added on Saturday, September 27, 2014, 05:37 PM

In his own words, “an infinity of combinations is possible when innumerable and diverse elements are brought together. But the human mind loses itself and becomes fatigued by such a labyrinth of possibilities. Control becomes impossible. The spiritual failure that must result is disheartening.… Reason … is an unbroken straight line. Thus, in order to save himself from this chaos, in order to provide himself with a bearable, acceptable framework for his existence, one productive of human well-being and control, man has projected the laws of nature into a system that is a manifestation of the human spirit itself: geometry” 
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- Highlight on Page 110 | Loc. 2085-86  | Added on Saturday, September 27, 2014, 05:41 PM

The segregation of functions thus allowed the planner to think with greater clarity about efficiency. If the only function of roads is to get automobiles from A to B quickly and economically, then one can compare two road plans in terms of relative efficiency. 
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Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (The Institution for Social and Policy St) (James C. Scott)
- Highlight on Page 111 | Loc. 2102-5  | Added on Saturday, September 27, 2014, 05:43 PM

He greatly admired Roman camps and imperial cities for the overall logic of their layouts. He returned repeatedly to the contrast between the existing city, which is the product of historical chance, and the city of the future, which would be consciously designed from start to finish following scientific principles. 
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Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (The Institution for Social and Policy St) (James C. Scott)
- Highlight on Page 111 | Loc. 2112-15  | Added on Saturday, September 27, 2014, 05:44 PM

The program of high-modernist authoritarianism at work here stems in part from Le Corbusier’s love of the order of the factory. In condemning the “rot” (la pourriture) of the contemporary city, its houses, and its streets, he singles out the factory as the sole exception. There, a single rational purpose structures both the physical layout and the coordinated movements of hundreds. The Van Nelle tobacco factory in Rotterdam is praised in particular. 
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- Highlight on Page 112 | Loc. 2124-26  | Added on Saturday, September 27, 2014, 05:45 PM

There is no ambiguity to Le Corbusier’s view of how authority relations should be ordered: hierarchy prevails in every direction. At the apex of the pyramid, however, is not a capricious autocrat but rather a modern philosopher-king who applies the truths of scientific understanding for the well-being of all. 
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- Highlight on Page 132 | Loc. 2458-63  | Added on Saturday, September 27, 2014, 06:47 PM

What is remarkable and telling about Jacobs’s critique is its unique perspective. She begins at street level, with an ethnography of micro-order in neighborhoods, sidewalks, and intersections. Where Le Corbusier “sees” his city initially from the air, Jacobs sees her city as a pedestrian on her daily rounds would. Jacobs was also a political activist involved in many campaigns against proposals for zoning changes, road building, and housing development that she thought ill-advised. 77 It was all but inconceivable that a radical critique, grounded in this fashion, could ever have originated from within the intellectual circle of urban planners. 
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- Highlight on Page 134 | Loc. 2490-95  | Added on Saturday, September 27, 2014, 06:49 PM

The metaphor that comes to mind in this connection is that of an army drawn up on the parade ground as opposed to an army engaged in combat with the enemy. In the first case is a tidy visual order created by units and ranks drawn up in straight lines. But it is an army doing nothing, an army on display. An army at war will not display the same orderly arrangement, but it will be, in Jacobs’s terms, an army doing what it was trained to do. Jacobs thinks she knows the roots of this penchant for abstract, geometric order from above: “Indirectly through the utopian tradition, and directly through the more realistic doctrine of art by imposition, modern city planning has been burdened from its beginnings with the unsuitable aim of converting cities into disciplined works of art.” 
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Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (The Institution for Social and Policy St) (James C. Scott)
- Highlight on Page 137 | Loc. 2546  | Added on Saturday, September 27, 2014, 09:59 PM

The whole logic of her case depends on the creation of the crowds, diversity, and conveniences that define a setting where people will want to be. 
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Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (The Institution for Social and Policy St) (James C. Scott)
- Highlight on Page 139 | Loc. 2598-2601  | Added on Saturday, September 27, 2014, 10:13 PM

“A city cannot be a work of art. … In relation to the inclusiveness and literally endless intricacy of life, art is arbitrary, symbolic, and abstracted. That is its value and the source of its own kind of order and coherence. . . . The results of such profound confusion between art and life are neither life nor art. They are taxidermy. In its place, taxidermy can be a useful and decent craft. However, it goes too far when the specimens put on display are exhibitions of dead, stuffed cities.” 
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Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (The Institution for Social and Policy St) (James C. Scott)
- Highlight on Page 142 | Loc. 2646-47  | Added on Saturday, September 27, 2014, 10:19 PM

If the planning authority does not need to make concessions to popular desires, the one-size-fits-all solution is likely to prevail. 
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- Highlight on Page 150 | Loc. 2810-14  | Added on Saturday, September 27, 2014, 10:36 PM

Nothing better conveys the impression of mere quantity and number without order than the word “masses.” Once the rank and file are so labeled, it is clear that what they chiefly add to the revolutionary process are their weight in numbers and the kind of brute force they can represent if firmly directed. The impression conveyed is of a huge, formless, milling crowd without any cohesion—without a history, without ideas, without a plan of action. 
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- Highlight on Page 151 | Loc. 2831-34  | Added on Saturday, September 27, 2014, 10:38 PM

Lenin appeals to something like a division of labor in revolutionary work, where the executive has a monopoly on the advanced theory without which revolution is impossible. Resembling factory owners and engineers who design rational plans for production, the vanguard party possesses a scientific grasp of revolutionary theory that makes it uniquely able to guide the entire proletarian struggle for emancipation. 
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Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (The Institution for Social and Policy St) (James C. Scott)
- Highlight on Page 153 | Loc. 2858-60  | Added on Saturday, September 27, 2014, 10:40 PM

Just as Le Corbusier imagines that the public will acquiesce to the knowledge and calculations of the master architect, so Lenin is confident that a sensible worker will want to place himself under the authority of professional revolutionists. 
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Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (The Institution for Social and Policy St) (James C. Scott)
- Highlight on Page 154 | Loc. 2888-92  | Added on Saturday, September 27, 2014, 10:42 PM

A woodworker or a mason must know his inert materials well in order to realize his designs. In Lenin’s case, the relative inertness of the material being shaped is implied by the global imagery of “the masses” or “the proletariat.” Once these flattened terms are used, it becomes difficult to examine the enormous differences in history, political experience, organizational skills, and ideology (not to mention religion, ethnicity, and language) that exist within the working class. 
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Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (The Institution for Social and Policy St) (James C. Scott)
- Highlight on Page 157 | Loc. 2949-51  | Added on Saturday, September 27, 2014, 10:46 PM

Lenin believed that the science of dialectical materialism gave the party unique insight into the revolutionary process and entitled it to claim the leadership of an otherwise disorganized and ideologically misled working class. 
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Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (The Institution for Social and Policy St) (James C. Scott)
- Highlight on Page 157 | Loc. 2952-54  | Added on Saturday, September 27, 2014, 10:47 PM

Their confidence in their method meant that neither the science of designing cities nor that of designing revolutions had much to learn from the existing practices and values of their intended beneficiaries. On the contrary, each looked forward to refashioning the human material that came under their purview. 
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- Highlight on Page 158 | Loc. 2963-66  | Added on Monday, September 29, 2014, 09:54 AM

The most discordant fact about the Russian Revolution was that it was not to any significant degree brought about by the vanguard party, the Bolsheviks. What Lenin did succeed brilliantly in doing was in capturing the revolution once it was an accomplished fact. As Hannah Arendt succinctly put it, “The Bolsheviks found power lying in the street, and picked it up.” 
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- Highlight on Page 159 | Loc. 2987-90  | Added on Monday, September 29, 2014, 09:57 AM

The new element in 1917 that made a revolutionary outcome far more likely than it had been in 1905 was World War I—specifically, the military collapse of the Russian offensive in Austria. Soldiers by the thousands threw down their weapons to return to the cities or to seize land in the countryside. The provisional government of Aleksandr Kerensky had little or nothing in the way of coercive resources to deploy in its defense. 
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- Highlight on Page 159 | Loc. 2991-95  | Added on Monday, September 29, 2014, 09:58 AM

What followed in the years until 1921 is best described as the reconquest, now by the fledgling Bolshevik state, of Russia. The reconquest was not simply a civil war against the “Whites”; it was also a war against the autonomous forces that had seized local power in the revolution. 31 It involved, first and foremost, a long struggle to destroy the independent power of the soviets and to impose piecework, labor control, and the abrogation of the right to strike on the workers. 
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Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (The Institution for Social and Policy St) (James C. Scott)
- Highlight on Page 162 | Loc. 3058-61  | Added on Monday, September 29, 2014, 10:05 AM

Once the “simple operations” appropriate to each niche in the established division of labor are mastered, there is quite literally nothing more to discuss. The revolution ousts the bourgeoisie from the bridge of this “ocean liner,” installs the vanguard party, and sets a new course, but the jobs of the vast crew are unchanged. Lenin’s picture of the technical structure, it should be noted, is entirely static. 
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- Highlight on Page 162 | Loc. 3062-65  | Added on Monday, September 29, 2014, 10:05 AM

The utopian promise of this capitalist-created state of affairs is that anyone could take part in the administration of the state. The development of capitalism had produced massive, socialized, bureaucratic apparatuses as well as the “training and disciplining of millions of workers.” 43 Taken together, these huge, centralized bureaucracies were the key to the new world. 
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- Highlight on Page 164 | Loc. 3098-3101  | Added on Monday, September 29, 2014, 10:09 AM

Lenin’s analogy was borrowed from Marx, who frequently used it as a way of saying that the hand loom gives you feudalism and the power loom gives you capitalism. So suggestive was this imagery that Lenin fell back on it in other contexts, claiming, for example, in What Is to Be Done? that his opponents, the Economists, were using “handicraft methods,” whereas the Bolsheviks operated as professional (modern, trained) revolutionaries. 
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- Highlight on Page 166 | Loc. 3131-36  | Added on Tuesday, September 30, 2014, 12:57 AM

The Agrarian Question also allows us to appreciate an additional facet of Lenin’s high modernism: his celebration of the most modern technology and, above all, electricity. 55 He was famous for claiming that “Communism is Soviet Power plus the Electrification of the whole countryside.” Electricity had, for him and for most other high modernists, a nearly mythical appeal. That appeal had to do, I think, with the unique qualities of electricity as a form of power. Unlike the mechanisms of steam power, direct waterpower, and the internal combustion engine, electricity was silent, precise, and well-nigh invisible. For Lenin and many others, electricity was magical. 
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- Highlight on Page 171 | Loc. 3235-40  | Added on Tuesday, September 30, 2014, 01:02 AM

In her refutation of What Is to Be Done? Luxemburg made clear that the cost of centralized hierarchy lay in the loss of creativity and initiative from below: “The ‘discipline’ Lenin has in mind is by no means only implanted in the proletariat by the factory, but equally by the barracks, by the modern bureaucracy, by the entire mechanism of the centralized bourgeois state apparatus. . . . The ultracentrism advocated by Lenin is permeated in its very essence by the sterile spirit of a nightwatchman (Nachtwachtergeist) rather than by a positive and creative spirit. He concentrated mostly on controlling the party, not on fertilizing it, on narrowing it down, not developing it, on regimenting and not unifying it.” 
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- Highlight on Page 172 | Loc. 3261-66  | Added on Tuesday, September 30, 2014, 01:04 AM

From Luxemburg’s perspective, Lenin must have seemed like an engineer with hopes of damming a wild river in order to release it at a single stroke in a massive flood that would be the revolution. She believed that the “flood” of the mass strike could not be predicted or controlled; its course could not be much affected by professional revolutionists, although they could, as Lenin actually did, ride that flood to power. Luxemburg’s understanding of the revolutionary process, curiously enough, provided a better description of how Lenin and the Bolsheviks came to power than did the utopian scenario in What Is to Be Done? 
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October

Autobiography of a Corpse

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Autobiography of a Corpse (New York Review Books Classics) (Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky)
- Highlight on Page 6 | Loc. 325-28  | Added on Wednesday, October 01, 2014, 10:00 AM

This was not a source of pain or even uneasiness. Only boredom. Or rather: boredoms. A late-eighteenth-century book I once read mentioned “Earthly Boredoms.” That’s just it. There are many of them: There is the spring boredom when identical people love identical people, when the ground is covered with puddles, the trees with green pustules. And a series of tedious autumn boredoms when the sky sheds stars, clouds shed rain, trees shed leaves, and “I’s” shed themselves. 
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Autobiography of a Corpse (New York Review Books Classics) (Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky)
- Highlight on Page 6 | Loc. 321-22  | Added on Wednesday, October 01, 2014, 10:01 AM

Yes, remembering me always in my new corpse-like condition could prove useful, but . . . as I searched her letter, word by word, I knew that the glassily transparent cold in me would not abate. 
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Autobiography of a Corpse (New York Review Books Classics) (Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky)
- Highlight on Page 6 | Loc. 322-24  | Added on Wednesday, October 01, 2014, 10:01 AM

With particular care I examined my name on the envelope. Yes, nine letters, all calling to me. I heard them. But I would not answer. It was then, I remember, that the period of dead, empty days began. They had come before. And gone. But now I knew: They had come forever. 
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Autobiography of a Corpse (New York Review Books Classics) (Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky)
- Highlight on Page 7 | Loc. 332-37  | Added on Wednesday, October 01, 2014, 10:02 AM

For days on end, from dusk to dusk, I thought of myself as a biconcave creature inaccessible both outwardly and inwardly, from within and from without: Both were equally forbidden. Beyond reach. Sometimes I too, like a tree tormented by the wind, would toss between the oak arms of my chair in time to the tedious tossing of an idea: The dead, the idea glimmered, are to be envied. Barely stiff, and down goes the lid; on top of the lid goes damp earth; on top of the damp earth, sod. And that’s that. But here, as soon as you begin bumping along in a dray, they cart you on and on like that, from pothole to pothole, through spring and winter, from one decade to the next, unmourned and unneeded. 
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Autobiography of a Corpse (New York Review Books Classics) (Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky)
- Highlight on Page 8 | Loc. 343-50  | Added on Wednesday, October 01, 2014, 10:04 AM

Be that as it may, I ceased all attempts to enter my outside. All those passes at friendship, experiments with another person’s “I,” endeavors to give or take love—I must, I thought, forget and renounce them once and for all. For some time I had been mentally constructing a flattened little world in which everything would be in my here—a little world that one could lock away inside one’s room. Space, I reasoned while still in earliest youth, is absurdly vast and has expanded—with its orbits, stars, and yawning parabolas—to infinity. But if one tucks it inside numbers and meanings, it will easily fit on two or three bookshelves. I have long preferred the narrow margins of books to the monotonous miles of earthly fields; the spine of a book has always seemed more intelligent to me than confused lectures about “the roots of things”; the sheer accumulation of those things, everywhere one looks, strikes me as crude and meaningless compared to the wise and subtle concatenations of letters and symbols hidden in books. 
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Autobiography of a Corpse (New York Review Books Classics) (Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky)
- Highlight on Page 8 | Loc. 350-51  | Added on Wednesday, October 01, 2014, 10:04 AM

Though the lines in books deprived me of half of my eyesight (55 percent), I never resented them: They knew too well how to be meek and dead. 
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Autobiography of a Corpse (New York Review Books Classics) (Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky)
- Highlight on Page 8 | Loc. 357-60  | Added on Wednesday, October 01, 2014, 10:05 AM

Sometimes, in an effort to amuse me, it would play hide-and-seek: I would hunt for that tiny sign, twirling my pencil along the lines and down the margins of a book, until I found it hidden in among other letters and symbols. Sometimes I even smiled at this. That’s right, I smiled. But the companion of my leisure could be of greater comfort still. “You see, ‘I’ is just a letter,” the “T” would say, “just like me. That’s all it is. Is it worth grieving over? Here and gone.” 
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Autobiography of a Corpse (New York Review Books Classics) (Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky)
- Highlight on Page 9 | Loc. 364-66  | Added on Wednesday, October 01, 2014, 10:05 AM

Incidentally, a count of the word ‘ich’ in Stirner showed that nearly 25 percent of the text consists of ‘ich’ (and its derivatives). Keep that up, and soon the whole text will be one continuous ‘I.’ 
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Autobiography of a Corpse (New York Review Books Classics) (Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky)
- Highlight on Page 9 | Loc. 371-73  | Added on Wednesday, October 01, 2014, 10:07 AM

The dusk, the boredoms, the “T,” and the hallucinations would all disappear: It was then that that ultimate loneliness, known to only a few of the living, would begin, when you are left not only without others but without yourself. 
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Autobiography of a Corpse (New York Review Books Classics) (Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky)
- Highlight on Page 9 | Loc. 373-84  | Added on Wednesday, October 01, 2014, 10:08 AM

There was, however, another, foreign something to disturb my black leisure. From a fairly young age, you see, I had been visited by a strange figment: 0.6 person. This figment arose as follows. One day, while leafing through a geography book, I came across this line: “In the country’s northern latitudes the population per square mile is 0.6 person.” It stuck in my mind’s eye like a splinter. I squinted and saw a flat white field stretching away past the horizon, a field divided into right-angled square miles, snow slowly falling in large, lazy flakes. And in every square, where the diagonals intersect, it, a stooped, thread-paper body bent low to the bare, ice-covered ground: 0.6 person. Exactly 0.6. Not just half, not half a person. No. A small, dissymmetrizing fillip had attached itself to “just.” The incompleteness, contradictory as this may seem, had been infiltrated by a remainder, by an “over and above.” I tried to banish the image. It would not go. Then suddenly one of those semi-beings (I could clearly see the ones in the squares closest to my eyes) slowly began to turn toward me. I tried to avert my eyes, but I couldn’t: They seemed to have fused with the dead empty sockets of 0.6. And not a blade of grass anywhere, not so much as an ice-covered rock, not a speck; only windless air and snow slowly falling in large, lazy flakes. From then on, 0.6 person took to visiting me on my empty days. During my black intervals. This was not a ghost, a vision, or a sleepy reverie. No, it was just that: a figment. 
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Autobiography of a Corpse (New York Review Books Classics) (Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky)
- Highlight on Page 10 | Loc. 385-87  | Added on Wednesday, October 01, 2014, 10:09 AM

A point in space may be found, they say, only by means of intersecting coordinates. But should those coordinates come apart, then . . .space is vast, while a point has no size at all. Evidently my coordinates had come apart, and to find me, a psychic point in infinity, turned out to be impossible. 
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Autobiography of a Corpse (New York Review Books Classics) (Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky)
- Highlight on Page 11 | Loc. 406-8  | Added on Wednesday, October 01, 2014, 10:10 AM

Then I understood: This old dictionary was an intelligent conversationalist. Well, of course, only old-fashioned and less-than-intelligible ethics could have shut me up inside a manège with all these people for whom I had no use. 
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Autobiography of a Corpse (New York Review Books Classics) (Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky)
- Highlight on Page 12 | Loc. 408-13  | Added on Wednesday, October 01, 2014, 01:28 PM

Now, on reviewing my memories, I see that my thinking was flawed by a fatal miscalculation, a stubborn mistake that I persisted in making time and again: I considered everything that took place under my frontal bone to be absolutely unique. I conceived of psychorrhea in only one specimen. I never suspected that the process of mental deadening could be creeping—from skull to skull, from an individual to a group, from a group to a class, from a class to an entire social organism. Hiding my half existence behind the opaque walls of my skull, concealing it like a shameful disease, I did not consider the simple fact that the same thing could be occurring under other skullcaps, in other locked rooms. 
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Autobiography of a Corpse (New York Review Books Classics) (Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky)
- Highlight on Page 13 | Loc. 436-37  | Added on Wednesday, October 01, 2014, 01:31 PM

Lower still, the bare, ice-covered branches of stunted city trees. Empty streets. And windless air steeped in deadness and silence. Yes, this is my hour: At such an hour I shall probably . . . 
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Autobiography of a Corpse (New York Review Books Classics) (Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky)
- Highlight on Page 14 | Loc. 451-53  | Added on Wednesday, October 01, 2014, 01:33 PM

The more often the ragged Remington lines assured me with a number, ornate signatures, and a seal that I really was so-and-so, the more suspicious I became of my “reality,” the more keenly I sensed in myself both this person and that. 
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Autobiography of a Corpse (New York Review Books Classics) (Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky)
- Highlight on Page 15 | Loc. 471-73  | Added on Wednesday, October 01, 2014, 01:35 PM

By morning many-hued military flags were hanging over building entrances and gateways. Men with newspapers held up to their eyes were walking down the sidewalks; men with rifles on their shoulders were walking down the roadways. Thus from the very first day newspapers and rifles divided us all into those who would die and those for whom they would die. 
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Autobiography of a Corpse (New York Review Books Classics) (Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky)
- Highlight on Page 16 | Loc. 479-80  | Added on Wednesday, October 01, 2014, 01:36 PM

Death—a dissociation that I imagined within the bounds of my “I” and only my “I” (beyond was of almost no concern to me)—was now forcing me to think in broader and more generalized terms. 
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Autobiography of a Corpse (New York Review Books Classics) (Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky)
- Highlight on Page 18 | Loc. 517-22  | Added on Wednesday, October 01, 2014, 01:40 PM

It was then that my excruciating insomnias began. I gave up my late-night strolls about the streets. They no longer helped. I never could and cannot drink. People’s society to me is worse than insomnia. But I had to fill my long, empty vigils with something. I bought thirty-two black and white carved figures and began playing chess: myself against myself. The utter futility of chess thinking appealed to me. After long struggles between thoughts and counter-thoughts, pitched battles between moves and countermoves, I could pour that whole tiny world, wooden and dead, back into its box, and not a trace of the dynasties of its black and white kings, or the devastating wars they had waged, remained—within me, or without. 
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Autobiography of a Corpse (New York Review Books Classics) (Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky)
- Highlight on Page 19 | Loc. 525-27  | Added on Wednesday, October 01, 2014, 01:41 PM

But it’s fair to say that the war’s dialectic forced those who were more or less alive to go to their death, and gave those who were more or less dead the right to live. 
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Autobiography of a Corpse (New York Review Books Classics) (Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky)
- Highlight on Page 20 | Loc. 541-46  | Added on Wednesday, October 01, 2014, 01:43 PM

On my writing table is an amusing toy for reflection. It was given to me by an acquaintance, an engineer who worked in a vacuum laboratory: an ordinary, hermetically sealed glass vial. It contains an intricately twined and exceedingly fine strand of silver hair. Surrounding the strand is a vacuum, a carefully filtered void. For me, that is the vial’s whole point. The engineer explained that this total evacuation, this absolute void, had taken a long time to achieve. Only recently have we mastered the technique of making an absolute emptiness, a so-called hard vacuum. Yes. And now the moment has come when I, having hidden my thought inside a fragile vial, have entered its hard vacuum. 
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Autobiography of a Corpse (New York Review Books Classics) (Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky)
- Highlight on Page 25 | Loc. 629-31  | Added on Thursday, October 02, 2014, 12:15 AM

New eyes have appeared. And people. They have a new way of looking at you: not at but through. You can’t hide your emptiness inside; they will bore into you with their pupils. No need to step aside when you meet them; they will walk right through you, as through air. 
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Autobiography of a Corpse (New York Review Books Classics) (Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky)
- Highlight on Page 42 | Loc. 877-78  | Added on Thursday, October 02, 2014, 11:52 PM

For you see, one person can infiltrate another only in minute doses, with tiny, barely visible men who, once massed in sufficient numbers, capture the consciousness. 
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Autobiography of a Corpse (New York Review Books Classics) (Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky)
- Highlight on Page 43 | Loc. 891-93  | Added on Thursday, October 02, 2014, 11:53 PM

In short, I decided, having plunged a spoon into the past, to the bottom, to stir it up again. If a woman is already out of love with one man, but not yet in love with the next, then “not yet,” if he has any sense at all, must shake “already”—shake him and shake him—until “already” has shown him all the approaches and means of access. 
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Autobiography of a Corpse (New York Review Books Classics) (Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky)
- Highlight on Page 45 | Loc. 924-27  | Added on Thursday, October 02, 2014, 11:56 PM

“You see,” he said, moving closer, “one mustn’t rush to judge; the audience creates the speaker’s style. You’ll soon be persuaded of this yourself. You can’t deny that Eleventh is observant. Put it this way: People use diminutives to express magnified emotions; the significance grows, the sign diminishes. We call those who mean more to us than others by diminutives. 
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Autobiography of a Corpse (New York Review Books Classics) (Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky)
- Highlight on Page 47 | Loc. 965-67  | Added on Thursday, October 02, 2014, 11:59 PM

Past a flock of birds, past a veil of dust, The disk of the sun sinks spent; If I am forgotten, then it must Be now, at this very moment. 
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Autobiography of a Corpse (New York Review Books Classics) (Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky)
- Highlight on Page 47 | Loc. 967-71  | Added on Thursday, October 02, 2014, 11:59 PM

“Pondering this handful of words, I didn’t suspect that, having entered this thought, I would never come out of it. Recepts, I reasoned, constantly roam from the consciousness to the unconscious and back again. But some go so far into the unconscious that they can’t find their way back to the consciousness. I began to wonder: How does a recept perish? Like a smoldering ember or a candle in the wind? Gradually or instantly? After a long illness or suddenly? 
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Autobiography of a Corpse (New York Review Books Classics) (Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky)
- Highlight on Page 48 | Loc. 973-77  | Added on Friday, October 03, 2014, 12:00 AM

My attention was immediately drawn to the question of forgotten emotions. A curious question indeed: A man and a woman meet n times, and every time they both experience a nervous excitement; yet at the n + 1 meeting, the woman comes to the man but the nervous excitement does not; the man feigns it as best he can and, when the woman has gone, even ransacks his soul for what he has lost. In vain: To recall an image that has gone is possible, but to recall a feeling, once it has gone, is utterly impossible; the lizard, if you will, has run away leaving its tail in your hand; the image and the emotion have dissociated. 
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Autobiography of a Corpse (New York Review Books Classics) (Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky)
- Highlight on Page 48 | Loc. 978-96  | Added on Friday, October 03, 2014, 12:02 AM

it seemed to me, clearly had something in common with, say, the cooling of a piece of ordinary sulfur. By depriving sulfur of calories, we convert its crystals from one system to another; that is, we force it to change its form and appearance. What’s more, it has been proven that a chemical substance—such as phosphorus—when gradually cooled not only changes its crystalline form and color, turning from violet to red, and red to black, but also, at a certain point in the cooling, loses all shape, decrystallizes, and becomes amorphous. I wanted to catch the moment of deformation . . . If one could observe the second when the sparkling carbon we call a diamond changes into the ordinary coal that leaves our hands black, why couldn’t one observe the instant when ‘I love’ turns into . . . “But, even remaining in the realm of chemical symbols, this wasn’t easy to do: Before losing its facets and becoming a formless, amorphous substance, crystal goes through a stage called metastability—halfway between form and formlessness. This analogy struck me as cogent. The relations of many, many people are metastable, somewhere in the middle between ice melting and the boiling point; interestingly, metastability shows the greatest resilience. One can take these analogies further. An incandescent substance, if left alone, will cool naturally and continually; the same is true of emotion. Only by changing the objects of that emotion, only by throwing more and more wood onto the fire of feeling can one maintain its white heat. Here I remember thinking that my analogies had brought me to an impossible impasse. But science, which tells us in which cases cooling temperatures turn crystal into an amorphous something, told me in which cases naturally cooling emotions turn diamonds into coal, love into indifference, form into formlessness. I learned that a crystalline substance, when cooled, changes form, but since the rate of cooling exceeds that of recrystallization, the latter process hasn’t time to finish, and the particles, overcome halfway (between one form and another) by the cold, stop. The result is frigid and featureless or, to convert chemisms into psychisms, hateful and forgotten. Under these conditions, a long and stable bond can only be explained as a succession of betrayals of each other with each other. What are you staring at? That’s just what it is: If even one person were absolutely faithful to the image etched in his mind, like an engraving on a copper plate, then his love might last a day or two—at most. The real love object is constantly changing, and one can love you today only by betraying the person you were yesterday. 
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Autobiography of a Corpse (New York Review Books Classics) (Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky)
- Highlight on Page 49 | Loc. 997-1006  | Added on Friday, October 03, 2014, 12:03 AM

My hero meets a girl, a charming creature not yet eighteen. Fine. They fall in love. Have children. The years go by. Their love remains what it was: strong, good, simple. By now he has asthma; she has crow’s feet and withered skin. But they are as dear as ever to each other. Then one day the door opens and in she walks, only she is not she, not who she was an hour or a day ago, but the seventeen-year-old girl he vowed always to love. My hero is perplexed and, I suppose, stunned. The visitant looks round in bewilderment at this strange, middle-aged life. At the children she has not yet borne. At the heavy, half-familiar man glancing nervously at the door to the next room: What if the other woman, the same woman, should walk in? ‘Yesterday you promised me,’ says the young creature. The asthmatic scratches his head, distraught: ‘yesterday’—that was twenty years ago. He doesn’t understand and doesn’t know what to do with his guest. Suddenly he hears footsteps—it’s the other woman, the same woman now. “‘You must go. If she finds you here . . .’ “‘Who?’ “‘You. Please hurry . . .’ “But too late. The door opens, and my hero, well, let’s say . . .he wakes up, I suppose—” 
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Autobiography of a Corpse (New York Review Books Classics) (Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky)
- Highlight on Page 51 | Loc. 1026-38  | Added on Friday, October 03, 2014, 12:05 AM

“Listen,” I turned to Sixth, “I know how we, the rest and I, got here, but why do you need love? What are you doing at the bottom of this pupil? You have the soul of a bibliophile. All you need are your bookmarks. You should have gone on living with them and your formulas, your nose in a book, rather than butting in where you’re not wanted.” The university lecturer looked crestfallen. “It can happen to anyone, you see . . . Even Thales , they say, as he was walking along staring up at the stars, once fell into a well. So did I. I certainly didn’t mean to, but if someone trips you with their pupils . . . At the time I was teaching psychology at a college for women. Seminars, tutorials, papers, what have you. Naturally, my students came to me, sometimes at home, for topics, references, sources. She among them. Once, twice. I hadn’t yet realized that for women, science, like everything else, is personified. Questions—answers—and again questions. She wasn’t particularly gifted. One day, while explaining stimulus logarithms in the Weber-Fechner law , I noticed she wasn’t listening. ‘Repeat what I just said.’ She just sat there, looking down and smiling at something. ‘I don’t know why you bother to come here!’ I exploded and, I believe, banged a book on the desk. Then she looked up, and I saw tears in her eyes. I don’t know what one does in such cases. I moved closer and made the mistake of looking into her moist pupils. That’s when I . . .” With a dismissive wave of his hand Sixth fell silent. 
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Autobiography of a Corpse (New York Review Books Classics) (Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky)
- Highlight on Page 55 | Loc. 1093-96  | Added on Friday, October 03, 2014, 12:10 AM

“Well, what do you make of our Quagga?” asked Sixth. I rudely said nothing. “Oh, I suppose you’re jealous. I admit there was a time when Quagga’s claims, his crowing about being her first, irritated even me. But you can’t overthrow the past: It’s more kingly than kings. You have to make your peace with it. And besides, if you think about it, what is jealousy?” 
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Autobiography of a Corpse (New York Review Books Classics) (Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky)
- Highlight on Page 60 | Loc. 1170-73  | Added on Friday, October 03, 2014, 12:16 AM

Reader, you’re turning away, you want to shake these lines out of your pupils. No, no. Don’t leave me here on this long empty bench: Hold my hand—that’s right—tight, tighter still—I’ve been alone for too long. I want to say to you what I’ve never said to anyone: Why frighten little children with the dark when one can quiet them with it and lead them into dreams? 
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Autobiography of a Corpse (New York Review Books Classics) (Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky)
- Highlight on Page 61 | Loc. 1178-80  | Added on Friday, October 03, 2014, 09:53 AM

EVERYONE can forget. Everyone—but the one forgotten. That has stuck in my head: from temple to temple. I know: I’ve been expunged from all eyes, from all memories; soon even panes and puddles will stop reflecting me. They don’t need me either. I don’t exist—so much so that no one has ever said or will ever say about me: He doesn’t exist. 
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Autobiography of a Corpse (New York Review Books Classics) (Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky)
- Highlight on Page 61 | Loc. 1187-88  | Added on Friday, October 03, 2014, 09:53 AM

sometimes I even sit down by a cross and iron fence and converse with those who never reply. In essence, we are the same—they and I. I stare at the nettles growing up over them, at the matted blades of dusty grass—and I think: we. 
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Autobiography of a Corpse (New York Review Books Classics) (Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky)
- Highlight on Page 62 | Loc. 1201-5  | Added on Friday, October 03, 2014, 09:56 AM

It is amusing that the most optimistic of all philosophers, Leibniz , could see only a world of discrete monads , of ontological solitudes, none of which has windows. If one tries to be more optimistic than the optimist and avow that souls have windows and the ability to open them, then those windows and that ability will turn out to be nailed shut and boarded up, as in an abandoned house. People-monads, too, have a bad name: They are full of ghosts. The most frightening of these is man. 
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Autobiography of a Corpse (New York Review Books Classics) (Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky)
- Highlight on Page 63 | Loc. 1217-18  | Added on Friday, October 03, 2014, 09:57 AM

Every morning, as soon as the sun has twitched back Moscow’s black, star-tattered cowl, I begin trudging through my day. Again and again. 
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Autobiography of a Corpse (New York Review Books Classics) (Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky)
- Highlight on Page 63 | Loc. 1218-23  | Added on Friday, October 03, 2014, 09:57 AM

In shopwindows I see huge fish, their flat tails flush against the glass, profusions of fruit, pyramids of tins, sealed bottles of shimmering alcohol. I stop at almost every window: All this is for me; both for me and for others too, of course, but only within the limits of my ten-kopeck coin. I turn to face the street, spokes spinning by, springs lazily swaying—women’s eyes through net veils, flickering glints and shadows; a soft whoosh of wheels whisks them past to some elusive where—past and past. I clench my teeth and I think: “That’s right, all this is mine as well as theirs. But only within the limits of my ten-kopeck coin. Patience—you’ll get your share of the earth. Width—from shoulder to shoulder; length—from crown to soles; and for now you have the cheer of your own tiny sun, the diameter of a ten-kopeck coin.” 
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Autobiography of a Corpse (New York Review Books Classics) (Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky)
- Highlight on Page 64 | Loc. 1228-33  | Added on Friday, October 03, 2014, 09:58 AM

Have you ever had to tinker with a cheap pocket watch? It tends not to stay wound for very long, and if the watch is over the hill and the gear teeth are worn down, it stops more than it runs. Even so, every time you wind the spring, it tries to tick, at least briefly, and move its hands. Then look, it has stopped again. That’s how it is with my brain: I wind it as you would a cheap pocket watch; I poke a sandwich between my teeth—and lo and behold, in my head there’s a ticking, and the hands jerk forward. Gear tooth by gear tooth, phrase by phrase—a metaphysical something starts up. Then just as suddenly it balks, sinks back, and I sit empty, as if I had no pulse and no “I.” 
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Autobiography of a Corpse (New York Review Books Classics) (Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky)
- Highlight on Page 65 | Loc. 1249-52  | Added on Friday, October 03, 2014, 10:01 AM

I want to squeeze my temples between my palms, draw the whole world into my consciousness, and brandishing my “no” like a hammer, object to everything: smite what is above, below, and all around; strike near and far. This is my one happiness, however fitful, however sick: overturning all verticals; extinguishing the imaginary sun; entangling the orbits and the world in worldlessness. 
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Autobiography of a Corpse (New York Review Books Classics) (Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky)
- Highlight on Page 69 | Loc. 1318-22  | Added on Friday, October 03, 2014, 10:09 AM

Though I walk, look, and listen beside others settled in this city, I know: They are in Moscow and I am in minus-Moscow. I am permitted only the shadows of things; things are beyond my reach; coins skipping from palm to palm give me only their thin, high-pitched tinkle; I am allowed encounters and conversations only with the emptiness that early-morning trams, bells jangling through the gloom, let carefully on and off; all the doors open to others are closed to me, while everything behind them is almost transcendental. 
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Autobiography of a Corpse (New York Review Books Classics) (Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky)
- Highlight on Page 70 | Loc. 1335-38  | Added on Friday, October 03, 2014, 10:11 AM

For everyone, reality is in one’s self. Yet every “I” is sewn into a “we”; from individuals—however loosely stitched together—comes a society, a kind of unit composed of solitudes. The strangest paradox of all is a city, connecting the unconnecting. Here the need to be alone nearly coincides with self-preservation: People survive so as to buy from each other, at a cost of ceaseless labor, the chance to be without each other. 
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Autobiography of a Corpse (New York Review Books Classics) (Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky)
- Highlight on Page 71 | Loc. 1338-40  | Added on Friday, October 03, 2014, 10:11 AM

People hoard the coins from their art, their work, their thieving so as to acquire walls. In the countryside, far from human congeries, their solitudes are not protected, not bounded by walls, and so open to attack; in the city, they are organized, hidden behind blinds and walls, kept under lock and key, properly defended. 
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Autobiography of a Corpse (New York Review Books Classics) (Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky)
- Highlight on Page 71 | Loc. 1352-54  | Added on Friday, October 03, 2014, 10:14 AM

By a gray stone pile, still hazy in the half-light, stood a man with his back to the wall; his legs wobbled, while his head looked as if it would come unscrewed from his coat collar. He did not notice me or the dead stone surround and, as if inscribed in an inviolate magic circle, went on rocking and raptly repeating: “God, thank God, doesn’t exist. Thank God, God doesn’t exist.” 
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Autobiography of a Corpse (New York Review Books Classics) (Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky)
- Highlight on Page 72 | Loc. 1357-58  | Added on Friday, October 03, 2014, 10:14 AM

As my hours of leisure were long and many, I decided to devote myself unstintingly to stealing solitudes. That’s right. Indigence and indolence always incite one to sin: to steal solitudes. 
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Will You Die With Me

Will You Die with Me?: My Life and the Black Panther Party (Flores Alexander Forbes)
- Highlight on Page 49 | Loc. 718-19  | Added on Saturday, October 04, 2014, 10:52 AM

Robert Beck, aka Iceberg Slim—now famous for best-selling novels of street life in the 1960s, patterned after his adventures as a big-time pimp—was one of the most memorable business owners on my paper route. 
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Will You Die with Me?: My Life and the Black Panther Party (Flores Alexander Forbes)
- Highlight on Page 66 | Loc. 940-44  | Added on Sunday, October 05, 2014, 12:26 PM

the educational phase also became a mass organizing tool that attracted thousands of people to the ranks of the BPP. She said that Huey thought this was great, but it was also “ass backwards,” because when the ranks swelled, many of the people joining were not known to the original organizers in Oakland, so what you got was a lot of little Black Panther fiefdoms. Huey said it was difficult for the Party’s leadership to get its arms around this huge operation that had grown exponentially. It also made it easy for police agencies to plant informants and agents provocateurs. 
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Will You Die with Me?: My Life and the Black Panther Party (Flores Alexander Forbes)
- Highlight on Page 66 | Loc. 950-51  | Added on Sunday, October 05, 2014, 12:26 PM

What came out of the Long March were a common program and agenda and a base of operations from which to sortie and wage revolution as one organization. 
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Will You Die with Me?: My Life and the Black Panther Party (Flores Alexander Forbes)
- Highlight on Page 67 | Loc. 962-68  | Added on Sunday, October 05, 2014, 12:28 PM

“Comrades, we are here to build the new revolution in Oakland, the ‘base of operation.’ Yes, this is the base of operation. We are going to learn what it is like to practice and implement ‘the correct handling of the revolution.’ The Servant and I brought you all here so that we can build an organization that has a common program and agenda—an organization that knows what it stands for. In the next several months I will declare my candidacy for the office of mayor of Oakland. And sister Elaine Brown is going to run for one of the nine city council seats. You know me and the Servant, we’ve been researching the government here, and we have determined that if we take over the city of Oakland and make it our base, we can wage a righteous revolution that will free the people of this city. 
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Will You Die with Me?: My Life and the Black Panther Party (Flores Alexander Forbes)
- Highlight on Page 67 | Loc. 970-73  | Added on Sunday, October 05, 2014, 12:29 PM

So we need to run a slate of candidates along with sister Elaine and take control of a majority to control the process. But the key to all of this is the port of Oakland.” He pointed in the direction he believed the port was in. “The mayor makes the appointments to the Port Commission and the council approves. And comrades, that’s were the loot is. The money we need to finance our revolution.” 
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Will You Die with Me?: My Life and the Black Panther Party (Flores Alexander Forbes)
- Highlight on Page 69 | Loc. 998-99  | Added on Sunday, October 05, 2014, 12:31 PM

The longer I was here, the more I could see that tension between individual Panthers in the field selling papers and the police was nonexistent. In fact, I was in Oakland for two or three days before I saw a police car. 
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Will You Die with Me?: My Life and the Black Panther Party (Flores Alexander Forbes)
- Highlight on Page 77 | Loc. 1120-22  | Added on Sunday, October 05, 2014, 12:42 PM

We practiced gun safety to a fault, because as Masai constantly reminded us, “This is your job in the Party, so get good at it, because the central committee and the Servant have big plans for this new unit.” 
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Will You Die with Me?: My Life and the Black Panther Party (Flores Alexander Forbes)
- Highlight on Page 79 | Loc. 1141-45  | Added on Sunday, October 05, 2014, 12:44 PM

Huey had said we don’t know what we have as a Party, so let’s find out who all of these niggers are. And that’s when we started our long retreat, closing down chapters and branches, and bringing everybody here so that we could establish Oakland as the base of operations. Shit, before we did that, the Party was this national phenomenon, made up of twenty to forty chapters and branches of people who didn’t know each other. That’s not how this is supposed to be. How in the hell could we fight a war without knowing who we are and without having one centralized location to train people as a jumping-off point? 
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Will You Die with Me?: My Life and the Black Panther Party (Flores Alexander Forbes)
- Highlight on Page 80 | Loc. 1152-54  | Added on Sunday, October 05, 2014, 12:46 PM

However, Masai told me in private that we were being trained for a larger role in the Party’s five-year plan to take over the city of Oakland. We were to be the shock troops that fired the first shots against the drug dealers whom Huey wanted to tax and regulate. But this would be only if they resisted the Servant’s tax policy. 
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Will You Die with Me?: My Life and the Black Panther Party (Flores Alexander Forbes)
- Highlight on Page 81 | Loc. 1163-65  | Added on Sunday, October 05, 2014, 12:46 PM

Their personal security people would also be dressed in suits, ties, et cetera. (BPP personal security personnel were often described by Huey P. Newton as decoys for lurking assassins. This was part of his sinister tactical mind that had to grow on you.) 
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Will You Die with Me?: My Life and the Black Panther Party (Flores Alexander Forbes)
- Highlight on Page 81 | Loc. 1172-74  | Added on Sunday, October 05, 2014, 12:48 PM

If something went down, the person had an escape route and the number of Jimmy Johnson in LA. Once he got to the airport, he would call Jimmy, who would place him in the underground network he had set up down south. We had to use this system only once, but it didn’t involve the chairman or the campaign. 
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Will You Die with Me?: My Life and the Black Panther Party (Flores Alexander Forbes)
- Highlight on Page 85 | Loc. 1231-33  | Added on Sunday, October 05, 2014, 12:56 PM

A few days after Masai and Poison were transferred in the fall of 1972, Robert Bay and John Seale came by to tell me that the Servant had appointed me the new head of security for the Black Panther Party. I was twenty years old. 
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Will You Die with Me?: My Life and the Black Panther Party (Flores Alexander Forbes)
- Highlight on Page 86 | Loc. 1241-47  | Added on Sunday, October 05, 2014, 12:57 PM

Rob looked like a big, light-skinned Buddha with a full beard. I asked him why he called me Fly. “That’s what the Servant calls you, brother. He gets reports on you guys from all over the place, on operations, from niggers on the street, what have you. He likes your work, thinks you’re what a real Panther should be like.” He glanced at me when he said that. “You got a lot of juice, young brother, and a lot of people think you’re out of your league. But what matters is what the Servant thinks. Right on?” “Right on,” I said. “Huey thinks you’re a pretty cool customer, so he started calling you ‘Fly’ back when Masai was pushing you to be groomed for the top spot to replace Poison.” I didn’t respond but thought, That’s why Poison used to treat me funny. 
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Will You Die with Me?: My Life and the Black Panther Party (Flores Alexander Forbes)
- Highlight on Page 91 | Loc. 1311-25  | Added on Sunday, October 05, 2014, 01:04 PM

There was this one time when the house manager of the Fox Theater was up at the house trying to cut some kind of a deal with Huey. This was the first time I saw the shock-a-boo-coo. This was during the period when the Party had a lease at the entertainment venue from which we showed movies and were planning to bring in live performances once we bought the place, which was the Servant’s intention. I think this guy’s name was Claude. He was short and dark and thought he was big shit. He was invited up to the Servant’s house after running into him at the Lamp Post. He insisted that Huey had accepted him as a member of the Party. Huey said, “Well, comrade, we need to initiate you with the sacred ceremony so that you will be a trusted warrior incognito.” When I heard that, I looked over at June, John, and Big Rob to gauge their reaction. They were stoned-faced but began to dress right (military style) behind Huey. They took out their weapons and crossed their arms with their handguns in their hands. Huey looked at me with those large deep eyes and motioned for me to take out my gun and walk over to Claude, who was kneeling in front of Huey, as he had been instructed to. Huey instructed me to place my gun at Claude’s head. Then he began a long, unintelligible incantation about the street gods and black warrior trustees who looked over living Panthers and helped dead Panthers who were in purgatory because they were too tough for hell. At the end of this long spiel, Huey motioned his head at me and looked down at my .45 auto. I wasn’t sure what he meant, but it appeared that he wanted me to cock my weapon. So that was what I did. He quickly moved my gun away from the man’s head and pointed for me to go sit down. He lifted Claude, who was shaking from head to toe. He welcomed Claude as the newest member of the BPP and told Big Rob to give him a ride home. Huey started laughing and looked at June and John, who were also cracking up. Huey came over to me and said, “What were you doing, comrade?” I paused, then said, “I thought you were motioning for me to cock my gun.” 
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Will You Die with Me?: My Life and the Black Panther Party (Flores Alexander Forbes)
- Highlight on Page 92 | Loc. 1332-34  | Added on Sunday, October 05, 2014, 01:05 PM

We don’t know what’s-his-name, and the nigger won’t be working for us besides working at the Fox. Look, Flores, rituals are for people we don’t trust. The nigger wants in on the stern stuff, so why not do something to use him and make him think he’s one of us. But remember, comrade, he will never be one of you.” 
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Will You Die with Me?: My Life and the Black Panther Party (Flores Alexander Forbes)
- Highlight on Page 96 | Loc. 1370-74  | Added on Sunday, October 05, 2014, 01:11 PM

I can remember only one large operation—when Huey wanted to send a specific message to the largest speakeasy on San Pablo, a placed called the Black Knight. We swarmed the place. Huey was inside with June, Big Rob, and about ten other Panthers. We stopped all business while the Servant read the owners, Cole and Larry, the riot act. Most of these nig-gers had never seen this many black men with guns carrying out a disciplined operation against them. They were defenseless against us. To whom could they go for support? As the Servant used to say, “They can’t call the police.” 
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Will You Die with Me?: My Life and the Black Panther Party (Flores Alexander Forbes)
- Highlight on Page 96 | Loc. 1378-91  | Added on Sunday, October 05, 2014, 01:13 PM

Mojo, me, and three other brothers planned this operation as a team. We would use two rented cars. Mojo and a driver would pull up in front of the joint with an AK-47 and stitch a neat little pattern across the top floor, where the gunmen would be positioned. I would be in the second car for backup with an M16 and the other brothers with two riot shotguns. We arrived at about three in the morning and the joint was jumping. I positioned my car on a street that was maybe a hundred feet from a street perpendicular to Shattuck. It was dark on this side street, so we were able to leave the car and crouch in the bushes nearby. We left our trunk open. Mojo and his driver pulled up in front of the club. Mojo stepped out of the car and walked to the middle of the street. His silhouette was eerie. Dressed in that long coat and large floppy hat, he was holding an automatic weapon in one hand and a cigarette in the other. He threw the cigarette in the street and stomped on it. He raised his weapon and the muzzle began flashing with a delayed report. We could see the impact as the bullets hit the club, shattering the silence outside. He was laying down tracks from one end of the club to the other. He stopped, flipped the banana clips, and continued shooting. The stampede began. Just as he jumped into his waiting car, people came bursting out of the front door running in these low crouches. Mojo’s driver hit the gas and turned sharply onto the street where we were parked. We had moved to the corner, covering them as they drove up. Mojo jumped from his car and threw the AK-47 into the open trunk of our car. He jumped back into his car and sped off. We waited for a few more seconds as I surveyed the situation, taking careful note of the damage and the chaos. From this moment forward, they paid on time. 
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Will You Die with Me?: My Life and the Black Panther Party (Flores Alexander Forbes)
- Highlight on Page 97 | Loc. 1397-1401  | Added on Sunday, October 05, 2014, 01:14 PM

I met with Big Rob to discuss the operation so I could get some perspective on our operating procedures for this one. How much latitude did the Duke and I have to deal with this guy if he disobeyed our orders to raise his hands, for example, or drop to the floor? In other words, what happens when the dude we’re confronting challenges us or, as Masai used to say, takes those actions that “alter the scope of the operation”? Could we go beyond harassing and robbing the guy to blowing him away? Message still delivered. Once I got that issue cleared up we were good to go. 
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Will You Die with Me?: My Life and the Black Panther Party (Flores Alexander Forbes)
- Highlight on Page 98 | Loc. 1403-5  | Added on Sunday, October 05, 2014, 01:14 PM

I told Mojo the rules of engagement and he gave me two .45s, government-issue 1911s, and said, “Look, youngster, if you guys have to pop this guy, go to the marina—it’s just a few blocks away—and deep-six the whole piece.” “Cool,” I said. “I understand.” 
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Will You Die with Me?: My Life and the Black Panther Party (Flores Alexander Forbes)
- Highlight on Page 101 | Loc. 1461-64  | Added on Sunday, October 05, 2014, 01:20 PM

I was twenty-one years old and not afraid of the Party’s discipline. The Servant, Chief of Staff June Hilliard, Assistant Chief of Staff John Seale, and Robert Bay had never said it directly, but I knew I had become one of the people in the Party who was special. Or, to put it another way, my mistakes were the cost of our doing business on this scale. The person who was in trouble was the armorer, Mojo. I learned later that it was this type of sloppy work and bad judgment that got Mojo expelled from the Party. 
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Will You Die with Me?: My Life and the Black Panther Party (Flores Alexander Forbes)
- Highlight on Page 108 | Loc. 1546-47  | Added on Sunday, October 05, 2014, 09:31 PM

That night and the next morning we went out to the speakeasies to look over our territory, but before we left the Lamp Post, Huey closed by saying to us, “If you are true to the game, the game will always be true to you.” 
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Will You Die with Me?: My Life and the Black Panther Party (Flores Alexander Forbes)
- Highlight on Page 109 | Loc. 1560-65  | Added on Sunday, October 05, 2014, 09:32 PM

It was dark outside and Robert took the surface street route instead of the freeway. We were cruising up Sacramento Avenue. As we passed different establishments, Huey pointed out the “joints,” calling out the revenues and what percentage they were being assessed at and then taxed, their names, and how long he had known the specific proprietor. He said, “Comrades, you know we will use the money from these chumps to help pay for our ‘survival programs,’ any future political campaigns, and to underwrite our five-year plan to take over the city of Oakland.” As he was finishing, Rob wheeled into a dirt parking lot behind what looked like a factory or warehouse. There were dozens of cars parked in the lot and on the street. There were Benzes, Cadillacs, Town Cars, you name it. 
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Will You Die with Me?: My Life and the Black Panther Party (Flores Alexander Forbes)
- Highlight on Page 111 | Loc. 1584-1606  | Added on Sunday, October 05, 2014, 09:37 PM

Booker ushered in a waitress, who took our orders. We all ordered cognac with a club soda back. And then, one by one, ushered in by Booker’s large hands, these guys came through the door wearing big floppy hats, “Lord Jesus” hairstyles, platform shoes, and lots of gold around their necks and on their manicured fingers. They were coming in at intervals, three at a time. And they would occupy the chairs stationed by Huey, directly in front of his desk and chair. He was holding court on the streets. But as each guy came in, he put his hands in his pockets and leather bags. They each pulled out little paper packets, unfolded them, and neatly deposited cocaine on a mirror that was placed before Huey. I could smell the stuff from where I sat. Huey bent over with a hundred-dollar bill that was rolled up like a straw and started snorting. They put so much cocaine down on the mirror that it looked like the little mountain of powder that Al Pacino’s character snorted in the film Scarface. The pyramid ultimately stood about six to eight inches high. Huey was scooping and snorting something fierce. Next he used a straw. He built a little hill of the powder over to the side and took it down his nostril in several dips. These other guys were lining up to take their hits, too, leaning over and snorting with little spoons connected to gold chains around their necks. No one was talking. One of them motioned toward me, offering me the use of his little gold spoon. I shook my head no, thank you. “The brothers are on duty,” Huey said. So they ignored us for the rest of the morning. The guys in the chairs were probably between thirty and fifty years old. They had names like Cole, Larry, Alameda Slim, Dog Slim, Howard Boyd, Billy Byrd, and Terrible Tom, who said he had dug a ten-foot-deep pit in his backyard that he used to throw his bad whores into and then fed them only raw meat. Afterward, Huey said we should not accept anything from them, because someday we would probably have to kill them for not paying. So it was better to distance ourselves from them. Huey stood up and began to pace the floor while launching into one of his one-man performances. He spoke about Li’l Bobby Hutton and his courage as the first member of the Party and the first member of the Party to die in combat; Plato’s Cave allegory; his shoot-out with the Oakland police in October 1967 in which he said the smoking gun was located in his hollowed-out law book; and what we would do when we took over the city of Oakland. Suddenly there was a knock on the door and Big Booker entered, moving quickly past everyone and then leaning over to whisper something in Huey’s ear. Huey nodded his approval and then turned to Robert Bay, saying, “Big Man, call June and tell him the police are surrounding this place and that I may need his help.” Robert said, “Right on, Servant,” and left to go use the phone in the lounge area. Huey then turned to Bethune and me and said with great emotion, “Will you die with me, comrade brothers?” We responded in unison, “Right on, Servant.” He said, “Good, then we’re not going to jail tonight.” Later that morning the police pulled back and we left without an incident. 
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Will You Die with Me?: My Life and the Black Panther Party (Flores Alexander Forbes)
- Highlight on Page 114 | Loc. 1632-40  | Added on Sunday, October 05, 2014, 09:40 PM

People began to disappear again a month after the Fox Lounge incident. Dozens of comrades who had been in the Party for years were either expelled or left of their own volition. I knew most of the expelled and personally showed some of them the door. This was what Huey had prepared us for. Chairman Bobby Seale, David Hilliard and his brother June, and John Seale were expelled or left voluntarily. Others, including Robert Bay, Gwen Goodloe, Elbert “Big Man” Howard, Bobby Rush, and scores more followed. The security cadre was not immune from this new purge. We lost about five or six good brothers for various reasons. Most of their expulsions occurred at the Servant’s house and involved some incident where the Servant was concerned. The stories were always sketchy, but I figured most of them got up to his house and started tripping about their own self-importance in the Party. Hanging around Huey was like a high. I knew these brothers, and it wasn’t unusual for them to be high-strung because they were involved in the stern stuff, and sometimes that shit would go to your head. Enormous egos are not willing to take any shit or back down. Those sessions at his house were like time bombs waiting to go off, as they did around August 1974. 
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Will You Die with Me?: My Life and the Black Panther Party (Flores Alexander Forbes)
- Highlight on Page 117 | Loc. 1659-64  | Added on Sunday, October 05, 2014, 09:42 PM

“Flores,” Elaine said, “we will be asking you to do more.” I nodded. “Damn, Fly, you should be excited,” Bethune said. “You’ve been here getting down for a long time, and now the other brothers and sisters will have to risk their lives doing some of this stuff.” “Right on,” I said. “I’ll do whatever I need to do to keep the Party moving ahead.” Both of them seemed disappointed that I had responded with so little passion. But at this time I couldn’t worry about that. I knew the transition was going to be rough. I had nothing to be excited about because this wasn’t a job or career for me. This was my life. 
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Will You Die with Me?: My Life and the Black Panther Party (Flores Alexander Forbes)
- Highlight on Page 119 | Loc. 1692-1708  | Added on Sunday, October 05, 2014, 09:46 PM

These were the conditions and environment under which many a nigger was shot. But not us, we weren’t going for it. With all of the confusion, shouting, lights flashing, and nervous tension, we calmed down and took the bust like we knew we should. They put us all in separate rooms again. At the police station I saw Captain Colletti and the ATF agent J. J. Newberry once more. I was fingerprinted but not charged. My release came several hours later, but as I was being led to the release point to sign some papers and meet Smokey, the BPP’s legal affairs coordinator, I was astonished at what I heard as I waited in the hallway holding area. “Comrade, I’m over here.” It was Huey, in a holding cell. I looked around and walked over to the cell. “Do you have any ciga-rettes?” he asked. “Yeah,” I said while reaching into my pocket and gesturing to the jailer that I was going to hand the pack to Huey. The jailer nodded that it was okay. “Keep them, Servant, I’m getting out.” “Good, Flores, that’s good. Sister Elaine will need you now more than ever.” I didn’t realize what he meant then. However, the entire night started to come together for me. We had been arrested because they were looking for the Servant. We were released, uncharged, within hours. The Servant was released the next day on bail after being charged with the attempted murder of some prostitute on San Pablo Avenue. The next time I saw Mojo, I was picking him up from the hospital and taking him to the Greyhound bus station in downtown Oakland. He had been expelled and mud-holed while at the Servant’s house. Huey P. Newton disappeared. Warrants were issued for his arrest. The next time I met with Elaine and Bethune, they were not as vague as before. “Flores Forbes,” Elaine said, “you have been appointed to the central committee of the Black Panther Party, and your title is assistant chief of staff. And you have also been appointed the armorer of the Black Panther Party. Congratulations!” I still didn’t say anything. I just shook their hands and went to be by myself. I had to be alone because it was at this moment that I realized I would never leave the Black Panther Party alive. I was twenty-two years old. 
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Will You Die with Me?: My Life and the Black Panther Party (Flores Alexander Forbes)
- Bookmark on Page 122 | Loc. 1733  | Added on Sunday, October 05, 2014, 09:48 PM


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Will You Die with Me?: My Life and the Black Panther Party (Flores Alexander Forbes)
- Highlight on Page 122 | Loc. 1731-41  | Added on Sunday, October 05, 2014, 09:49 PM

I had several duties as the armorer; paramount among them was maintaining the vast inventory of weapons and ammo. I made sure the weapons were functioning properly, by constant testing at the range, and that they were matched up with the right ammo. (I was surprised when people didn’t know the difference between 7.62mm or 7.62×39. The former was for an American M14/M60 and the latter was for the AK-47.) I also serviced and cleaned the inventory and replenished it when necessary. Replenishing the inventory could be tricky. This meant I had to buy or trade with various sources like illegal arms dealers, gun shops, and gun shows. To assist me in these endeavors I needed a team. I had two assistants, both top-flight Panther security personnel: Clark Bailey and Louis T. Johnson. And I had one woman, a white woman. She was my girlfriend, and I also recruited her to assist me in my work. Roni was the only white person who was a member of the BPP. Until the feds caught on, she was my front person at the gun shops and gun shows. Elaine had encouraged me to move in with her because she lived with the Gladwins in the Oakland Hills, away from the flatlands. Tom and Flora Gladwin were major contributors to the Party. They welcomed me with open arms. They were two of the best white radicals I had ever known. Flora was the librarian at our award-winning school in East Oakland, and Tom, well, he was the most interesting of fellows. I never confirmed this, but I heard he had been a CIA analyst at one time. We got along famously and there were never any problems. 
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Will You Die with Me?: My Life and the Black Panther Party (Flores Alexander Forbes)
- Highlight on Page 124 | Loc. 1754-61  | Added on Sunday, October 05, 2014, 09:51 PM

On the operational side, we created a model of what worked early on with the Duke, Mojo, and me. We developed three-man squads with a good mix of street experience and Vietnam combat experience. There were maybe a dozen brothers in the cadre with real serious Vietnam combat experience in elite U.S. Army units like the 82nd and 101st Airborne, the 173rd Airborne Brigade, and a half-dozen brothers with Ranger patches. We hooked them up with a group of street-smart brothers, making a great outfit. We had strong team leadership with veteran Panthers like Santa Rita, Texas, Aaron Dixon, Rollin Reid, George Robinson, and the Duke. We got even stronger when the brothers came up from LA for some joint operations. These brothers helped develop their individual units and prepare them for some of the stern stuff. We studied most of the so-called urban guerrilla texts, but none of them were written with a U.S. street in mind. So we had to develop our own operational standards. Our weakness was the inability to handle wounded comrades. Everything else we dealt well with. 
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Will You Die with Me?: My Life and the Black Panther Party (Flores Alexander Forbes)
- Highlight on Page 129 | Loc. 1826-41  | Added on Sunday, October 05, 2014, 09:57 PM

There was mass confusion in the parking lot as Bethune ran toward me saying, “Fly, what in the fuck happened?” I started to explain about the incident when Bruce “Deacon” Washington came hobbling toward us shouting, “Fly, I’m hit!” A chill went up my back. I told Steve Long and one of the Donald brothers to take Deacon to the hospital. Deacon, a dedicated Panther soldier from Philadelphia, died of his wounds the next morning. We buried Deacon and decided that these young motherfuckers would not get away with this. Both of them were wounded and recovering in Highland Hospital in East Oakland, a hospital with a large police presence. “Look,” I told the team of volunteers assembled for this operation, “there is a big OPD substation at the hospital. So you just can’t walk in and shoot these niggas. You gotta get up close, close enough to use a knife.” They nodded that this was cool. “You all know this is not authorized, so you can’t take a bust,” I said. They said to a man that they understood. They told me that they had cased the hospital and worked out a plan. Once they found the floor the targets were on, they could figure out how to get at them and work their way out of the hospital. But they said there was a catch. “Fly, we need some serious shit just in case we have to deal with the police,” one of them said. I looked at them and said, “How serious?” “AK serious, and we need three nine-millimeter Browning pistols.” “You got it,” I said. The night the team went in, Bethune and I were at the Lamp Post having a drink. I got the call around midnight and drove to East Oakland to the safe house the team had returned to. How they got in and out to this day I haven’t a clue. One of the thugs was in the lobby of the hospital visiting with friends, so they passed on him. Good move. However, they found the other one in his room, shanked him, and evaded the police after the nurses and doctors had sounded the alarm. The young nigger didn’t die but was severely wounded. We left it at that and moved on. 
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Will You Die with Me?: My Life and the Black Panther Party (Flores Alexander Forbes)
- Highlight on Page 133 | Loc. 1886-92  | Added on Sunday, October 05, 2014, 10:02 PM

I felt like I had come full circle with my life in the BPP. The excitement of the military stuff was not something I would enjoy again, I thought. But the day-to-day tedium of managing a program was losing its luster. I was a Panther official who was working in what was comparable to a 9-to-5. This took getting used to. While I was on probation I couldn’t carry a gun, and Elaine had made it clear to Bethune that I was never to go on another operation. She told me one day when I was complaining about my new role, “Look, nigger, you’re not some Panther gunman anymore; you are the assistant chief of staff and you need to act like it. The Servant said you must also be an administrator. Well, comrade brother, that’s what you are now—a Buddha administrator, and your goddamn Samurai days are numbered.” 21 
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Will You Die with Me?: My Life and the Black Panther Party (Flores Alexander Forbes)
- Highlight on Page 136 | Loc. 1914-22  | Added on Sunday, October 05, 2014, 10:08 PM

A big topic—that is, with Phyllis Jackson—that caused my defensive posture was what I did or should do about my folks who doubled as maintenance personnel, cooks, and executive staff at the school complex. Strategically placed at our most valuable asset were some of our top security people. Some did wear concealed weapons, but the untrained eye would think they were just janitors, cooks, and staff of the nonprofit arm. It was important that our school complex was well secured. But the topic that got me into heated discussions with Phyllis was these guys’ movements. As their coordinator for the daily work they did at the school complex, she complained that she could not account for their whereabouts, as most coordinators in the Party demanded of their staffs. She would start talking about this in the meetings and I would just tighten up and shrink in my chair. I would say, “You need to talk to them and get them to understand.” After the meeting I would go and see Phyllis and tell her on no uncertain terms, “Please don’t talk about that there anymore. If you have any beef about that, let’s talk and work it out.” But she kept talking about it, I kept going to see her about it, 
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Will You Die with Me?: My Life and the Black Panther Party (Flores Alexander Forbes)
- Highlight on Page 137 | Loc. 1922  | Added on Sunday, October 05, 2014, 10:08 PM

and we went back and forth. 
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Will You Die with Me?: My Life and the Black Panther Party (Flores Alexander Forbes)
- Highlight on Page 141 | Loc. 1989-2001  | Added on Sunday, October 05, 2014, 10:14 PM

In 1976 we delivered on our part of the deal with Lionel Wilson. We sent out every single Panther, Panther sympathizer, and Party volunteer to work for his campaign, and he became the first black mayor of the city of Oakland. Elaine had come back from visiting Huey in Cuba and announced that we were going to begin planning his return. She worked her side of the street organizing Wilson, Fortune 500 CEOs, and other power brokers in the Bay Area to promote our plan to take over the city of Oakland. (Of course, they didn’t know about the plan.) We worked our side of the street. We were organizing many of the local dealers and bringing them into the fold. Some we armed with top-flight weapons, while others were given their own turf that was sacrosanct. Not only did we work the local crowd, but we even expanded to LA and worked with some of the original Crips. Some of them had come up to work on Wilson’s campaign, and we hit it off and started working on an idea that Elaine and I had been kicking around for some time: reopening the LA chapter. The chapter was officially reopened in February 1977. I went down to LA for the project, taking about fifteen people from the base to assist. I met my family for dinner at a local restaurant. I saw them maybe every six months or so, when I traveled down to San Diego for a quick break. My mother and father had finally accepted my life choice. In fact, I believed they were rather proud of me. They could see that I was successful at doing something worthwhile with my life, even if it was dangerous. I had no way of knowing it, but this would be the last time I saw my father alive. 
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Will You Die with Me?: My Life and the Black Panther Party (Flores Alexander Forbes)
- Highlight on Page 146 | Loc. 2016-24  | Added on Sunday, October 05, 2014, 10:16 PM

“And you know we got a lot of work to do, getting things ready and stuff like that?” “Yeah, right on.” “Well, you know, there’s his case and that dope-fiend bitch that’s testifying against him.” Texas remained silent for a while, looking down at the dirt, kicking pebbles around, before he asked, “Fly, do we have a mission?” “Not quite, but it’s something like that.” I stood up and walked a few paces away, thinking about how I should put this to him. I turned to face him and said, “Texas, we don’t have orders, but what we do have is the ‘right to initiative.’ ” This term was derived from our reading and interpretation of Wretched of the Earth, by Frantz Fanon. He states that it is the oppressed people’s right to believe that they should kill their oppressor in order to obtain their freedom. We just modified it somewhat to mean anyone who’s in our way, like the woman who meant to testify against Huey. The first part of this phrase dealt with the right to do it. The second part, which relates to the initiative, just meant that we would do the operation and once it was successful, we would report it to the central committee. 
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Will You Die with Me?: My Life and the Black Panther Party (Flores Alexander Forbes)
- Highlight on Page 151 | Loc. 2083-2100  | Added on Sunday, October 05, 2014, 10:37 PM

The planning for Huey’s return had hit a feverish pitch by the day of his arrival. He had already left Cuba and landed in Canada. The authorities there flipped and placed him in custody. He was released, though—with the help of a Canadian member of parliament—and was scheduled to arrive at San Francisco International Airport on the evening of July 3. The logistics of putting this together was a unique experience. We had to transport approximately 150 to 200 adult Panthers and half that many kids to the international arrivals area at the airport and get them all back to Oakland after the event. We negotiated with the Oakland Police Department to allow us to drive Huey from the airport in Bethune’s Town Car and deliver him to the police once we arrived in Oakland. Bethune and Elaine had flown to Canada to make the flight back home with Huey and his wife, Gwen. I rode to the airport with Big Bob. We had every little detail of the Servant’s homecoming worked out, all the way down to the music. Bob organized it so that when Huey got in the car, a tape of his favorite song—“I Believe,” by Johnnie Taylor—would be playing. When we got to the airport, there were thousands of people besides us to greet Huey: comrades, family, friends, the press, and the Oakland police. We had arranged with the OPD’s dignitary protection detail to park the Town Car in the front of the international arrivals door. Bob stayed with the car. It was my job to find the car and to direct Huey’s entourage to its location. One of the OPD officers said, “Forbes, when we walk out with Huey’s people, don’t forget about reminding Bob that you should follow our car to the Alameda County jail, after we cross the bay.” I didn’t recognize any of them, but they knew who I was. “Right on,” I said in reply, while flashing him a clenched fist, Panther Power. Cooperating with the OPD was blowing my mind. But for Huey, anything could be done. Huey was about five to ten minutes away from deplaning when I decided to build a human gauntlet with the comrades so that he could walk through the crowd unimpeded. By the time the gauntlet was finished, the plane was pulling up to the gate. The crowd started to get loud and press toward the designated gate. I moved with the brothers to be closer to the Servant, as did the OPD detail. This was the closest we had ever been to the police, and they were really checking us out. It was one of those rare occasions when that tension between us was gone. We were cooperating for a good cause. 
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Will You Die with Me?: My Life and the Black Panther Party (Flores Alexander Forbes)
- Highlight on Page 152 | Loc. 2100-2114  | Added on Sunday, October 05, 2014, 10:39 PM

The door burst open. Elaine and Bethune emerged, followed by the Servant and Gwen. I felt like a witness to a last-second shot in an NBA championship game that wins the series or something like that, when someone does something that is unexpected and it works. It was a moment of pure joy that comes with goose bumps and watery eyes. I was close to the kind of tears that you might shed when someone makes an emotional speech that touches every major and minor point you believe in. I was truly psyched, but I did snap out of my trance. I had to move; I could not stand around teary-eyed. The police clearly didn’t want Huey to go through the gauntlet. The head of their detail said we should go through a special door when it was time to leave. That was cool with me. Huey got on top of the baggage counter, and the throngs of people began cheering and waving as he bent down to shake hands and dap with familiar well-wishers. It was then that we made eye contact. He gave me the Buddha Samurai nod, and I nodded back. I jumped up onto the counter and we embraced. I then got down to greet and hug Gwen. “Fly, where’s the car?” Bethune asked. “It’s this way,” I said, pointing in the direction of the OPD special door. As I started to steer them in that direction, Bethune grabbed my arm and asked who were those white men following us. “They’re the police, man. We’ve been kicking it with them all evening,” I replied with a touch of sarcasm. “Oh, okay, that’s right, we have to take the Servant to the jail,” he said. “Right,” I said. Before we could leave, the Servant jumped back onto the baggage counter and held up his hands, gesturing for people to be quiet. I didn’t hear most of what he said, but I did hear him say, “Comrades, we are declaring war on the drug dealers, and we will rid Oakland of this new menace.” 
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Will You Die with Me?: My Life and the Black Panther Party (Flores Alexander Forbes)
- Highlight on Page 153 | Loc. 2114-32  | Added on Sunday, October 05, 2014, 10:40 PM

I was stunned, to say the least. We never made policy statements in public like that, not without careful planning. But he had done it now, and that meant we were committed, and I didn’t like it. Huey had changed! He never would have made such a statement in public before, especially with the police around. As we pushed through the door, I looked at Bethune and he looked at me. He was stunned too. Wa made our way to the car out front, and before I got in, the OPD sergeant said for us to follow them again. “Right on,” I said. Those guys were really nervous, and who could blame them? After all of these years of fuckin’ with us and us fuckin’ with them, I guess they couldn’t really believe that we would hear a word they said. The ride back to Oakland was a quiet one for me, except for the stereo blasting Johnnie Taylor. All I could think about was this declaration of war that Huey had tied us to. Huey spoke briefly to Bob, Elaine, and Bethune. He then turned around in the front seat and said, “Flores, how are you, comrade brother, how have you been doing?” “Fine, Servant, I’m doing fine.” Man, was I distracted. He had that look in his eyes, as if to say: “I am different, but how? You figure it out, Fly; you think you’re so goddamn smart.” You know, it was like he was laughing at you, from deep down inside. From the very first time I met Huey, in 1972, he was always kind of spooky. He was born with a veil over his face, and that’s supposed to connote some type of mystical power. That could have been some bullshit, but he was always pulling a rabbit out of his hat. He was doing it now, with this almost impossible return to America. He was finally back, safe and sound, just like I prayed he’d be. We went directly to the Alameda County jail and turned Huey over to the OPD. He was bailed out two weeks later. The Black Panther Party that Huey left in 1974 was not the same one he returned to in 1977. We had grown in some significant ways. We had gotten Lionel Wilson elected mayor of Oakland, thus completing one of the major objectives of our five-year plan to take over the city of Oakland. Elaine had worked effectively to establish links with the governor, judges, and many of the Fortune 500 companies in the Bay Area. And our centerpiece program, the Oakland Community School, was considered a serious innovation in alternative education and had reaped the public kudos to prove it. We had expanded our operations on all fronts. The people who were in leadership positions were relatively new to the Servant, even though most of them had been in the Party for some time. 
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Will You Die with Me?: My Life and the Black Panther Party (Flores Alexander Forbes)
- Highlight on Page 155 | Loc. 2140-53  | Added on Sunday, October 05, 2014, 10:43 PM

I was working on our housing projects, the Felix Mitchell stuff, and responding to whatever new things the Servant wanted done. One day, while I was working on the house on Tenth Street in North Berkeley, Bethune, Bob, and the Servant came by. Huey was reviewing our work on the houses and the school complex. He was still peripatetic and walked around the property greeting the brothers and inspecting the work. He didn’t stay long, and as we shook hands, he nodded in approval, asking me if everything was okay. “Of course,” I replied. We walked Huey to the car, all except Bethune, who told the Servant he was going to stay. It was not customary for us to leave the Servant’s company until we were dismissed. There was something afoot. Huey and Bob drove off. Bethune directed me to the front porch of the house and offered me a seat. “Fly,” Bethune began, “I have some bad news.” “What is it?” I asked with that confident sound you try and make when a surprise response on your part could mean your ass or your life. “Well, Joan Kelly has filed charges against the Pearl, Fly.” Joan Kelly was a member of the central committee who was in charge of the Party’s expansive nonprofit organizations, and Frances “Pearl” Moore was my live-in girlfriend and a rank-and-file member of the BPP. We had been together for three years. “What? What for?” I was shaken. Bethune stood up and walked onto the sidewalk approach to the porch and then turned on his heel. “She’s a thief, Fly; she stole some stuff from Joan Kelly’s purse. And you know she’s been suspected of this kind of thing before. The Servant says she’s got to be expelled.” I was numb, but I didn’t say a word. “Fly,” Bethune said, “are you okay?” 
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Will You Die with Me?: My Life and the Black Panther Party (Flores Alexander Forbes)
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Will You Die with Me?: My Life and the Black Panther Party (Flores Alexander Forbes)
- Highlight on Page 156 | Loc. 2153-68  | Added on Sunday, October 05, 2014, 10:44 PM

“What do you think?” I said as I got up to walk away. I hit my forehead with the palm of my hand. Damn. Shit, this is fucked up, I said to myself. I couldn’t believe they would fuck with Baby at this juncture. It seemed as if they didn’t give a fuck about nothing. After all of these years of dedicated service, these niggers choose now to fuck with me by fucking with my woman. I knew how the shit worked around here, and that meant it wasn’t Joan who had come up with this scam. It was probably the nigga I was trying to save. Yeah, I was certain, because this was the Servant’s style. I should’ve known because I was usually in on the scheme, but not this time. And here I was planning to lop off this bitch’s head to save the Servant. Man, the shit could get thick around here. I was schooled by the movement to subordinate my personal relationships and my feelings for the business of the fold. This was hard because I loved this woman. I must set an example, I said to myself. So at her board hearing, at which I did not preside because of a conflict of interest, I showed my support for the executive decision. I did not try to defend her. I did not say one word. Bethune read the charges and she started to cry, glancing in my direction. I averted my eyes because it was hard not to help, seeing those big beautiful brown eyes filled with tears. I would not help because this could be a test, knowing how many games Huey could play with a person. I believed the Party came before my personal life, and now was my time to practice what I preached. After reading the charges, Bethune told Frances, “You have been officially expelled from the Black Panther Party with no appeal possible. You must go to your apartment and remove all of your personal belongings.” And then he added, “Oh yeah, don’t call Flores, because as you can see, he is in agreement with this move.” Bethune then nodded in my direction. I got up, took Frances by the hand, and left. I drove her to our place to collect her things. I did not say one word to her in the elevator, car, or even as she walked out of the door and out of my life. 
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Will You Die with Me?: My Life and the Black Panther Party (Flores Alexander Forbes)
- Highlight on Page 163 | Loc. 2260-79  | Added on Sunday, October 05, 2014, 10:53 PM

THE NEXT DAY WAS October 21, 1977. I had secured the intelligence data needed for the operation to get rid of the witness against Huey about two days before the last central committee meeting at Huey’s house. The preliminary hearing was scheduled for this Monday; we would strike on that Sunday morning, just as the target was rolling over. So on this day, as I woke, I contemplated doing my disappearing act for at least the two days it would take to set up and execute the plan. I looked at the phone and thought about calling Texas, but instead I got up and paced around my living room, trying to get at what was bothering me. Maybe the Servant wasn’t worth this effort. But I was committed and wouldn’t turn back now, even if he wasn’t worth it. I went back into my bedroom and took the phone off the dresser and into the bathroom and shut the door behind me. I needed another safety net. I figured that the only brothers in the fold outside of Texas whom I could trust were the brothers in the cadre from LA. I decided to call Pookie and Stubbs. They were both down with the Buddha Samurai, and besides, I knew they would kill grass if I told them to. The phone rang about four or five times before Pookie answered. I could tell he was just waking up; it was about 7:00 A.M. “Right on, this is Pookie.” “Pookie, it’s me, man.” I waited and hoped he recognized my voice. “Yeah, right on, Fly.” Good, I thought. “Listen, Pook, I need you to be ready for a phone call. When you get it, listen carefully to the person on the other end. It probably won’t be me, so don’t trip on that, okay?” “Okay, right on.” “It will probably be within the next few days.” “Right on.” “When you get the call, go and get Stubbs and tell him everything that I’m telling you now, in addition to the information from the phone call that you might receive.” “Right on.” “And do everything they tell you to do.” “Right on.” “Also, Pook, check this out. If you get the call and have to hook something up for me, you probably should keep going after you finish.” There was a pause on the other end, but I knew he was still there because I could hear his breathing. “Fly,” he said after a few seconds. “Yeah.” “I’m down with you to the end, my brother, or until the final day of liberation.” I just sat there on the phone and took in what he had just said. Man, I thought, it was kind of overwhelming to hear someone say that to you. I guess the thing that really rocked me is that he was deadly serious about who and what we were. Just like I was. 
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Will You Die with Me?: My Life and the Black Panther Party (Flores Alexander Forbes)
- Highlight on Page 164 | Loc. 2279-2303  | Added on Sunday, October 05, 2014, 10:54 PM

“Right on, Pook, I knew I could count on you. And there’s just one more thing to remember about the call.” “What’s that, Fly?” “That we will always be brothers in life and brothers in death.” I almost thought I was going to cry when I said that. Damn, I thought. I had to say that. What else could I say? Something stupid, like “Thank you, my brother, for backing me in the blind.” “Right on, Fly, I got it,” he said and hung up. I hung up and just sat on the edge of the bathtub. I got up and headed for the picture that hung over the couch in my living room. I knelt on the couch and took the frame off its hook. I sat on the couch and carefully slid the armory list out of the back of the frame. Then I picked up the phone to call Texas. “Right on, this is Naomi.” “Hey, Nai Nai, this is Flores.” “Hi, Fly, how are you doing?” “I’m fine, baby. Is the Twister there?” “Yeah, hold on.” “What’s up, Fly?” I paused, contemplating again how to say this. “T, ah, leave your wallet at home, I’m coming by to pick you up in about an hour.” “Right on, Fly,” he said, and he hung up. I hopped off the couch and walked back into my bedroom with the list. As I was looking for something to wear and intermittently checking the list for the best locations for the TE and a main staging area, my mind began to drift, and I wondered about the lack of fear. I was not bothered by the fact that I was on my way to assassinating someone. I wondered why then, and now. I think that most Black Panther Party members—especially those comrades who had been in the Party for longer than five years—were in some kind of a “confidence zone.” We thought we could do almost anything to achieve an objective—a revolutionary objective. This was the result of years of ideological and philosophical conditioning. We comrades were constantly bombarded with slick and catchy phrases that expounded on the greatness of sacrificing all for the cause, struggle, revolution, or whatever term was in vogue. We were taught that you should subordinate your personal life and all else for the goals spelled out in the Ten Point Platform and Program of the Black Panther Party. What we were about to do, though, had nothing to do with the Ten Point Platform and Program. In the final analysis, what I really believed was that Huey P. Newton was my “prince.” I would kill or die for him at the drop of a hat. The brothers in the fold had pledged an allegiance to me in much the same way. We were down for this or that, and the only thing that mattered was that it worked. When we were attacked, we counterattacked the best we could. If we needed to change our rhetoric in order to fool the opposition, we did so. If we needed to change the way we dressed in order to deceive the local police and other law enforcement agencies, we did so. We had announced that we were laying down our guns in order to cut back on police attacks and murders, though we did not mean it. It was just another urban guerrilla adaptation. We made political statements for military reasons that would buy us time until we regrouped for another push against the system and society. 
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Will You Die with Me?: My Life and the Black Panther Party (Flores Alexander Forbes)
- Highlight on Page 166 | Loc. 2303-23  | Added on Sunday, October 05, 2014, 10:56 PM

I got to Texas’s pad, which was in the lower part of East Oakland, about five minutes later than I had expected. We started to plan our agenda for the next forty-eight hours. I had already selected several locations where we could pick up the TE that we would need for the job. And I had picked out a staging area at one of our places in North Oakland. It was near the freeway and about a twenty-minute drive from Richmond, the city where the witness lived. As we drove around, I explained to Texas about the location and that there was a slight possibility that the police might be there. I had this suspicion because the intelligence for this operation came from secondary sources and not our own due diligence. Upon hearing this, Texas just said in his own low-key style, “Fuck the police,” and we pushed on. I really liked Texas; he was a very talented brother who didn’t get much credit, especially from the women in leadership positions. He was originally from Beaumont, Texas, hence the nickname, but had grown up in Detroit, which was where he first joined the Party. Louis Talbert Johnson was, to me, the prototypical Black Panther Party street operative. He was about six-two and weighed between 180 to 200 pounds. He was smart, and some considered him slick. He knew his weapons and could shoot equally well with a handgun or automatic rifle, but he preferred a riot shotgun to any of them. He was good with his hands and a buck knife and was probably one of the best “wheel men” in the Party. He was a lover of jazz, especially fusion, and specifically Weather Report. He was also a marijuana connoisseur of the highest order. But what made him stand out the most, besides the large Apple Jack hat he used to wear, was his dedication to duty and the Party and his fearless, almost swashbuckling, style on a military operation. He always wanted to be the first person through the door. He was my ace boon coon—always there—making the right moves and having a good time doing it. We had a deadly serious trust in each other, you know. Deep down inside of me, I even wished, because I felt this impending doom, that I had gone to Bethune and said the Party should support this thing and make it one of those deep underground operations. But in order to do that, we would need the Servant’s nod, and I didn’t think we would get that. So there we were, making our move, as wrong as two left shoes. Anyway, Texas was my main man, and we were going down for the cause together. We were going down for our prince and not the people or the Party or some other abstract notion of liberation. Yes, we were idealists and too aggressive for some people, but we were not stupid enough to think that what we were doing was tied to the Ten Point Platform and Program or any of our 1960s rhetoric. We believed we had “the right to initiative,” to take matters into our own hands. If things did not work out, we were also willing to suffer the consequences. 
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Will You Die with Me?: My Life and the Black Panther Party (Flores Alexander Forbes)
- Highlight on Page 167 | Loc. 2323-34  | Added on Sunday, October 05, 2014, 10:57 PM

We swooped into Richmond just to take a peek at the spot and locate a secondary staging area. We looked long and hard and didn’t see any police. “Looks good,” I said to Texas. “Yeah, looks good, Fly,” he replied. We then set off for Oakland, to choose a team, pick up the TE, recon the site, set up our staging area, plan a little more, make our move, and go home. We decided that we needed about four more people to fill out the team. One more brother to be with us on the initial assault, another brother to drive and drop us off, and a man and a woman to pose as a couple on a one-night stand to hold down the secondary staging area. We stopped at a phone booth in Berkeley to call central headquarters. Henry “Mitch” Mitchell, who was the officer of the day, told me that Bethune and Bob had called, looking for me. I told Mitch, who had been on the housing rehab crew, to say he hadn’t heard from me and not to sweat telling a lie. Everything was cool with him, he said. I asked him about the location of Elmo Black, Randell Jefferson, Stephanie Hopson, and Joe Jackson. They were the additional people we had selected to fill out our crew. I told him to contact each of them and have them meet me at the staging area in North Oakland. I further instructed him to say that this was extremely important and that they should not speak to anyone about this, which included their coordinators, Bethune and Bob. We were to meet in North Oakland at 11:00 P.M. The time now was 8:00 or 9:00 P.M. 
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Will You Die with Me?: My Life and the Black Panther Party (Flores Alexander Forbes)
- Highlight on Page 168 | Loc. 2334-90  | Added on Sunday, October 05, 2014, 11:00 PM

Texas and I made two stops in Berkeley and grabbed an M16 automatic rifle and put it together and taped two 30-round banana clips full of .223-caliber ammo together. We then picked up two Riot 20 Standard, 12-gauge pump shotguns with 00 buck rounds for the tubular magazine; three dark jumpsuits; three pairs of leather gloves; and three ski masks. We would use the M16 as a backup for the police if they should show up or for anybody who could outgun the Riot 20s. The reason we used shotguns as the primary assault weapon was because they left no land or groove tracing that could be detected by a ballistics test. And the jumpsuits, ski masks, and gloves were used to prevent blood from splattering on our clothes, faces, and hands. The gloves were also used to hold down the prints we might leave behind and to shield our hands from the blast residue emitted by firing a weapon. But if anything at all went wrong, we had the option of leaving everything behind, because we knew that nothing could be traced back to us, unless it was one of our bodies. And as another precaution, everyone on the operation was instructed not to carry any ID. It would take the police several hours to trace you with only your prints. We packed the trunk of the car and drove to the staging area in North Oakland to drop off the stuff. We then left to recon the spot. There were no changes. We drove around to time and measure the distance between the spot and the hotel we would use as a secondary staging area. We also looked for a good location to park the second car, in which we would leave the area after the operation was over. We returned to our primary staging area at about 10:30 P.M., and everyone was assembled. I spoke separately with everyone. I instructed Elmo Black to take Joe and Stephanie to the hotel staging area, where we would rest and lay low after the operation so that we would not have to drive back to Oakland until the next day. We went over everything again and again until 1:00 A.M. We set an alarm clock for 2:30 A.M. and then settled down to take a short nap. Texas and Randell were up and dressed in their gear, strapped down, and ready to go when the alarm went off at 2:30. I was the only one still asleep. We left North Oakland in two cars. When we arrived at our location in Richmond, I instructed Randell, who was driving the second car, to park on the next block over and leave the keys in that car. He then hopped into our car, and we drove around for another hour or so to get familiar with the street movement. It was time. Elmo dropped us off in front of the designated house at around 4:00 and then left to return to Oakland, as instructed. We walked up the driveway and knelt down in the dark below a window facing the street. I looked toward the front of the house just to see what I could see. Nothing. No movement, no sign of anyone. We pulled down our ski masks, and in a duck-walking crouch, we moved around to the designated door. This was a duplex with two doors facing the sidewalk with a backdrop or open area the size of a racquetball court. We went to the second door and stood up. I was on the left and Texas was on the right while Randell was kneeling on the other side of the sidewalk facing the front door. I motioned to Randell to rip the screen door off. Texas would reel around and kick the door in. I gave the signal and everybody moved. With that done, I started in the door, closely followed by Texas. Randell remained outside to cover us. I saw two muzzle flashes and heard two sharp reports as I entered the door. I thought they had come from within. But I wasn’t sure. They were followed by several sharp and rapid reports from outside. I began to raise my weapon to fire, but found that my entire right side was not working, it was numb. I couldn’t feel a goddamn thing on my right side. I had been shot. A copper-jacketed .223-caliber bullet had banked off the right side of my shotgun stock and slid underneath the back of my glove and entered the crease of my wrist, just below the heel of my hand. Tumbling and slashing, it had exited out the top of my knuckle, ripping through my leather glove and leaving my gun hand useless but still wrapped around the stock. Damn, I thought. I cradled my weapon as more shots rang out from outside. I tried to retreat back through the door, but Texas, who seemed to be moving in slow motion, blocked my path. He was slumping near the entrance. I said, “Texas, are you okay?” (Even that came out in slow motion.) There was no response. Randell turned and was facing the backdrop with his weapon held from a squatting position. Texas continued to fall in slow motion. Randell turned to see Texas falling and jumped toward him, trying to break his fall. He then struggled to pull Texas away from the door. Texas had been hit with a .223-caliber bullet in the back of the neck. It exited through his throat. I reeled outside, dropping my weapon and looking down at my right side. I felt my right arm with my left hand. Nothing. I raised my right hand with the help of my left hand. I couldn’t see my fingers. Damn. I had been shot in the hand and I couldn’t see my fingers anymore. Damn. I ripped at the glove. My hand started to burn and sting. I pulled the glove off, flinging it to the ground. “Help me with Texas, Fly! He’s hurt bad!” Randell shouted. I grabbed T’s left side as Randell grabbed his right. We attempted to drag him toward the street, but as we got to the driveway, I could see that he was gone. He felt like he weighed a thousand pounds. “He’s dead, man, we gotta leave him,” I said. “No,” said Randell, “we gotta take him with us.” He continued trying to drag Texas, who was dead on his feet. I could not hold him up anymore, so I let go. The weight of T’s body was too much for Randell alone, and he let go too. “Come on, Randell, let’s go,” I said sternly. We ran up the street toward the curb, peeling off our outerwear as we went. We had been trained long ago that if an operation gets botched, you must leave everything behind—guns, jumpsuits, and dead comrades. We made a left turn and headed for the next block, where we had parked the other car. As we got to the corner, I could see two police cars nearing the intersection from our right. We crossed the street and went to the car. I turned, while standing on the driver’s side of the car, and faced the oncoming police car. The lights were flashing, but there was no siren. The police were about twenty feet away when they made a sharp left turn and headed down the street we had just left. Randell and I stood still there in the early-morning darkness. I popped the lock with my left hand and got into the car. Randell jumped in on the passenger side. We drove off. We swooped back to the hotel and picked up the couple at the secondary staging area; we wouldn’t need it now. After leaving the hotel, we drove down the street that intersected the street where we left Texas’s body. There were police cars everywhere, but as I had guessed, there were no roadblocks yet. So we just drove by the police and headed back to the main staging area in North Oakland. As I drove away from the scene, I looked down at my bloody nub of a hand. Damn, I thought, I have to get medical treatment. We were quiet in the car until Randell nervously said, “Fly, do you want me to drive?” I didn’t answer. I just drove on, thinking, I have to get away. We have to get away. The cold reality of the situation set in and I felt a shiver throughout my body. Cold-blooded fear was riding me now. As I maneuvered the car back toward North Oakland, I kept repeating these short phrases to myself as if I were counting sheep, trying to go to sleep and forget about everything that had just happened. It didn’t work. What will I do now? What will I do? What will I do? I will get away. That’s what I will do. I will get away. But regardless of what I said to psych myself up, I knew that from this moment on, my life as I had 
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Will You Die with Me?: My Life and the Black Panther Party (Flores Alexander Forbes)
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known it was over. 
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Will You Die with Me?: My Life and the Black Panther Party (Flores Alexander Forbes)
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WHEN YOU EXPERIENCE a near-death occurrence or someone close to you gets popped and you’re there, it forces you to focus in on where you have been in your life. Because, baby, that moment could be the last thing you remember. It could be the last taste of life that you get. We made it back to Oakland from Richmond without any further incident. Jefferson helped me out of the car and into the house. I paid no attention to whether I was bleeding to death or not, I just wanted to lie down and go to sleep, hoping that when I woke up, this would all be a dream. It was hard to fathom that Texas was dead and still lying out there in the street being examined by the police, poking him, taking pictures of him, and then finally zipping him up in a big green bag. 
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Will You Die with Me?: My Life and the Black Panther Party (Flores Alexander Forbes)
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When Bert returned to take Nelson and me to the hospital, things were starting to hit the fan. First of all, the Alameda County district attorney, Tom Orloff, announced in the courtroom that there had been an attempt on the star witness in Richmond this morning and that the operation was botched and the body of Louis Talbert Johnson—Texas—had been found in the driveway. We had worked out a story for the ER doctor that involved my hand, a jackhammer accident, and getting high on the job. Nelson concurred that this made sense, given the condition my hand was in. Bert drove Nelson and me to the ER at Piedmont Hospital on Pill Hill. He dropped us off and sped away. Little did I know that I would see Bert very soon, but the circumstances would be very tense and in a “get out of town” style. Nelson and I moved through the hospital with ease. I registered at the ER desk and was ushered immediately, with Nelson at my side, into an ER room with a young white male doctor and about five or six other attendants standing nearby. Without asking any questions, the doctor started to remove my dressing. Halfway through, he asked, as the other doctor had asked, who had done this work. I said, “It was him,” motioning toward Nelson. “Great work,” the doctor said. “Now, what happened?” “I was working on a construction project in Petaluma when my jackhammer got away from me and stuck me in the top of my right hand.” I stopped talking and glanced at Nelson for his eye-contact feedback. But before we could register, the doctor said, “That can’t be the case.” “What?” I said. “That can’t be the case,” he repeated. First pointing to the entry wound on my wrist, he said, “This is where it came in—and this is where it left.” I said, “Where what came in?” “The bullet,” he said. “This looks like the wound the police said we should be on the lookout for and that we must notify them.” I moved away from the doctor, Nelson at my side, and backed toward the door. The doctor said, “Look, if you don’t get treatment, you can die; besides, I must tell the police about all gunshot wounds I treat.” Yeah, right! Nelson and I turned and started running out of the ER section of the hospital and into the parking lot. We didn’t look back, but the doctor and his attendants were at the exit, watching us leave the scene. We broke through the parking lot, dodging cars and finally crossing the street and tumbling down an embankment that took us out of their sights. We stopped running and began to walk quickly when we heard the police sirens heading toward the hospital. I knew this area extremely well, so I decided the closest place to hide and make a call was our house on Santa Rosa; it was currently used as dormitory for the kids. We slipped into Santa Rosa through a window that was always open, and when I saw the oven mitt on the counter, my mind began to free-associate and it finally hit me. Damn, I said to myself, banging my left hand on the kitchen counter. I forgot that I left my motherfucking glove at the scene. 
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Will You Die with Me?: My Life and the Black Panther Party (Flores Alexander Forbes)
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Stubbs took us north from Las Vegas and headed toward Salt Lake City. This part of the trip was somewhat pleasant because I was getting away and that made me feel better. It seemed the farther we got away from Oakland, the better I was able to mentally negotiate the pain shooting through my hand as it started to come alive again. When we reached Salt Lake City, it was dark, and this was good in my estimation because not many brothers were in this part of the country. We stopped for fuel and to get some food. I could not eat or sleep. Pookie took over from here, and after checking the map, he swung us east in the dir <You have reached the clipping limit for this item>
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The Invisible Bridge

The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 223-32  | Added on Tuesday, October 07, 2014, 02:29 PM

The Vietnam War was over—“peace with honor,” in the phrase the president repeated six more times. But “it wasn’t like 1945, when the end of the war brought a million people downtown to cheer,” Mike Royko, the Chicago Daily News’ regular-guy columnist, wrote. “Now the president comes on TV, reads his speech, and without a sound the country sets the clock and goes to bed.” He was grateful for it. “There is nothing to cheer about this time. Except that it is over. . . . Mr. Nixon’s efforts to inject glory into our involvement were hollow. All he had to say was that it is finally over.” Royko continued, “It is hard to see the honor. . . . Why kid ourselves? They didn’t die for anyone’s freedom. They died because we made a mistake. And we can’t justify it with slogans and phrases from other times. “It was a war that made the sixties the most terrible decade our history. . . . If we insist on looking for something of value in this war then maybe it is this: “Maybe we finally have the painful knowledge that we can never again believe everything our leaders tell us.” 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 617-21  | Added on Tuesday, October 07, 2014, 03:09 PM

General Taylor had once been a favorite general of Kennedy-era liberals. Robert F. Kennedy had called him “relentless in his determination to get at the truth,” and named one of his sons after him. Now Maxwell Taylor was a tribune of the other tribe, the one that found another lesson to be self-evident: never break faith with God’s chosen nation, especially in time of war—truth be damned. This was Richard Nixon’s tribe. The one that, by Election Day 1980, would end up prevailing in the presidential election. Though Richard Nixon, like Moses, would not be the one who led them to that promised land. 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 738-40  | Added on Wednesday, October 08, 2014, 05:26 AM

“WE TELL OURSELVES STORIES,” A wise woman named Joan Didion once said, “in order to live.” It is how we organize the chaos of experience into the order we require just to carry on. And in the life of the young Ronald Wilson Reagan, there was more than the usual ration of chaos to organize. 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 841-44  | Added on Wednesday, October 08, 2014, 05:43 AM

Until the day Ronald Reagan died, in fact, he was almost never photographed wearing glasses. Here was a constant: if a camera was present, or an audience, he was aware of it—aware, always, of the gaze of others: reflecting on it, adjusting himself to it, inviting it. Modeling himself, in his mind’s eye, according to how he presented himself physically to others. Adjusting himself to be seen as he wished others to see him—until the figure he cut became unmistakable. 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 957-63  | Added on Wednesday, October 08, 2014, 05:59 AM

Her mother’s beloved pastor died suddenly. Dutch made his replacement practically his surrogate father. He assures us that his actual father could occasionally show “great sensitivity”—like the time Moon’s senior class decided to wear tuxedos for graduation, and Moon decided not to show up because the family could not afford one. Then Jack invites him on a walk. They end up at Mr. O’Malley’s clothing store, where the haberdasher is waiting to fit him for a tux. It is telling that Moon, the family cynic, did not interpret the gesture as sensitive. He remembered it as Jack trying to save face in public. There is also the fact that sudden, extravagant acts of generosity are a frequent mark of alcoholic patriarchs, making up for equally extravagant failures. 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 1007-10  | Added on Friday, October 10, 2014, 08:28 PM

in the writing of Grantland Rice, who also wrote, “The true democracy in the United States is not to be found among politicians, our so-called statesmen, our labor union leaders or our capitalists. It is only to be found in sport. . . . Here you are measured by what you are and what you can do. Nothing else counts.” 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 1019-21  | Added on Friday, October 10, 2014, 08:30 PM

And, said the young liberal theologian Reinhold Niebuhr in the Nation, it could not last: “Heroes can thrive only where ignorance reduces history to mythology. They cannot survive the coldly critical temper of modern thought when it is functioning normally, nor can they be worshipped by a generation which has every facility for determining their foibles and analyzing their limitations.” 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 1035-39  | Added on Friday, October 10, 2014, 08:32 PM

Heroes were everywhere, every day, in a small-town Midwestern paper like the Telegraph. It was part of the culture of the 1920s—headlines like ROUND WORLD FLIERS RESUME FLIGHT TOMORROW; UNSUNG HEROES OF U.S. / BOYS IN POSTAL SERVICE FACE UNTOLD HARDSHIPS / BUT ARE NEVER RECOGNIZED IN HONORS; “HUMAN FLY” TO SCALE BANK BUILDING. Charles Lindbergh dipped a wing when he flew over town on the way to an appearance in Peoria. 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 1044-49  | Added on Friday, October 10, 2014, 08:33 PM

How deeply did the canons of sports heroics inform Ronald Reagan’s inner transformation? His son Ron once told a story about his father’s last days, when he could look back at a life in which he had become, by any reasonable reckoning, precisely the kind of man he had dreamed of: first a movie star adored by millions; then the most powerful man in the world, the slayer of evil empires. Weakened by Alzheimer’s disease, his mind reduced to its most primal constituents, he would wake with a start and cry that there was somewhere he needed to be: not a movie set where Bette Davis or George Cukor was waiting for him, nor the White House Situation Room, but a locker room. “There’s a game,” he would murmur; “they’re waiting for me.” 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 1058-59  | Added on Friday, October 10, 2014, 08:34 PM

F. Scott Fitzgerald, right around this time, defined “personality” as “an unbroken series of successful gestures.” 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 1150-52  | Added on Friday, October 10, 2014, 08:47 PM

“He always left people with a way of saying ‘God bless you,’ ” a classmate recalled, “that made them feel—just maybe—he had an inside track.” Some began seeing him as a figure of destiny. 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 1152-58  | Added on Friday, October 10, 2014, 08:48 PM

IN RONALD REAGAN’S CHAOTIC CHILDHOOD the imagination was armor. There is nothing unusual about that; transcending the doubts, hesitations, and fears swirling around you by casting yourself internally as the hero of your own adventure story is a characteristic psychic defense mechanism of the Boy Who Disappears. He pushes doubt and confusion from the forefront of his consciousness with the furious energy of a boy who fears that if he does not do so he might somehow be consumed. The strategy can backfire, however, when the boy becomes a man and must finally face the austere everyday ambivalence and incoherence of the adult world. The long-delayed realization that one’s fantasies do not actually map reality can leave behind a wrecked grown-up more alienated, helpless, and terrified than he ever was before. Which is why most people, with greater or lesser degrees of success, simply grow out of it. 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 1176-79  | Added on Friday, October 10, 2014, 08:50 PM

At his inauguration he promised to “bring us together”; pundits swooned. A little more than nine months later he delivered one of the most politically successful addresses in the history of the presidency: the “Silent Majority” speech, which in a single evening increased the number of Americans who approved of his handling of the Vietnam War by 19 percentage points. 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 1406-7  | Added on Friday, October 10, 2014, 09:13 PM

The price of onions started soaring, too. Horse meat, slide rules, a world in which anything that reliably had cost one dollar might soon suddenly cost two: it did something to people. 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 1664-78  | Added on Friday, October 10, 2014, 11:21 PM

And then there was Watergate—of which Attorney General Richard Kleindienst had just testified before Congress, defending Richard Nixon’s novel doctrine of executive privilege in a way that drove senators insane. “The Congress has no power at all to command testimony from the executive departments?” asked Senator Edmund Muskie, the object of the worst Watergate dirty tricks during the 1972 presidential campaign season. Replied Kleindienst, “If the President of the United States so directs.” “Do we have the right to command you to testify against the will of the President?” “If the President directs me not to appear, I am not going to appear.” “Does that apply to every appointee of the Executive Branch?” “I’d have to say that is correct.” And if Congress did not like that, Kleindienst continued, it could “cut off our funds, abolish most of what we can do, or impeach the president.” Senator Ervin, startled, followed up: how could an impeachment take place if none of the president’s men could be compelled to supply facts? Kleindienst’s answer was chilling and strange: “You don’t need facts to impeach a president.” Republicans and Democrats both fumed that they had never heard senators addressed like that in their chamber. A Harvard constitutional law expert called Kleindienst’s claims “utterly ridiculous.” A Yale professor said they “can’t hold water.” Democratic senator Lawton Chiles of Florida said it sounded “so unreal that I wondered if it was really me—if I hadn’t parted from my senses.” The chair of the House Republican Conference, John Anderson of Illinois, said it “borders on contempt for the established law of the land.” A Pennsylvania Democrat called it “monarchical or totalitarian.” 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 1695-1710  | Added on Friday, October 10, 2014, 11:23 PM

The reporters kept pressing him, question after question after question. On the eighteenth query, he uttered the immortal words: “This is the operative statement. The others are inoperative.” Time magazine helpfully catalogued what statements were now “inoperative”: The White House’s claim that what had happened at the Watergate on June 17, 1972, was merely “a third-rate burglary attempt”; the claim of Attorney General Kleindienst on August 28, 1972, of “the most extensive, thorough, and comprehensive investigation since the assassination of President Kennedy”; the president’s reassurances the next day that his counsel John Dean had carried out an investigation on his behalf, such that he could now “say categorically . . . that no one in this administration, presently employed, was involved in this very bizarre incident”; his statement the next day that while “overzealous people in campaigns do things that are wrong,” “what really hurts is if you try to cover it up,” and that he himself wanted the guilty to be prosecuted “as soon as possible”; his campaign manager’s October 16 avowal that the Washington Post had “maliciously sought to give the appearance of a direct connection between the White House and the Watergate, a charge which the Post knows—and a half-dozen investigations have found—to be false”; three days later, the promise of the campaign’s deputy director Jeb Magruder that “when this is all over, you’ll know that there were only seven people who knew about the Watergate, and they are the seven who were indicted by the grand jury”; then the president’s statement that he had “absolute and total confidence” in John Dean’s 1972 investigation; and John Mitchell’s statement on March 29 that claims he had known about the burglary beforehand were “slanderous and false.” All, apparently, inoperative. 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 1943-48  | Added on Monday, October 13, 2014, 01:22 PM

For instance, in the fall of 1968, a Berkeley faculty member recruited Black Panther Minister of Information Eldridge Cleaver as guest lecturer for Social Analysis 139X—Dehumanization and Regeneration in the American Social Order. Reagan said if it happened he would investigate the school from “top to bottom”—for “if Eldridge Cleaver is allowed to teach our children, they may come home one night and slit our throats.” Cleaver taught anyway, proclaiming in one lecture, “Ronald Reagan is a punk, a sissy, and a coward, and I challenge him to a duel to the death or until he says Uncle Eldridge. I give him a choice of weapons—a gun, a knife, a baseball bat, or marshmallows.” 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 1956-57  | Added on Monday, October 13, 2014, 01:23 PM

The next month, the same movement surfaced at Berkeley. He visited the campus for an inspection; a throng started chanting “Fuck Reagan”; the governor responded with an outstretched middle finger. 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 1963-69  | Added on Monday, October 13, 2014, 01:24 PM

Later that spring, when Berkeley students forcefully seized a spit of vacant campus land and declared it a “People’s Park,” Reagan dispatched not just National Guard troops but a Sikorsky helicopter that spewed tear gas at students cornered into a crowded campus square. A student was shot observing events from a rooftop. Reagan said, “The police didn’t kill the young man. He was killed by the first college administrator who said some time ago it was all right to break the laws in the name of dissent.” His address at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco defending the military deployment—he was beating back, he said, “a revolutionary movement involving a tiny minority of faculty and students finding concealment and shelter in an entire college generation. . . . Stand firm and the university can dispose of this revolution within the week”—made all three networks. 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 1971-73  | Added on Monday, October 13, 2014, 01:25 PM

Marx-minded student leaders welcomed such incidents as “heightening the contradictions”—a necessary precursor to the longed-for revolution. Reagan barked back, four days before the shootings at Kent State: “If it’s to be a bloodbath, let it be now. No more appeasement.” 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 1984-87  | Added on Monday, October 13, 2014, 01:27 PM

Reagan couldn’t even count on the loyalty of Republican conservatives, either: their hearts belonged, as their bumper stickers proclaimed, to “Spiro of ’76.” And there was this: Vice President Spiro Agnew would be fifty-six at convention time. John Connally would be fifty-nine. Chuck Percy would be fifty-six—and Reagan, at sixty-five, would be eligible for Social Security. “Around the mouth and neck,” George Will of National Review wrote, “he looks like an old man.” 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 1989-97  | Added on Monday, October 13, 2014, 01:28 PM

Bad accounting and an improving economy had left California with a nearly $1 billion budget surplus. Reagan said he intended to “return the money to taxpayers”—novel language at the time. His method would be unprecedented: the state’s first ballot initiative sponsored by a sitting governor. The state made a tactical decision the pundits called ill-advised: to put it on the ballot for November 1973, instead of in 1974. It set off an apparently impossible scramble to get six hundred thousand signatures by June to get it on the ballot. The plan baffled the pundits. George McGovern had made middle-class tax relief a centerpiece of his presidential campaign only a few months earlier; that, obviously, had gone nowhere. The details of the plan devised by four right-wing Reagan advisors—economist Milton Friedman, Martin Anderson, a lawyer named Anthony Kennedy, and Chief of Staff Edwin Meese—were confusing. The aim was to put a ceiling on state taxes and spending. But it seemed to bestow most of its favors on those who were already well-off—and what sort of political sense did a giveaway to the rich make for Ronald Reagan? 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 2255-61  | Added on Monday, October 13, 2014, 02:05 PM

The previous year a divorced father in the ABC TV movie That Certain Summer explained his “homosexual lifestyle” to his fourteen-year-old son. The sitcom Maude featured an arc of episodes concerning abortion. The ancient Anglo-Saxonism fuck was introduced for the first time into the Oxford English Dictionary. Johnny Carson was no longer required to have his Tonight Show monologues prescreened by network censors. In January 1973 the Supreme Court, in Roe v. Wade, made “abortion on demand”—in the words of its vociferous detractors, who were not many, were not well organized, and were most of them Catholic—legal in all fifty states. In 1969, 68 percent of respondents had told Gallup that premarital sex was wrong; only 48 percent said so now. 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 2395-2400  | Added on Monday, October 13, 2014, 02:20 PM

White House aide Peter Flanigan promised that “the United States is not going to go back to the cold, the dark, and the bicycle.” That just sounded like another government lie. In June, two thousand independent service stations simply shut down. Thousands of others began imposing ten-gallon limits per purchase. The “Skylab” space station, just launched into orbit, was meant to pave the way for a permanent human presence in space. Soaring temperatures within the spacecraft almost scuttled the launch. An editorial cartoon parked the astronauts at a gas station: “Don’t worry,” a NASA official told them, “you guys can’t go anyway. He can let us have only 10 more gallons of gas.” 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 2403-8  | Added on Monday, October 13, 2014, 02:21 PM

In 1955 the chairman of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission had said electricity would soon be so cheap it would no longer be metered. In 1966 a government report predicted, “The nation’s total energy resources seem adequate to satisfy expected requirements through the remainder of the century at costs near present levels.” Now that abundance had become scarcity as if overnight, conspiracy theories multiplied. The Nixon administration “was acting in concert with the major companies to produce a shortage” in order to kneecap the independent oil producers, Senator Adlai Stevenson III rumbled; Senator Walter Mondale said energy companies were faking the shortage to spur construction of the controversial oil pipeline to Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, where oil had been discovered in 1968. 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 2408-20  | Added on Monday, October 13, 2014, 02:22 PM

But Americans also blamed themselves. It was part and parcel of a new vernacular ideology: civilization was destroying the earth. The evidence seemed to be everywhere. In Los Angeles, beaches were closed after five million to six million tons of raw sewage flowed into the Pacific when the pumping system failed. In New Jersey, thick, frightening patches of “red tide” choked the beaches—harmlessly, authorities insisted, though they were contradicted by newspaper warnings that “a toxic variety can irritate the ears, eyes, nose and skin.” Annually, millions of pounds of smelly dead alewife fish washed up on Lake Michigan’s shores; record earthquakes hit Nicaragua, Mexico, Peru, China, and Italy; dormant volcanoes mysteriously erupted in Iceland; Jerusalem suffered a snowstorm; 1,500 birds suddenly died in England; massive fish kills appeared in Lake Erie; floating islands of decaying vegetable matter emerged in the middle of the Caribbean; this spring, 1973, the Mississippi River spilled over flood protection gates in Louisiana for the first time in decades. “A growing, man-made dead sea of waste matter has seemingly come to life off the Atlantic Coast”—this was a Los Angeles Times editorial—“and is moving to rejoin the civilization that created it. At the center of this water contamination, no ocean creatures survive. On its fringes, diseased and rotted fish have been found. Within, chloroform bacteria and the viruses of encephalitis and hepatitis thrive, waiting for targets to attack.” Two years earlier there had been a biblical infestation of gypsy moths on the East Coast. Who could deny the planet was in full-bore rebellion? 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 2420-23  | Added on Monday, October 13, 2014, 02:23 PM

The Club of Rome, a gathering of wizards from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology supported by seventeen top scientists from six nations, published Limits to Growth, a report based on computer simulations that concluded the most benign possible outcome of current trends was the complete collapse of civilization by the year 2100—unless, that is, the world resolved to immediately shift to a “no-growth” economy. 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 2440-44  | Added on Monday, October 13, 2014, 02:25 PM

A new movie came out, about a future New York City grown to 40 million, homeless people lining the streets, the inhabitants rioting for the scarce “high-energy vegetable concentrates” they survive upon. Strawberry jam costs $150 a jar. The authorities encourage suicide to cull the herd, gifting those who choose death with access to video clips of all the animal and plant life the earth used to enjoy. In the movie’s shock ending, it turns out food processors—the fictional doppelgängers of the rapacious energy companies—secretly harvested these human bodies to produce food. Soylent Green become one of the summer’s hits. 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 2807-12  | Added on Monday, October 13, 2014, 04:05 PM

on that page he recollected, “I used to say to him, ‘You’re a nice guy, Jeb, but not yet a good man. You have a lot of charm but little inner strength. And if you don’t stand for something you’re apt to fall for anything.’ ” Magruder was, he said, a very 1950s kind of fellow—“agreeing his way through life.” He argued that the 1960s had given America the gift of skepticism, that people no longer need to agree their way through life to succeed—and that through Magruder “we have the opportunity to learn . . . the ancient lesson that to do evil in this world you don’t have to be evil.” 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 2824-31  | Added on Monday, October 13, 2014, 04:07 PM

Unfamiliar with how criminal defendants talked when trained by criminal lawyers, Americans found the exotic language from the witness table fascinating. Harry Reasoner of ABC did a humor piece on a married couple on vacation arguing about who was responsible for forgetting the toothpaste: “ ‘Since there was no cap on it, I hesitated to place it in my shaving kit, where it might compromise my razor. I assume, in fact my recollection is that I was told, that you would seek out the cap and complete the packing of the toothpaste while I was eating breakfast.’ ” Such phrases as “at this point in time” and “at that point in time” (legalese for “now” and “then”) became the nation’s favorite inside joke: On Sesame Street, Cookie Monster stood accused of stealing, what else, cookies—an offense, after whispered consultation with his lawyer, he happened not to recollect at this point in time. Then he started eating the microphone. 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 3074-81  | Added on Monday, October 13, 2014, 04:34 PM

This was the United States, the week of its 197th birthday. “The Roman Empire crumbled from within,” wrote a Chicagoan in the Tribune. “Isn’t that what is happening to us?” So when the sixty-seventh attorney general of the United States denied outright what six previous witnesses had attested to in sworn statements before Congress, it just seemed like the way of the world. Mitchell offered no quarter, either growling, glowering, or sitting in stony silence in the face of questions he did not prefer, cracking sadistic one-liners at the ones he deigned to answer. He knew nothing. The panel reacted with incredulity. He had frequently cruised along the Potomac with Nixon on the presidential yacht Sequoia, they pointed out, and yet the president had never bothered to ask him what he knew about Watergate? (No—and if he had, “I would have spelled it out chapter and verse.”) 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 3134-37  | Added on Monday, October 13, 2014, 04:41 PM

Francis Ford Coppola’s “thriller about privacy,” The Conversation, was in production; it starred Gene Hackman as a surveillance technician consumed by paranoia following his efforts to get to the bottom of a murder he has accidentally recorded with a powerful long-distance microphone. It was as if the zeitgeist could predict what was coming. 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 3263-66  | Added on Monday, October 13, 2014, 04:54 PM

But now a shift was afoot. The suspicious circles were expanding into places like the Worcester, Massachusetts, living room of a conservative blue-collar worker whose son happened to be Abbie Hoffman, the Chicago Seven defendant and hippie savant. Now John Hoffman sat in front of his tiny black-and-white TV and told himself that, yes, “Abbie had been right all along”: American decency was indeed a sham. 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 3292-95  | Added on Monday, October 13, 2014, 04:57 PM

Buchanan, practically his only West Wing fan, came up with the idea of drafting him as the administration’s attack dog against the radicals, and the liberal media elites the White House believed to be cosseting radicals. Or, in Agnew’s memorable words, “the cacophony of seditious drivel emanating from the best-publicized clowns in our society and their fans in the Fourth Estate.” 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 3315-20  | Added on Monday, October 13, 2014, 04:59 PM

Bottom line: releasing tapes “would set a precedent that would cripple all future Presidents.” So he would refuse to do it. (Barry Gold-water Jr., a congressman from Los Angeles, answered curtly: “He asks for the trust of the American people, but he doesn’t trust them enough to let them hear the tapes.”) The reason, Nixon concluded, was that the relationship between a president and his aides was like that “between a lawyer and his client, between a priest and a penitent, and between a husband and wife”: it required confidentiality. (A letter writer wondered if it was accidental that he omitted the relation between a psychiatrist and his patient.) 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 3335-38  | Added on Monday, October 13, 2014, 05:02 PM

But what about Nixon taping him when he visited the Oval Office? What did he think about that? No big deal. “Matter of fact,” Reagan said, the tapes probably “made me sound good.” (They did not. In one 1971 conversation, Nixon called him “pretty shallow” and of “limited mental capacity.” Kissinger called the notion of Reagan as president “inconceivable.”) 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 3416-18  | Added on Monday, October 13, 2014, 05:10 PM

Said Edmund G. “Jerry” Brown Jr., who was California’s secretary of state and son of the man Reagan beat to become governor in 1966, and who hoped to succeed him in 1974, Proposition 1 was “just a vehicle to use to run for President,” and “a hoax, pure and simple.” 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 3496-3500  | Added on Monday, October 13, 2014, 05:20 PM

Late in August, at the annual Soap Box Derby in Akron, Ohio, a fourteen-year-old was stripped of first prize after officials X-rayed his car and discovered an electromagnet in the nose to pull him out of the starting gate more quickly. Immediately, special pleaders argued he had done no wrong. A publicist at the University of California, Los Angeles reminisced in an op-ed on all the ways he and his buddies used to cheat, and said he couldn’t wait to help his son do the same: “Grownups should put their expectations of youngsters in line with reality.” 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 3533-35  | Added on Monday, October 13, 2014, 05:24 PM

Moretti said that if Proposition 1 passed, “by the time the walls come crashing down around whoever the next governor of this state is,” Reagan would “be campaigning in Mississippi someplace, saying, ‘I don’t understand the problems they’re having out there; when I was in charge, things ran smoothly.’ 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 3641-42  | Added on Monday, October 13, 2014, 06:38 PM

Egypt’s foreign minister said there could be no peace while Israel occupied Palestinian lands; Israel’s foreign minister said occupation would continue until there was peace. 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 3642-49  | Added on Monday, October 13, 2014, 06:39 PM

BACK HOME, A UFO SCARE was afoot: two men from Pascagoula, Mississippi, reported a cigar-shaped vessel with flashing blue lights pulled them up in its tractor beam; there claw-handed beasts paralyzed them and performed a medical examination. Within weeks Gallup reported 51 percent of Americans thought extraterrestrial visitations were real. Fifteen million said they’d seen one themselves. The Pascagoula witness showed up on The Dick Cavett Show. It was around this time that Time put drug mystic Carlos Castaneda on the cover, and three books battled it out on the paperback bestseller list: The Gods from Outer Space and Chariots of the Gods, both by Erich von Däniken, which proposed “ancient aliens” had built monuments like the Pyramids, Stonehenge, and the sculptures on Easter Island; and Bermuda Triangle, which wondered whether the lost city of Atlantis was responsible for the supposedly mysterious disappearances there. 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 3703-10  | Added on Monday, October 13, 2014, 06:46 PM

Agnew’s plea deal opened the floodgates of a corrosive cynicism. The president had refused to entertain the idea of amnesty for draft resisters; but Agnew had been afforded amnesty all but automatically. So Gordon Strachan, the young Haldeman aide who earned laughs for warning young idealists away from Washington, had been proved wrong; as one Los Angeles Times letter writer put it: young people should go into public service. Then they would have “the privilege of committing felonies.” An inmate wrote from Los Angeles County Jail: “My horrendous crime of plain drunk has drawn me 120 days”; if only his crime was political he’d be free to walk the streets. Another wrote that the sixty days he got for breaking a window during a strike was “a clear reminder that, as Thrasymachus says in Plato’s Republic, justice is whatever those in power say it is, and whatever is to their advantage.” Someone nominated the “Theme from Shaft” as the new national anthem. 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 3711-14  | Added on Monday, October 13, 2014, 06:47 PM

On October 14 the New York Times reported a poll demonstrating a 12 percentage point increase in public cynicism regarding government. Two professors reported on their annual canvass of graduate students entering the University of Michigan’s Institute for Public Policy Studies. A year earlier, 12 percent had agreed that “often those who enter politics think more about their own welfare or that of their party than about the welfare of the citizens.” This year the figure had jumped to 94 percent. 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 3721-29  | Added on Monday, October 13, 2014, 06:49 PM

New York also noted the increasingly political turn of Mad magazine—2.4 million copies sold a month, and no ads or branded merchandising: kids’ one redoubt of purity in a cruddy, overcommercialized world. In one recent gag, the “Corporate Ecologist of the Year” explained how his company was spending million of dollars responding to pollution: “on advertising—to clean up the corporate image.” “Starchie Bunker” got a visit from an “old World War II buddy,” Adolf Hitler, then CBS gave Hitler a spin-off sitcom. New York’s distinguished political correspondent Richard Reeves wrote that Mad was turning his son into a smart-ass. It did him proud: “The kid can spot the sham piling up all around him.” Another parent told Reeves, “I think it made her secure in being skeptical. . . . It’s really a shortcut to a kind of sanity-preserving sophistication.” Mad’s publisher chimed in: “We all need some cynicism.” Reeves asked a seven-year-old what Wacky Packages’ appeal was. He said, “I think they’re bringing out the truth.” 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 3729-32  | Added on Monday, October 13, 2014, 06:49 PM

The brat named the spirit of the age. Everything was fraudulent. America making the world safe for democracy? CBS Radio now reported from Chile on suspicions that the United States had instigated the coup there. The anchor clarified: “Actually, no evidence has yet been uncovered that Washington had any direct responsibility for the events in Santiago”—though such was the national atmosphere of suspicion that they reported on the rumor anyway. 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 3743-46  | Added on Monday, October 13, 2014, 06:50 PM

Apparently because he was mediocre, Ford was the one—the proverbial heartbeat away. Or maybe an impeachment away. It had long been a Washington joke: the oafish Spiro Agnew was Nixon’s “impeachment insurance.” Nixon had joked about it himself in the Oval Office: “What the hell, you know. People say impeach the President. Well, then they get Agnew!” Now the insurance policy had expired. 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 3793-3802  | Added on Monday, October 13, 2014, 06:56 PM

There was another motivation for America doing what it could to help Israel win: petroleum. Nixon and Kissinger hoped the Arabs would realize that the only way to obtain their strategic objectives was by cooperating with the United States. But the petroleum industry interpreted the situation in the opposite way. Aramco, the consortium of international petroleum companies operating in the Middle East, had written to the president on October 12 warning that the resupply would provoke a cutback from Saudi Arabia. So did the British ambassador to the United States, who asked Henry Kissinger, “What will be your posture when the Arabs start screaming ‘oil’ at you?” “Defiance,” the secretary of state replied. Defiance, however, soon backfired, in the most terrifying way. Nixon had never taken seriously the idea that Arab states could or would use oil as a weapon. In fact, Nixon had never taken the oil problem seriously at all. “Concentrate on the big game,” he said to his treasury secretary, George Shultz, when warned about the geopolitical consequences of possible shortages the previous March; he called such worries “escapist.” 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 3812-17  | Added on Monday, October 13, 2014, 06:58 PM

new bottlenecks in supply: a spectacular 1969 oil spill off Santa Barbara scotched offshore drilling; auto emissions standards added about 300,000 barrels a day to U.S. demand; refineries became harder to build; environmentalists stymied a planned pipeline to move oil discovered in Alaska’s Prudhoe Bay. Cities converted their dirty coal-burning power plants to cleaner ones burning oil, further squeezing supply; new synthetic fabrics and petrochemicals compounded the addiction. In just the short window between 1970 and 1973, America’s oil imports, once all but nonexistent, doubled. Now 29 percent came from abroad—the lion’s share from Middle East nations that mostly despised the United States. 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 3817-18  | Added on Monday, October 13, 2014, 06:58 PM

Fifteen years earlier Nikita Khrushchev had called the divided city of Berlin “the testicles of the West,” which he need only squeeze to make the United States scream. Now that pressure point was oil. 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 3831-33  | Added on Monday, October 13, 2014, 07:00 PM

Colonel Muammar Gadhafi, said when he’d expropriated the holdings of Occidental Petroleum in 1971: “People who have lived without oil for 5,000 years can live without it again for a few years in order to attain their legitimate rights.” 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 3897-3903  | Added on Monday, October 13, 2014, 07:10 PM

The word went forth: the office of special prosecutor had been abolished as an independent entity. The TV cameras then recorded an unbelievable scene: FBI agents, acting on a White House directive, sealed the prosecutor’s office—thousands of pages of evidentiary documents, interview tapes, painstakingly prepared reconstructions of criminal and near-criminal events, the entire bureaucratic infrastructure of the investigation, all the prosecution’s evidence for every last Watergate trial from lowly Bud Krogh to mighty John Mitchell: now it was impounded, off-limits to anyone. Men at arms, summoned by the President of the United States asserting his authority over another coequal branch of the government; the most sensitive and crucial inquiry in the constitutional history of the republic—cut down, perhaps for good. To the suspicious circles it felt as though a fascist takeover was imminent. 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 4001-5  | Added on Monday, October 13, 2014, 11:06 PM

In Esquire Tom Wolfe noted the fact that people who hijacked airplanes and took over buildings were becoming cultural heroes to an alienated populace—seen as men “at the end of their ropes” risking it all in a struggle against the “system.” The terrorist, as his fan construed it, created “his own society, his own system: in the bank vault, in the Olympic quarters, in the prison courtyard . . . striking out against the endless exfoliations of American power. . . . I finally cut through the red tape. . . . I am a celebrity!” 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 4057-66  | Added on Monday, October 13, 2014, 11:12 PM

“VOTERS SMARTER THAN REAGAN,” editorialized the far-off Milwaukee Journal. “The proposition had the surface appeal of the politicians’ favorite, but false homily,” the Journal patiently explained, “that says government should ‘live within its income’ like everyone else.’ Government in fact is not like everyone else, but uniquely different. It alone can, and must be able to, determine the level of its own income, through the taxing power. To equate its financial situation with that of a private household is utter illogic. To say the resources of a sovereign government shall be chained forever after to whatever the tax laws happen to yield at a given moment in the past is dangerous nonsense.” A government, they said, was a vehicle for sorting out human priorities. “Reagan’s demagogic ploy would have gone at them all backward, by starting with an arbitrary, pre-fixed revenue ceiling regardless of what had to be done and who would get hurt. And it’s always the poor who get stuck worst under that kind of tax philosophy.” This conventional wisdom did not look to be changing anytime soon. 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 4084-89  | Added on Monday, October 13, 2014, 11:14 PM

“Let us unite in committing the resources of this nation to another new endeavor, an endeavor that in this Bicentennial era we can appropriately call ‘Project Independence.’ “Let us set as our national goal, in the spirit of Apollo, with the determination of the Manhattan Project, that by the end of this decade we will have developed the potential to meet our own energy needs without depending on any foreign energy sources. “Let us pledge that by 1980, under Project Independence, we shall be able to meet America’s energy needs from America’s own energy resources.” 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 4097-4103  | Added on Monday, October 13, 2014, 11:16 PM

THE PUBLIC STILL TRUSTED HIM enough to behave as if the energy equivalent of Pearl Harbor had already arrived. Honoring a nonbinding presidential request, gas stations began closing down from 9 P.M. Saturday through midnight on Sundays. So people began “topping off”—filling their tanks every time they passed a gas station, leading to hours-long lines in which idling cars . . . just wasted more gas. Everyone wanted to get to a pump before the last drop was gone and one of the ubiquitous SORRY, NO GAS TODAY signs was hoisted up. Then they would have to return tomorrow—when prices were usually two cents a gallon higher. Tempers flared, no architect having thought to design a corner gas station for the eventuality of dozens of angry motorists cutting fellow motorists off at street corners like drivers in the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 4109-13  | Added on Monday, October 13, 2014, 11:17 PM

On the Watergate front, on November 13, Ronald Ziegler announced “Operation Candor”: over the next weeks, the president would “fully and publicly” answer all charges. Joseph Kraft, in a column titled “Toward Impeachment,” was not impressed: “President Nixon, in fact, is one of the least trustworthy witnesses on his own behalf.” Time pointed out this was the thirteenth time since the scandal began to unfold that “Richard Nixon vowed to disclose all of the facts and put the story to rest.” 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 4113-26  | Added on Monday, October 13, 2014, 11:18 PM

The story, lately, was about finances. On November 17 the Washington Post front page trumpeted devastating new findings in the old saga of the “milk money,” the hundreds of thousands donated to the Republican Party as early as August 1969 from dairy interests in exchange for price supports for their industry: the Associated Milk Producers’ lawyer now revealed the donations came after a conversation with Attorney General John Mitchell about how to buy favor with the administration. Other stories concerned the president’s personal finances: about how he had hidden profits from a Florida land sale by registering the deed in the name of his daughter Tricia; about how he claimed California as his voting residence even though he paid no state taxes there; about three previously undisclosed financial trusts benefiting Nixon controlled by Haldeman and Ehrlichman. The evening of the Post’s dairy story the president submitted himself on live TV to the questions of the nation’s newspaper managing editors, who were meeting at Disney World. Before they could ask him about his financial dealings, he volunteered his own account—one uncannily similar to the first grand slam he hit on live TV: the 1952 “special fund” speech, which had saved his political life under circumstances at least as dire as the ones he faced now. His conclusion gave the water-cooler wags the most memorable catchphrase of the scandal so far. “I have never profited, never profited from public service—I have earned every cent. And in all of my years of public life, I have never obstructed justice. And I think, too, that I could say that in my years of public life, that I welcome this kind of examination, because people have got to know whether or not their President is a crook. Well, I am not a crook.” The 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 4153-56  | Added on Monday, October 13, 2014, 11:22 PM

Governor Reagan, in Singapore as a special presidential representative for a trade deal, said North Vietnam must “return” the POWs and MIAs supposedly still being held, and that if it didn’t, “bombing should be resumed.” He accused liberals in Congress of taking away “the power to sway those monkeys over there to straighten up and follow through on the deal.” 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 4176-81  | Added on Monday, October 13, 2014, 11:25 PM

But who were the real mafiosi? “I hear about organized crime,” a citizen wrote to the Berkshire Eagle in Massachusetts, “but has anyone tried to find out why these same companies are responsible for organized famine, organized monopolies, organized profiteering? . . . I’m an avid supporter of free enterprise, but what the oil companies are doing isn’t free enterprise; it’s free back-stabbing aimed at the public.” The newspapers reported oil tankers stacked twenty deep at U.S ports waiting—a kind of maritime arbitrage, the suspicious circles imagined, all the better to produce a false shortage, then make a killing once the price became high enough to unload them. 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 4219-23  | Added on Monday, October 13, 2014, 11:29 PM

Merle Haggard, the felonious White House guest from March, sang a new hit song: “If We Make It Through December.” And on Christmas Eve, OPEC unilaterally raised the price of crude, this time by a factor of four. Gas went up to fifty-five cents a gallon, gas lines up to as long as four hours. Richard Nixon’s new “energy czar,” William Simon, announced a mandatory emergency fuel allocation program that would provide for 20 percent less gas than currently demanded. And alone among prominent public officials, Ronald Reagan said such “redundant, unclear, and contradictory rules” were not necessary at all. 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 4337-45  | Added on Tuesday, October 14, 2014, 10:43 AM

The Exorcist’s turning point came as the gaunt, frantic mother begs Father Karras, the faithless priest, to look into performing the ancient and mysterious rite of exorcism. Science, after all, has been helpless to explain her daughter’s mysterious possession. Father Karras, a man of science, tells her that she is being ridiculous and that her daughter . . . but the mother interrupts: “I’m telling you that thing upstairs isn’t my daughter!” Like the real-life middle-class Angelenos flocking to the downtown branch of State Savings Mutual Bank to embrace the healing powers of astrology, numerology, palmistry, tarot, and the comet Kohoutek, reason and progress having failed to deliver us from evil, why not embrace mystical solutions instead? And so, in the movie’s dramatic final fifteen-minute set piece, ministrations of holy water, prayers declaimed in Latin, the simple profession that Satan is one and indivisible and perfectly, obviously evil, but that God is one and indivisible and perfectly good, together restore the innocent little girl to herself—and, incidentally, restore Father Karras’s faith as well. Evil abated. Order restored. 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 4511-15  | Added on Tuesday, October 14, 2014, 01:40 PM

SENATOR JAMES BUCKLEY OF NEW YORK, the nation’s most prominent conservative politician, did not agree. Two days after the president’s return to Washington, Buckley gave a speech announcing, that Nixon’s “credibility and moral authority” were “beyond repair,” the presidency jeopardized “by a long, slow, agonizing, inch-by-inch process of attrition.” So for the sake of the republic and the conservative mandate of 1972, he must voluntarily resign—as an “extraordinary act of statesmanship and courage.” 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 4546-47  | Added on Tuesday, October 14, 2014, 01:43 PM

THAT, FINALLY, WAS THE SMART play. To attack the media from the right, and thereby to intimidate it into quiescence for fear of being accused of “liberal bias,” was the new name of the game. 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 4679-82  | Added on Tuesday, October 14, 2014, 02:02 PM

In the culture at large, Hank Aaron absorbed the brunt of that sort of anger. Stealing Babe’s pride of place, to his new pen pals he was like one of those black construction and steel workers who’d stolen theirs—just another swaggering black man empowered to lord it over whites as if he owned the world. Soon, as one of them put it, “You boogies will think that you invented baseball or something.” 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 4697-4706  | Added on Tuesday, October 14, 2014, 02:07 PM

THE HOME RUN CHASE ALSO indexed America’s new paranoia, its wariness toward formerly trusted institutions, its new lack of respect for formerly taken-for-granted norms of decency. Before the 1973 season began, back when the POWs were coming home, the Braves’ traveling secretary said publicly that the team hoped Aaron would break the record at home; then “we’ll sell out every night.” So every time Aaron struck out, fans accused him of doing it on purpose. Every time he sat on the bench, it was a scam. Then, as the 1974 season approached, when Braves owner Bill Bartholomay announced his intention to bench Aaron during the opening series in Cincinnati, the New York Times called it “a brazen defiance of baseball’s integrity”—even though the practice was venerable and common. “Baseball’s gone crooked,” Dick Young of the New York Daily News wrote. “There is no delicate way of putting it. . . . I would feel slightly better, and so would the fans, if the Commissioner of Baseball had come out with a blistering order to the Braves that Hank Aaron must play the first three games, under threat of forfeit.” 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 4711-13  | Added on Tuesday, October 14, 2014, 02:08 PM

(A political cartoon showed a relieved President Nixon looking out a White House window: “Oh, it’s only a streaker. For a moment there I thought you said leaker!”) 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 4721-22  | Added on Tuesday, October 14, 2014, 02:09 PM

Allen Ginsberg sent up a friend who accepted his prize and shouted at the top of his lungs, “There is no longer any hope for the salvation of America!”) 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 4723-33  | Added on Tuesday, October 14, 2014, 02:10 PM

Later that season the Cleveland Indians offered beer for a dime a cup at a game against the Texas Rangers. There had already been a bench-clearing brawl between the two teams at a cheap-beer night in Arlington, Texas, a week earlier. Before this game, kids started setting off fireworks from their seats and the Texas manager Billy Martin tipped his cap and blew kisses to the booing crowd. In the second inning a hefty gal flashed her breasts on the on-deck circle and tried to kiss an umpire. In the fourth, a streaker slid into second base. In the fifth, a father and son mooned the outfield stands. By the sixth the fireworks were rocketing into the Texas dugout and fans started throwing golf balls, rocks, and batteries onto the field—and, following the seventh-inning stretch, they invaded the playing field, overwhelming security guards. In the ninth inning, when the home team tied the game at 5–5, a fan tried to celebrate by stealing the Rangers’ star right fielder Jeff Burroughs’s glove. The two got into a fistfight, and that was when the real riot began: Clevelanders armed with knives, chains, Chinese martial arts “nunchaku,” and shards of seats they liberated from the stadium’s concrete floor sent Texas players fleeing for their lives—but not before Martin, armed with a bat, led the rest of his team from the dugout to join the melee, crying “Let’s get ’em boys!” like a demented Henry V recalling St. Crispin’s Day. 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 4739-46  | Added on Tuesday, October 14, 2014, 02:11 PM

In New York, Frank Sinatra, opening a concert at Carnegie Hall: “To ease any tension in anybody’s mind, Hank Aaron has hit the home run tonight.” Sinatra had once been a man of the left. Now the former chairman of Democrats for Reagan in 1970 was much more a tribune of the sort of people who suspected any advance for blacks meant a reversal for whites. He said it without enthusiasm, to no more than polite applause. But Hank Aaron’s response was anticlimactic as well: “Thank God it’s over,” he said when offered the microphone during the ceremony that interrupted the game. Then it started to rain, and for a moment it looked as if a cancellation would force the ordeal on him some other day. The ceremony ended. Half the crowd left. The president, too busy agonizing over his tapes to come to Atlanta, called only after Aaron had trotted out to right field. The call was accidentally disconnected before the hero made it back to the dugout. 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 4746-57  | Added on Tuesday, October 14, 2014, 02:12 PM

THREE DAYS LATER, ON APRIL 11, the House Judiciary Committee voted 33 to 3 to subpoena forty-two more taped conversations and gave the president two weeks to produce them. The next week Watergate special prosecutor Leon Jaworski requested a court order for sixty-four others—and then, the day after that, the Judiciary Committee asked for another 142. The president’s lawyer James St. Clair requested one last extension to consider their response. By a vote of 34 to 4 the committee acceded to what Rodino called this “one last request”—that single word last veritably echoing across the marble walls. Lawyer and president repaired to Camp David, and reached a historic decision. And night owls in Washington at 2:45 A.M. on April 29—about the hour when on a certain night in 1972 four Cubans were being arrested for burglary—could have spied several presidential employees rushing forth from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue with typed manuscripts to the gloomy brick buildings where the 7,400 employees of the U.S. Government Printing Office impressed each day’s Congressional Record into hot lead type on turn-of-the-century Linotype machines. They would soon be producing for the benefit of an eager nation a volume the size of a phone book with the portentous title Submission of Recorded Presidential Conversations to the Committee on the Judiciary of the House of Representatives by President Nixon, April 30, 1974. After that, the world would change. 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 4775-80  | Added on Tuesday, October 14, 2014, 02:14 PM

He wound up after thirty-five minutes—the length of almost all his television speeches, the ideal length for a speech, he had long ago convinced himself—with sentimental bromides: that in an age when “peace may become possible in the Middle East for the first time in a generation,” an age on the verge of “fulfilling the hope of mankind for a limitation on nuclear arms,” there was “vital work to be done . . . so that Americans can enjoy what they have not had since 1956: full prosperity without war and without inflation. . . .” (This was a retreat. He used to say the Americans already had full prosperity without war and without inflation.) 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 4852-53  | Added on Tuesday, October 14, 2014, 07:56 PM

CBS’s Eric Sevareid called the transcripts “a moral indictment without known precedent.” Joseph Alsop recorded his “sheer flesh-crawling revulsion.” 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 4924-27  | Added on Tuesday, October 14, 2014, 08:04 PM

The dean of the last-ditch supporters was a tiny retired Orthodox rabbi from Taunton, Massachusetts, named Baruch Korff. In the suspicious circles, he was fast becoming the tragedy’s comic relief, rumbling in his borscht belt–comic Ukrainian accent that a great man’s “blood has been sapped by vampires” and his body set upon by “vivisectionists . . . unworthy of polishing his shoes.” 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 5042-44  | Added on Wednesday, October 15, 2014, 10:46 PM

A Reagan biographer thinks these “days of government employment were, perhaps, the finest of his life, more exciting and fulfilling than any previous experience. The desperation and hope had helped him discover a capacity to fight for others as well as himself.” His youngest son may well have agreed. Like his father, he had always been a Democrat. 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 5072-77  | Added on Wednesday, October 15, 2014, 10:47 PM

Most famously, he did play-by-play of the games of the Chicago Cubs. In an age before jet travel, the relevant technologies were a telegraph and a typewriter: a witness present at the game would relay the on-field goings-on to Des Moines in Morse code, and a clerk in the studio would type out the action on slips of paper and pass them through a slit in the soundproof wall to Ronald Reagan, who’d fill in the rest with his imagination while working a foot pedal to amplify and attenuate canned crowd applause. He got so good at it that he toured around delivering the show in person, including at the chapel at Eureka College and the Iowa State Fair. 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 5094-5105  | Added on Wednesday, October 15, 2014, 10:47 PM

And then, at jackrabbit speed, mounting in rhythm and intensity, his audience pulled in deeper and deeper— “. . . thereitgoesahardhitgroundballsecondbasemangoveroveraftertheballmakesaonehandstabgrabstheballalmostfallingdownthrowsit just in time for the out!!” Then the country heard for the first of many times the tale about the time he had Dizzy Dean pitching against Billy Jurges (though in other tellings the batter was Augie Galan), and the telegraph machine malfunctioned: “I looked at Curly and Curly looked at me and I just couldn’t say that to the audience, ‘We’ve lost our service, we’re going to have a brief interlude of transcribed music.’ ” He laughed: “So I said, ‘Diz Dean’—I slowed him down a lot, had him use the rosin bag, had him shake off signs, lengthy windup—‘finally lets go with the other pitch.’ And he fouled that one off to the right. Then he fouled one back to the stands! Then he fouled one off back of third base and I described two kids trying to get the ball. Then he fouled one off that just missed a home run by a foot—until finally, in the nick of time, Curly sat up, started typing, and I started another ball on the way to the plate, grabbed the wire, and said—‘Jurges popped out on the first ball pitched.’ ” As the laughter billowed he thanked his audience and stepped down. That old trouper’s rule: always leave ’em laughing when you say goodbye. 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 5120-23  | Added on Wednesday, October 15, 2014, 10:49 PM

No one seemed impressed with Ronald Reagan. At NBC News the reporter had signed off from Des Moines with the jape, “Sportscasting is clearly good training for politics. You learn the fine art of speaking with conviction—even when you don’t know what you’re talking about.” Anchor Brokaw, unable to help himself, grinned from ear to ear. 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 5137-44  | Added on Wednesday, October 15, 2014, 10:50 PM

Impeachment hearings had begun behind closed doors in the Rayburn Office Building. Twenty-one Democrats and seventeen Republicans sat earnestly on a two-tiered mahogany dais beneath stately portraits of illustrious predecessors from a Judiciary Committee that had only recently been a very different sort of body: a redoubt of backbench conservatives, a sleepy graveyard for progressive legislation. By the late 1960s, though, it suddenly found itself the white-hot center of all the most interesting issues, from open housing to criminal jurisprudence to privacy rights. Fresh-faced young liberals soon clamored to join; now more than half the membership was under fifty. Eleven were freshmen, and blacks and women were represented far out of proportion with their number in the rest of the House. “These aren’t Southern gentlemen like Sam Ervin,” a Republican member warned his caucus. “These guys are out for blood.” Chairman Rodino and his deputy John Doar determinedly refused to give it to them. 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 5156-62  | Added on Thursday, October 16, 2014, 01:55 AM

On May 20 Judge Sirica upheld an appeal by the impeachment inquiry for sixty-four more taped conversations. The president refused, filing an appeal refusing to comply with this or any “such further subpoenas as may hereafter be issued”—a position so uncompromising it shook loose some die-hard supporters who had taken at face value what had been his former public line that he could be forthcoming only in the event of an impeachment inquiry. The committee voted 28–10, with eight of seventeen Republicans voting with the majority, to dispatch a public letter calling his refusal a “grave matter” that “might constitute a ground for impeachment.” Independent Prosecutor Jaworski asked the Supreme Court to hear the case immediately. On May 31, the Supreme Court agreed. The committee doubled down, subpoenaing forty-five more conversations. 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 5171-78  | Added on Thursday, October 16, 2014, 01:57 AM

Landing in Damascus after Air Force One was escorted by four Soviet-built MiGs, Nixon announced reestablished diplomatic relations with Syria. In Jordan he and King Hussein pledged “continued close friendship and cooperation.” Israel, his next stop, had reason to take offense at all of that; King Faisal, after all, had said that peace would come in the Middle East only after Jerusalem was “liberated” from the Jews—but Nixon did pretty damned well there, too. After speeding at 75 mph from Ben Gurion Airport to Jerusalem in a forty-car procession that included thirty military vehicles, he promised enriched uranium and nuclear reactors to the Jewish state just as he had done for Egypt, proclaiming, “This is the cradle of civilization. We must make sure it is not its grave.” Crowds went wild again—with help from the sixty thousand dollars the Israeli government spent on American flags. 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 5299-5305  | Added on Saturday, October 18, 2014, 04:55 PM

The timing was remarkable. Only minutes later, Chairman Peter Rodino sat poised with his gavel in the air waiting for the signal from the TV cameraman to smack it down to open the Judiciary Committee’s public impeachment hearings. Nine impeachment counts were up for debate. The allegations ranged from Nixon’s role in accepting the ITT and dairy industry’s bribes to his refusal of Congress’s subpoenas: his secret, falsified bombing of Cambodia, his obstruction of justice in bribing defendants, his misuse of the CIA, his lying to investigators, his making up the story of John Dean’s investigation, his misuse of federal funds to gussy up his private residences, and, finally, his violation of the oath to faithfully execute the laws by deploying the IRS, FBI, and Secret Service in “disregard of the constitutional rights of citizens.” 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 5419-21  | Added on Saturday, October 18, 2014, 08:55 PM

Inflation was up above 12 percent. The currency markets were on the verge of panic. Oil, $2.70 a barrel in September, now went for eleven bucks. The world seemed nigh unto apocalypse. (“Live today,” a Pan American Airways commercial went. “Tomorrow will cost more.”) 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 5421-29  | Added on Saturday, October 18, 2014, 08:56 PM

Two weeks before the impeachment hearings, the perky hostess of the chat show Suncoast Digest, who incorporated homemade puppets into the program, was angry that the station owner had told the staff to concentrate on “blood and guts,” and had cut away from her show to cover a shoot-out at a local restaurant. She began her broadcast with an uncharacteristic hard-news segment, with film from the restaurant shooting—which jammed in the projector, at which point she announced, “In keeping with Channel 40’s policy of bringing the latest in blood and guts, and in living color, you are going to see another first—attempted suicide.” She then shot herself in the head and died, leaving behind the script she had been reading from, which included a postscript: a third-person account of the breaking news story, to be read by whoever took over the news desk next. The Sarasota Herald Tribune ran a photo: “THIS Is the 38-Caliber Pistol Christine Chubbuck . . . used in her on-the-air suicide.” The show Gentle Ben, about a little boy and the tame bear who was his pet, replaced Suncoast Digest. 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 5456-62  | Added on Saturday, October 18, 2014, 09:00 PM

The White House postponed the briefing. And then did so again. Ron Ziegler finally appeared at lunchtime. He had tears in his eyes. He announced the president would go on TV that night, and in time for the evening newscasts, the nation learned why. Good evening. President Nixon stunned the country today by admitting that he had held back evidence from the House Judiciary Committee, keeping it secret from his lawyers, and not disclosing it in public statements. The news caused a storm in Washington, and some of Mr. Nixon’s most loyal supporters are calling for his resignation. They included Charlie Wiggins, choking back tears, who said “the magnificent public career of Richard Nixon must be terminated involuntarily.” 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 5462-65  | Added on Saturday, October 18, 2014, 09:00 PM

The new transcript bludgeoned Wiggins’s soul. It recorded the president strategizing with Haldeman, on June 23, 1972, about how to use the CIA to get the FBI not to investigate the laundering of money through Mexico. “That’s the way we are going to play it,” the president exulted—exactly the smoking gun Wiggins had expended all his political capital and brilliant advocacy claiming didn’t exist. 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 5465-68  | Added on Saturday, October 18, 2014, 09:00 PM

George Will called it a “smoking howitzer.” Republican National Committee chairman George H. W. Bush posted an open letter: “Dear Mr. President, It is my considered judgement that you should now resign.” Charles Sandman said he had to resign. The studiously apolitical Johnny Carson announced, “Tonight’s monologue is dedicated to Richard Nixon. I’ve got a monologue that just won’t quit.” He got a standing ovation unlike any he had ever experienced. Surely, Nixon would resign now. 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 5469-74  | Added on Saturday, October 18, 2014, 09:01 PM

A REPORTER CALLED RONALD REAGAN “deeply disturbed” by the new transcript. In a prepared statement, the governor passively voiced a most unusual conclusion: that “for the first time, it has been revealed that neither the Congress nor the American people have been told the entire truth about Watergate”— for the first time. He fell short of asking the president to resign. Instead, he said it was “absolutely imperative that he go before the Congress immediately and make a full disclosure of all information he has on this matter, answering any and all questions the members may have. The Constitutional process should then go forward in order to bring about the speedy resolution of this issue.” 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 5495-98  | Added on Saturday, October 18, 2014, 09:03 PM

Representative Earl Landgrebe, Republican of Indiana, showed up on the Today show the next morning and said, “I’m sticking with my president even if he and I have to be carried out of this building and shot.” The NBC interviewer, incredulous, asked him about the new facts in evidence. He answered, earnestly, “Don’t confuse me with the facts.” 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 5498-5503  | Added on Saturday, October 18, 2014, 09:03 PM

And on Thursday, August 8, Richard Nixon went on TV at nine for his thirty-seventh address to the nation as president, 852 days since the third-rate burglary at the Watergate. The public areas outside the White House were more crowded than on November 22, 1963—people honking for impeachment, shouting “Jail to the Chief,” comparing rumors about how the military coup would go down. Then the airwaves crackled, the president spoke—and made a merely political argument, free of contrition, that although resignation was “abhorrent to every instinct in my body,” it had become “evident to me that I no longer have a strong enough base in Congress to justify continuing the effort.” 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 5630-32  | Added on Saturday, October 18, 2014, 09:14 PM

Another key tenet embodied in The Parallax View extended far beyond the conspiracists: that America, before Nixon, before Johnson, had had a truth-telling president—a president who had been innocent. 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 5708-11  | Added on Saturday, October 18, 2014, 09:22 PM

The new president promptly declared inflation “Public Enemy Number One.” The markets didn’t care. The Dow Jones Industrial Average, half of what it was in 1972, fell 12 percent more in its next eleven trading sessions—though at Ford’s first news conference only five questions were on the economy and only three questions were on foreign policy. The others followed up on the insistent opening bark of the UPI’s Helen Thomas: 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 5803-6  | Added on Sunday, October 19, 2014, 05:51 PM

And finally there were the elections in which the two parties chose their gubernatorial candidate to succeed Reagan in the State House in 1975. The Democrats went with “just the kind of limousine liberal right-wing populists love to put down.” He was Edmund G. “Jerry” Brown Jr., the Yale-educated son of the man Reagan beat in 1966, “identified with liberal causes from peace in Vietnam to racial harmony.” 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 5808-13  | Added on Sunday, October 19, 2014, 05:51 PM

The piece was called “The End of Backlash Politics”—which Kraft defined as “reaction against Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society.” And it was well and truly on the run—everywhere: “Recent developments in Detroit, Philadelphia, Minneapolis, and New York, as well as Los Angeles, suggest the decline of backlash mayors. At their conference in Seattle early last week, the governors were lining up to be seen in opposition to Mr. Reagan and the other leading right-wing populist, George Wallace.” That heralded “the possibility of closing the parentheses on the era of backlash politics which has been so strong in the country since Ronald Reagan rode out of the TV movies back in 1966.” 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 5878-87  | Added on Sunday, October 19, 2014, 05:57 PM

White went on to speak resentfully of “suburban liberals . . . who view busing as the solution to racial balance—as long as it stays inside the city.” That referenced a landmark 5–4 Supreme Court decision a month and a half earlier, Milliken v. Bradley, which ruled that desegregation plans could not cross municipal lines. Justice Potter Stewart had reasoned that the emerging pattern of white suburbs and black inner cities was “caused by unknown and perhaps unknowable factors.” Actually nothing could be more easily known: during the postwar years, federal subsidies flew in a torrent toward suburbs, in the form of interstate highways, mortgage deductions, and subsidies to banks that openly defied the letter and spirit of federal law by engaging in discriminatory lending patterns. That was why the suburbs in the Boston metropolitan area were 99 percent white. Now, however, the burden of rectifying the region’s segregation was solely Boston’s cross to bear. In the Globe, Harvard psychologist Robert Coles shocked liberals by calling Judge Garrity’s decision “a scandal” for imposing integration “on working class people exclusively.” But Milliken meant there was nothing anyone could do about that. 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 5890-98  | Added on Sunday, October 19, 2014, 05:58 PM

CAME THE FIRST DAY OF school. In Southie, helicopters swoffed overhead. Police squads swarmed, breaking up a mob, at which another mob took revenge, ripping out public phones, uprooting benches, terrorizing blacks at a nearby commuter train station. At Jamaica Plain High School, shots were fired through the door. Street toughs stoned buses. Thugs enforced a white school boycott with fists and chains. That went on for weeks. So did the protest motorcades, blaring down the boulevards, with Irish matrons raised to be nothing but decorous in their public demeanor blasting their horns so aggressively that casings were separated from steering wheels. Marchers carried swastikas and KKK slogans, and—when they passed by unfortunate black bystanders—cries like “Bus the niggers back to Africa!” The third week ended with a menacing mob of three hundred in front of Garrity’s house in bucolic Wellesley; for hours, a line of white-helmeted riot police was the only thing keeping them from storming his parlor. That was October 4, “National Boycott Day”—when a mob rushed from a bar to keep cops from arresting a stone thrower; the next night, a posse of tactical police crashed in and beat patrons at 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 5898  | Added on Sunday, October 19, 2014, 05:58 PM

random. 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 5902-5  | Added on Sunday, October 19, 2014, 05:59 PM

The people throwing rocks at school buses intersected with the vigilantes showing up at construction yards to harass the black activists seeking to close them down for not honoring the city’s affirmative action settlement—“two groups of people,” columnist Jimmy Breslin lamented, “who are poor and doomed and who have been thrown in the ring with each other.” 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 5950-55  | Added on Sunday, October 19, 2014, 06:04 PM

Regardless, Moore’s campaign for the school board reflected the influence of the John Birch Society’s anti–sex education front group the Movement to Restore Decency (MOTOREDE). It was also fueled by the first campaign billboards a county school board race had ever seen, featuring the strikingly compelling slogan “Put a mother on the school board.” Moore could soon claim her first political scalp: the superintendent who had offended her. This figure of the humble housewife, drafted against her will into public life by the awful, inexorable tides of liberal extremism, a reluctant lone prophet in the service of simple commonsense decency, would become a standard right-wing trope in the years to come in battles across the country. 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 5967-69  | Added on Sunday, October 19, 2014, 06:05 PM

By 1974, they won a requirement in their home state that any mention of evolution in biology books “should identify it as only one of several explanations of the origins of humankind,” and “shall be edited, if necessary, to clarify that the treatment is theoretical rather than factually verifiable.” 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 6012-16  | Added on Sunday, October 19, 2014, 06:08 PM

The teachers’ adversaries, locally, were known as Hillers. One spokesman for the teachers was an Episcopalian rector, the Reverend James Lewis. He thought at one point that he might be killed. He wrote a newspaper article that was syndicated nationally: “The anti-textbook people of Kanawha County are confused and angry about everything from marijuana to Watergate. Feeling helpless and left out, they are looking for a scapegoat. They are eager to exorcise all that is evil and foul, cleanse or burn all that is strange and foreign. In this religious war, spiced with overtones of race and class, the books are an accessible target.” 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 6119-24  | Added on Sunday, October 19, 2014, 06:17 PM

It was just as Ronald Reagan had said in the greatest speech of his career, when he introduced himself to the nation as a political figure on October 27, 1964, speaking for the doomed presidential candidacy of Barry Goldwater, in a line that he repeated nearly verbatim in his gubernatorial inaugural speech in 1967: “This is the issue,” he said—“Whether we believe in our capacity for self-government or whether we . . . confess that a little intellectual elite in a far-distant capitol can plan our lives for us better than we can plan them ourselves. . . . They say the world has become too complex for simple answers. They are wrong. There are no easy answers, but there are simple answers. We must have the courage to do what we know is morally right.” 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 6138-52  | Added on Sunday, October 19, 2014, 06:19 PM

Patriotism—the old-fashioned kind—felt somehow forbidden. A liberal English teacher named Daniel Fader published a memoir about raising an adolescent in the 1970s, Paul and I Discover America. His son told him how he planned to sew a flag on the seat of his pants. “Why would you want to do that, to sew the flag on the seat of your pants?” “I don’t know. Because that’s where it belongs.” “Do what you like. If that’s what you have to do, then do it. But if someone knocks you down because he doesn’t like it, I won’t be there to pick you up. And maybe I’ll think you got what was coming to you.” The violence of his own sentiment shocked the author, and, gingerly, almost apologetically, he felt his way through where it had come from. “For the first time in our life together I was moved to speak to my son of my country, my flag, the immense weight of goodwill and affection that I bore it. I was moved to tell him of his grandfather who blessed the day my immigrant grandfather had removed his family from medieval Russia to twentieth-century America; of my uncle, his great-uncle . . . who cherished for a quarter of a century the knowledge that he had fought for his country; of a small, bandy-legged Cockney American who knew and loved his adopted country’s flag so well that his devotion to it had cost him the clarity of his speech, the strength of his step, and too soon the full length of his life. I told him all this, as best I could . . . the reason why the crumpled flag in his hand and his intention to abuse it had aroused me to such violent denunciation.” You used to not have to explain this sort of thing. And to those of less liberal temperament than that memoirist, the new reality felt like it came out of nowhere—and they cast about for ways to make it all stop. 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 6152-56  | Added on Sunday, October 19, 2014, 06:20 PM

Perhaps they could do it by getting rid of those textbooks their children were bringing home. Like that history text Search for Freedom, the one starring Marilyn Monroe. Clad in fashionable earth tones, the book began in the key of suspicion: “It is said that on October 12, 1492, Christopher Columbus ‘discovered’ America.” It ended, 418 pages later, with faint praise for Americans’ traditional faith in the future, which, the authors concluded, “helps explain why Mexican-Americans who work in the fields of California or blacks and Puerto Ricans on the streets of Harlem still have reason to hope.” 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 6312-23  | Added on Sunday, October 19, 2014, 07:04 PM

The lame-duck right-wing governor could be ignored—but not, traditionally, someone like Mills. Here was the way Washington worked: long-serving congressmen and senators, almost always from the South, where elections were not quite democratic and incumbents had about as much chance of losing as they did of sprouting wings (Mills had been a congressman since 1939), leveraged their seniority into chairmanships of the committees that powered Congress like an engine room on a ship. And, like those engine rooms, the work they did was hidden from view, in backroom “markup” sessions in which power brokers from both parties drafted world-changing legislation via bonds of trust sealed with toasts of bourbon and branch water. When done right, in the old-fashioned way, the bills arrived on the floor “clean”—not amendable—and were passed by unrecorded vote, by obedient junior members directed by equally powerful “whips.” Whips who left scars on those who dared disobey. Wilbur Mills was at the apex of that system; his committee was invariably described in newspapers as the “powerful Ways and Means Committee,” and he himself as “the most powerful man in Washington.” But maybe now Mills could be defied. He was facing his first serious primary challenger, who was hitting him hard on the main issue that mattered this campaign season, that he’d accepted dirty money during his short-lived 1972 presidential run—“Wilbur’s Watergate,” the New Republic called it. 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 6375-77  | Added on Sunday, October 19, 2014, 07:36 PM

THE DAY AFTER FORD SPOKE in Kansas City, he spoke at a judiciary subcommittee witness table, live on TV. The first president to testify before Congress since George Washington, coming so soon after Richard Nixon had so adamantly refused to do so, it was meant at once to display his openness, to empty out suspicions from the pardon—to end the national nightmare, again. Instead, he was set upon by a fusillade of paranoia. 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 6411-17  | Added on Sunday, October 19, 2014, 07:40 PM

Their economic ideologies were not traditionally liberal, either. “The best way out” of the energy crisis, Hart said, was not the nationalization of the energy companies, which Democrats like Scoop Jackson were calling for. It “is to work together. There will be a lot more cooperative ventures between the environmentalists and the energy developers.” Snaking across Colorado’s switchback mountain roads for the past eighteen months, he preached that America had to accept austerity—pledging, like Tom Bradley getting elected mayor in Los Angeles by promising no more freeways, not to develop Colorado’s coal shale resources. “The party’s over, the day of having it all is gone. . . . We’re entering a period of history when conspicuous consumption and waste just must end.” 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 6440-44  | Added on Sunday, October 19, 2014, 07:43 PM

Jerry Brown would quote small-government nostrums he read in the magazines Commentary and Public Interest—house organs of the ascendant neoconservative movement. Though he came to the same conclusions quoting a bible of the environmental movement: E. F. Schumacher’s Small Is Beautiful: A Study of Economics as If People Mattered (or, as the cover actually read, small is beautiful: a study of economics as if people mattered). 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 6451-52  | Added on Sunday, October 19, 2014, 07:44 PM

His stock refrain was a Reaganite one: “If you want to get the government off your backs, get your hands out of the government’s pockets.” 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 6478-82  | Added on Sunday, October 19, 2014, 07:48 PM

The “people” were not, by this reckoning, blue-collar construction workers perfectly happy to see their twenty-term congressman scratch colleagues’ backs in behalf of a project like the Supersonic Transport, the better to create union jobs. Common Cause was proud to have helped kill the SST. Instead, its several hundred thousand mailing-list members were well-educated, often suburban professionals whose most important political issues were reform of congressional processes, public financing of elections, and strict disclosure laws for both corporate and labor donations. 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 6491-93  | Added on Sunday, October 19, 2014, 07:49 PM

The Democratic National Committee kicked in with a surprisingly spirited coordinated effort, with the chairman of its campaign committee, the term-limited Georgia governor Jimmy Carter, surprising all and sundry with the Nixon-like intensity of his travel schedule in what in previous years had been a primarily ceremonial job. 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 6498-6505  | Added on Sunday, October 19, 2014, 07:50 PM

THE WATERGATE BABIES, OVERWHELMINGLY, WON. Enough Democrats were elected to the House of Representatives to outnumber Republicans in the 94th Congress by a ratio of more than two to one; thirty-one members were holding elective office for the first time. Three new Democratic senators increased the Democrats’ margin in the upper chamber, 61 to 39. In a new survey on party identification by Republican pollster Robert Teeter, only 18 percent were willing to associate themselves with the GOP. States traditionally dominated by Republicans were now represented by Democrats: seven out of nine congressmen in Wisconsin, seventeen out of twenty-five in New England, five out of six in Iowa, nine out of eleven in Indiana. Gary Hart scored 23 percentage points more in Colorado than George McGovern had only twenty-four months earlier. Jerry Brown would be governor of California. He was thirty-seven years old. The man he replaced was sixty-four. (Ramsey Clark lost, after Jacob Javits exploited his trip to Hanoi.) 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 6519  | Added on Sunday, October 19, 2014, 07:52 PM


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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 6510-13  | Added on Sunday, October 19, 2014, 07:52 PM

A thirty-two-year-old congressman-elect from Michigan, James Blanchard, said, “I’m not entirely sure what my political philosophy is.” Said Ronald Reagan of the Democratic speeches that fall, “Listening to them I had the eerie feeling we were hearing reruns of Goldwater speeches. I even thought I heard a few of my own.” 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 6514-16  | Added on Sunday, October 19, 2014, 07:52 PM

“Don’t vote. It only encourages them,” the bumper stickers said. Many of the bumpers that sported it still featured the sticker that popped up after Nixon was pardoned by Ford: “IMPEACH SOMEONE.” 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 6611-14  | Added on Sunday, October 19, 2014, 08:03 PM

DSG was in the saddle, and with the votes of almost every one of the freshmen, Phil Burton became chair of the 94th Congress’s mighty Democratic caucus. Then, over the next few days, they got to work reinventing the House. First, they took away from Mills’s Ways and Means Committee the power to pick who served on committees. Then, since Ways and Means was still powerful enough, they expanded its membership from 25 to 37, diluting the clout of its incumbent membership by adding reform-minded youngsters. 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 6618-32  | Added on Sunday, October 19, 2014, 08:05 PM

One fresh feature of the 94th Congress was its six new women, bringing the total to eighteen, a record. One of them, thirty-five-year-old Pat Schroeder of Colorado, had seen her 1972 campaign as an antiwar housewife spied on by the FBI. At the meeting, she accused Hébert of having discriminated against her in the Armed Services Committee (he had once insisted she and the committee’s black member, Ron Dellums, literally share a seat in the hearing room) because she was a woman. He responded that he would have treated her better if she had acted like a woman. The caucus fired him by a vote of 152–133. Afterward, to reporters waiting outside the hearing room, he called his inquisitors “boys and girls.” He was not entirely wrong. One of them, freshman representative Tom Downey of New York, had attended his first peace march ten years earlier, at the age of fifteen. Appropriations chair George Mahon (seventy-five years old) and the half-deaf chairman of the Agriculture Committee, W. R. Poage (seventy-six), who voted against the majority Democratic Party position more than he voted for it, were unhorsed for what a Common Cause report called “serious abuses” of procedural fairness and “arbitrary” treatment of colleagues. (Poage was replaced by the chairman of the Democratic Study Group.) Wright Patman lost his chairmanship of Currency and Banking, not for being a reactionary—he had been fighting concentrated power since the Progressive Era, and was the first congressman to undertake an investigation of Watergate—but solely for his age. “You can’t have an 81-year-old chairman,” even one who “was a hero to 90 percent of us,” a young insurgent of the first Congress in history with an average age under fifty told the Associated Press. “Congress will never be the same,” another new member told the press. “It’s permanent. . . . I think the feeling is the sun is shining and now we really have a chance to do something.” 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 6643-51  | Added on Sunday, October 19, 2014, 08:07 PM

“The clear inference,” newspapers reported, “was that Congress expects Hays to give them a pay hike.” Hays then confirmed the inference by telling reporters that “our take-home pay is like that of a peasant.” (It was about four times America’s median household income.) “The new idealists betrayed a small streak of venality,” Howard Smith editorialized on ABC; the Washington Post said that “self-styled congressional reformers have tackled the establishment in order to establish themselves instead.” Ralph Nader, whose Congress Watch had built much of the intellectual case for the House’s decrepitude, cried sellout: “This is the type of political wheeling and dealing built on conflicts of interest that was widely rejected by voters in November. Surely the reform-minded members of the 94th Congress can do better than to perpetuate a man in office [in] response to the same old tradeoffs that have bred such cynicism about Congress in the public mind.” The Republican Party, it was true, seemed near to death. 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 6655-58  | Added on Sunday, October 19, 2014, 08:08 PM

But here was a lesson Democrats would have all too much occasion to contemplate in the years ahead: to claim the mantle of purity is always a risky business. It just gives voters an excuse to be disillusioned once your ordinary humanity is exposed. How long did the new Congress’s reputation for purity last? Two months, possibly. That was when a Maryland senator surveyed his constituents: “Do you have confidence in the ability of Congress to deal with today’s problems?” They answered “no” by a margin of two to one. 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 6705-10  | Added on Sunday, October 19, 2014, 08:14 PM

THUS ARRIVED AN UNLIKELY DEVELOPMENT: chasing spooks became a political opportunity. Frank Church, the liberal Democratic senator from Idaho, a longtime critic of the CIA (“I will do whatever I can, as one senator,” he had said years earlier, “to bring about a full-scale congressional investigation of the CIA”) and scourge of the Vietnam War (“a monstrous immorality”)—and a presidential hopeful—maneuvered himself into the chairmanship of the new Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities. And for one of the members of the new Rockefeller commission, CBS reported, “the assignment could help keep presidential hopes alive.” 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 6724-34  | Added on Sunday, October 19, 2014, 08:16 PM

On the heels of a Pentagon move to eliminate 11,600 civilian jobs at military bases, the auto industry announced 40,000 layoffs. Ford Motors cut production schedules at eleven of its twenty North American assembly plants and most of its forty-five manufacturing plants. Chrysler laid off almost 11,000 white-collar workers. American Motors idled 7,000 workers in one plant in Kenosha, Wisconsin, alone. In New Hampshire, a textile mill that had been in business since 1823 was scheduled to shutter. Maryland’s largest private employer, the four-mile-long Sparrows Point steel complex, began laying off thousands; 100,000 steel workers lost their jobs nationwide between the previous summer and the upcoming fall; in December 1974—Christmastime—185,000 blue-collar workers found themselves without work. Businesses and consumers preferred products made elsewhere: foreign car sales were up 20 percent, American cars down almost 13. The Economist said, “Capitalism is being tested everywhere. Many people believe it is dying.” It called the closing of 150 investment banks and securities dealers in the United States in recent weeks “some of the worst failures since the Great Depression.” The National Association of Home Builders called the slump in its industry “far and away the worst since the Depression.” Since the Depression: a new household phrase. 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 7068-70  | Added on Monday, October 20, 2014, 02:25 AM

“Fort Roach,” “Fort Wacky,” and the “Culver City Commandos” were the nicknames Hollywood wags coined for the faintly ridiculous outfit, whose base commander was a stunt pilot who described their job as “putting a square peg in a square hole.” 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 7077-78  | Added on Monday, October 20, 2014, 02:26 AM

devouring a book by a mystic named Manly P. Hall, The Secret Destiny of America, whose rhetoric about Providence’s great plan for the land between the oceans would recur often in Reagan’s speeches in decades to come; 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 7106-8  | Added on Monday, October 20, 2014, 02:29 AM

And then, one day, passing a radio, he overheard an announcement: “Ladies and gentlemen, the war in Europe is over.” His response, as he remembered it for a 1985 interview, was curious: “I felt a chill, as if a gust of cold wind had just swept past.” The rest of the nation was jubilant. But it was almost as if he felt afraid to face the rest of his life. 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 7269-71  | Added on Monday, October 20, 2014, 02:45 AM

“We were not out to kill the goose that laid the golden egg,” as he put it in settling a 1933 strike, “but we were out to get as many of them as we could.” 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 7446-47  | Added on Monday, October 20, 2014, 10:27 AM

“Hearings Regarding the Communist Infiltration of the Motion Picture Industry” opened in Washington on October 20, 1947, with testimony from the friendly witnesses. 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 7541-48  | Added on Monday, October 20, 2014, 10:36 AM

SOON A SLOW, SUBTLE IDEOLOGICAL shift began stirring in Ronald Reagan’s breast. By 1952, he was campaigning for Dwight Eisenhower—but also for a liberal senatorial candidate. By eight years later, however, he was about as far right as a public figure could be—writing a personal letter to the Republican presidential nominee: “Shouldn’t someone tag Mr. Kennedy’s ‘bold new imaginative program’ with its proper age? Under the tousled boyish hair cut it is still old Karl Marx—first launched a century ago. There is nothing new in the idea of a Gov’t being Big Brother to us all. Hitler called his ‘State Socialism’ and way before him it was ‘benevolent monarchy.’ ” Delighted at the spectacle of this Hollywood star calling a centrist Democrat a Commie, Nazi, and monarchist all at once, Richard Nixon issued a command to his staff: “Use him as a speaker wherever possible. He used to be liberal.” 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 7565-69  | Added on Monday, October 20, 2014, 10:39 AM

The new deals made Hollywood stars entrepreneurial, at a time when the Revenue Act of 1941 set the top income tax bracket at 90 percent for every dollar earned above $200,000. So stars started thinking like Republicans: They became tax-obsessed. Indeed, the story Reagan would tell about why he became interested in taxes revolved around that 90 percent top marginal tax rate: he claimed it kept him from adding a new picture to his schedule if it meant getting paid only a dime on the dollar. The story, however, doesn’t wash. Reagan was still a contract player, not a freelancer—and still a rather meager contract player at that. 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 7590-93  | Added on Monday, October 20, 2014, 10:42 AM

In any event, by then a business genius had figured a way out of the 90 percent tax bracket problem. When a studio really wanted a certain actor for a certain role, Lew Wasserman, Reagan’s own agent, invented profit-sharing deals that turned the actor into a “corporation,” whose stake in a picture could then be taxed at the capital gains rate, a mere 25 percent. But that was only for stars. Wasserman wasn’t able to get Reagan any decent pictures at all, on any terms. 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 7604-7  | Added on Monday, October 20, 2014, 01:26 PM

His costars were an act that specialized in the hardly cutting-edge arts of soft-shoe dancing and barbershop quartet singing. Rounding out this uninspiring evening of entertainment, the Citizen reported, was a “monologue such as he has delivered at countless benefits.” Reagan was just grateful for the opportunity—which came, he wrote to Lorraine Wagner on the Frontier’s Western-themed stationery, at “about the time when I thought I was going over ‘Niagara Falls’ in a tub.” 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 7610-15  | Added on Monday, October 20, 2014, 01:27 PM

This does not sound like a man realistically worried about the tax penalties of taking on extra work. His obsession with the unfairness of the IRS may be better explained by a secret that came out only after his death. A researcher discovered a tax lien against Reagan in the amount of $24,911 (some $200,000 in inflation-adjusted dollars), apparently related to income he had deferred during World War II, when he was pulling down only $280 a month. Who knows what frustrations, during this most frustrating period of his life, lay behind that? What endless phone calls with IRS bureaucrats, what tortured discussions with accountants, what fears that this man for whom appearances counted for everything might be found out? Who knows. If he ever talked about it, no one ever told. 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 7781-86  | Added on Monday, October 20, 2014, 07:24 PM

In Los Angeles, the school superintendent, Dr. Alexander Stoddard, introduced UNESCO study materials into the schools. Stoddard had been the scheduled speaker at a dinner marking the hundredth anniversary of the school system in Schenectady, New York, where the corporation General Electric was based. Then he fell to a heart attack. Reagan, who happened to be in town, was drafted to speak in his place—attributing Stoddard’s collapse to “the vicious attacks of the ultra-professional patriotic organizations that can eventually wreck our school system.” He was, however, about to round the final ideological bend—making much the same vicious attacks himself. The development came largely of that gift from Lew Wasserman and MCA. 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 7831-34  | Added on Monday, October 20, 2014, 08:37 PM

From the start, GE identified television, which first surpassed radio in ad revenue in 1952, as electrical living’s best salesman. GE was an innovative decentralized corporation, with each division and factory managed relatively independently of the others; the TV show was its first “all-company project”—and a pure product of its department of public relations. 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 7848-52  | Added on Monday, October 20, 2014, 08:39 PM

miraculously frictionless planes, free from conflict, let alone class conflict—that dreaded notion, beloved of labor unions, that workers and owners just might have interests in contradiction with one another and that their relationship was defined by a contest of wills. Selling that notion of industrial consensus became all the more crucial to GE brass following World War II, after the same 1946 strike wave that convulsed Hollywood shuttered nearly every GE plant in the country, just as the company hoped to flood all those GI starter homes with all the accoutrements of electrical living. 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 7861-64  | Added on Monday, October 20, 2014, 08:42 PM

He conceived his most important audience as GE’s 250,000 employees, their families, and the communities in which they lived. His goal was to teach them to identify their most intimate interests with the well-being of the company—and their company’s with the well-being of the free world itself. In other words, to turn millions of Americans into right-wing conservatives. 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 7864-68  | Added on Monday, October 20, 2014, 08:43 PM

Lemuel Boulware was said by labor experts to understand the mind of the American working class better than any other executive in America. He won that knowledge by means of innovative techniques: surveys; interviews with ministers and voluntary organizations in the communities containing GE’s plants; even what marketers would later call “focus groups”—gathering GE toilers before members of his staff of three thousand “job marketers” to test which messages about company benevolence and union malevolence resonated and which ones failed. 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 7944-46  | Added on Monday, October 20, 2014, 08:54 PM

Once more: freedom was always on the verge of extinction; in 1948, the predators were the tax evaders; the prey was the common man. By 1960 the lion and the lamb had switched places: now it was the likes of Standard Oil and Hollywood who were the put-upon martyrs—moral role models, in fact. 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 7976-79  | Added on Monday, October 20, 2014, 09:12 PM

GENERAL ELECTRIC THEATER’S EPISODES ENCODED an ideology in themselves: its writers devised the most extraordinary conundrums—comic ones, dramatic ones, whichever—each and every time resolving them within the half hour, in perfect expression of that 1950s faith that nothing, anything, need ever remain in friction in the nation God had ordained to benevolently bestride the world. 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 8012-13  | Added on Monday, October 20, 2014, 09:15 PM

“Everything electric but the chair,” went Reagan’s own joke. Or the one about the guy who watched too much GE Theater. “I didn’t really need a nuclear submarine,” he said. “But I’ve got one now.” 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 8091-99  | Added on Monday, October 20, 2014, 09:37 PM

“UNDERMININE OUR PRIVATE ENTERPRISE SYSTEM.” Here was an irony: the high tide of Boulwarism coincided, in the early 1950s and early ’60s, with a series of federal indictments of General Electric executives for a conspiracy to fix prices. They had schemed with other electrical manufacturing firms to remove from the exigencies of the marketplace the prices of everything from two-dollar insulators to multimillion-dollar hydroelectric turbines. As a historian of GE explained, the men who ran GE “took a dim view of competition.” In 1960, GE’s first strike since 1946 loomed. That same year Reagan earned a promotion. After years of enjoying an informal role in script selection and cast recruitment, he was officially named a producer. Simultaneously, his profile as a political troubador increased. “Boyish of face and gleaming of tooth, Ronald Reagan earned a reputation, among cinemagoers as a pleasant young man in white ducks, whose deepest thought was reserved for the next dance,” Time magazine explained four months into John F. Kennedy’s term, its first mention of Reagan outside the context of acting. 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 8108-14  | Added on Monday, October 20, 2014, 09:38 PM

But the company itself grew more cautious about taking on the government as its legal troubles deepened. And it was GE’s star propagandist who ended up in the crosshairs. Sometimes Reagan pointed to the Tennessee Valley Authority as the most glaring example available to those seeking to rescue a nation giving up its freedom on the installment plan, just as he’d learned from one of Lem Boulware’s favorite books, Economics in One Lesson. But the TVA bought its turbines for its massive dams from GE. In his first memoir Reagan describes an awkward conversation with GE’s CEO Ralph Cordiner, filled with long pauses, that concluded with Reagan asking, “Mr. Cordiner, what would you say if I said I could make my speech just as effectively without mentioning TVA?” He replied, “Well, it would make my job easier.” Reagan dropped TVA from the speech. 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 8120-23  | Added on Monday, October 20, 2014, 09:40 PM

In March 1962 Reagan produced a two-part adaptation of a memoir, I Was a Spy: The Story of a Brave Housewife, which told the story a suburban mother, Marion Miller, who in 1950 stumbled into an apparently innocuous meeting of a “Committee for the Protection of the Foreign Born” and discovered it was but a front for what Joseph McCarthy had called that year a “conspiracy on a scale so immense as to dwarf any previous such venture in the history of man.” 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 8140-45  | Added on Monday, October 20, 2014, 09:42 PM

Another major difference, however, between Democrats then and Democrats beginning with Joe McCarthy’s fall in the middle of the 1950s, when Reagan was joining up with GE, was that they had largely abandoned the good-versus-evil narrative of an invisible Bolshevik bacillus insinuating itself into a great but complacent nation’s bloodstream. Respectable Democrats by Kennedy’s day (those, at least, outside the reactionary Deep South) considered that an embarrassing relic of a too-paranoid time. Ronald Reagan did not. And it is hard to see how Reagan could feel at home in a party that had abandoned a core tenet in his moral vision of the world and his own heroic place in it. 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 8205-11  | Added on Monday, October 20, 2014, 09:48 PM

HOWEVER IT HAPPENED, HE NOW had lost a $125,000 salary, and bookings scheduled years into the future. Another professional humiliation. He picked up the occasional commercial, odd jobs like hosting the Rose Bowl Parade, episodes on TV series like Wagon Train. Then once more politics saved him. That fall, he chaired Democrats for Nixon on behalf of Nixon’s run for California governor. His anger at his martyrdom fueled him, and vaulted him into conservative movement superstardom—until he was as busy as before. In Long Island, in 1963, Young Americans for Freedom honored him in a rally that drew thirteen thousand people. That summer he began working on his first book. In 1964 he took on working toward Barry Goldwater’s presidential nomination practically as a full-time job. 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 8220-25  | Added on Monday, October 20, 2014, 09:50 PM

And then, on October 27, 1964, with dazzling quickness, the rest of his life began. Barry Goldwater’s rich California backers prevailed upon the Goldwater campaign to put on TV the speech Reagan had been giving for years, repurposed for the Republican nominee, to raise money for the flagging presidential campaign. “You and I,” he said, “have a rendezvous with destiny. We will preserve for our children, this the last best hope on earth, or we will sentence them to take the first step into a thousand years of darkness.” David Broder called it “the most successful national political debut since William Jennings Bryan electrified the 1896 Democratic Convention with the ‘Cross of Gold’ speech.” 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 8270-75  | Added on Monday, October 20, 2014, 09:55 PM

For instance, he had affected horror at a demand from the state legislature in 1971 to make tax collection more efficient by withholding payments automatically from paychecks: “Taxes should hurt,” he said, insisting, “My feet are in concrete.” He proved able to loosen his feet from that concrete, giving in—then, when the 1972 tax bill he signed brought an unexpected revenue windfall, the $851 million state budgetary surplus it produced became his marquee boast, even though it came largely from reforms in the collection of revenue that he had so adamantly opposed. And the increased money flowing into state coffers also became Exhibit A in proving government was a devouring Gila monster. Indeed, it was the foundational argument for his Proposition 1 tax limitation initiative. 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 8385-87  | Added on Thursday, October 23, 2014, 09:10 AM

Horrors, of course, drench the news in any decade. By the middle of the 1970s, however, the perception of the density of horrors was so much worse. For instance, the BBC’s Alistair Cooke gave a speech as a guest of the House of Representatives in which he declared that “crime and violence in the cities has become greater than at any time since the fifteenth century.” 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 8455-62  | Added on Thursday, October 23, 2014, 09:16 AM

IT ALL HAPPENED SO SHOCKINGLY fast. At the beginning of the year the North Vietnamese Communists captured the South Vietnamese province of Phuoc Long on the Cambodian border, seventy-five miles from Saigon. The media called it an isolated fight. But then, early in March, the Communists captured the Central Highlands city of Ban Me Thuot, and South Vietnam’s President Thieu began a slow, soiling surrender. First he gave up the northern provinces. Then the entire Central Highlands, cutting his country in two. Instead of the orderly retreat of a disciplined army, “there’s a complete lack of communication, a breakdown in the chain of command,” an American intelligence officer explained, describing the chaotic rout of this army to which Americans had pledged their lives, their fortune, and their sacred honor. “Colonels aren’t following orders. No one cares. It’s become every man for himself.” 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 8462-67  | Added on Thursday, October 23, 2014, 09:16 AM

The North Vietnamese politburo had planned the full-on offensive to win the war to take two years. Instead, it was taking a few months. One and a half million refugees poured south to coastal cities they were told were impregnable to the enemy—“from one end of a sinking ship to another,” wrote the New Yorker’s Jonathan Schell—endless columns of women and children, old men in conical hats, clogging dusty roads to the sea. Along these roads civilians were massacred—not by their ostensible enemy, but by South Vietnamese soldiers, driven by directionless rage. A country, Schell wrote, “tearing itself apart in a frenzy of self-destruction.” 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 8511-14  | Added on Thursday, October 23, 2014, 09:20 AM

A leader of West Germany’s Christian Democrats worried, “If Berlin were attacked tomorrow I am not absolutely certain that the United States would intervene.” According to a new poll, only 34 percent of Americans would favor helping West Germany in the event of an invasion, and only 27 percent would want to help Israel. 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 8595-99  | Added on Thursday, October 23, 2014, 09:29 AM

Congress voted only the $200 million for humanitarian aid. The House vote against military aid included fifty Republicans. Ford promptly told Congress that it was responsible for the “loss of Vietnam”—not, say, a South Vietnamese army whose officers abandoned their troops to slaughter infant civilians. He claimed that “just a relatively small American commitment” could have met “any military challenges.” (He lied. The Pentagon’s estimate of what it called an “austere program” to save Saigon had been $1.4 billion at a minimum.) 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 8601-6  | Added on Thursday, October 23, 2014, 09:30 AM

To the west, the capital of Cambodia fell to a fearsome Communist agglomeration known as the Khmer Rouge. This was not bad news, the Los Angeles Times editorialized, “for the suffering Cambodians themselves.” The New York Times’ correspondent there, Sydney H. Schanberg, published a reflection amid the collapse noting the “million Cambodians killed or wounded (one seventh of the population), hundreds of thousands of refugees living in shanties, a devastated countryside, children dying of starvation and carpenters turning out a steady stream of coffins made from ammunition crates.” 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 8607-11  | Added on Thursday, October 23, 2014, 09:30 AM

it was already evident that the Khmer Rouge were beginning a genocide of millions of their countrymen in a lunatic bid to radically engineer an agrarian society without banks, religion, or indeed any modern technology whatsoever, beginning with the purging of intellectuals, businessmen, Buddhists, and foreigners—the establishment of a Communist “Year Zero.” “Everyone had felt that when the Communists came and the war finally ended, at least the suffering would largely be over. All of us were wrong.” 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 8616-18  | Added on Thursday, October 23, 2014, 09:31 AM

The day after that, President Ford told graduates assembled in the Tulane University field house, “Today America can regain the sense of pride that existed before. But it cannot be achieved by refighting a war that is finished as far as America is concerned.” 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 8642-47  | Added on Thursday, October 23, 2014, 09:35 AM

That was the coup de grâce. The next morning, at six thirty, Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger announced, “The President ordered the final withdrawal of the Americans from Vietnam at approximately 11:00 last night on the advice of the ambassador and subsequent to the closing of Tan Son Nhut making it necessary to go to a helicopter air lift.” The evacuation was dubbed “Operation Frequent Wind”—like a reference to flatulence, like something out of M*A*S*H. It was desperate, sordid, unplanned. The American consul general, after all, had been going around town announcing, “Saigon is as sound as the American dollar.” (But how sound was that? Inflation was 9.2 percent.) The ambassador’s wife resolutely refused to pack. 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 8676-83  | Added on Thursday, October 23, 2014, 09:38 AM

In the New York Times, across the entire front page, was the headline: MINH SURRENDERS, VIETCONG IN SAIGON; 1,000 AMERICANS AND 5,500 VIETNAMESE EVACUATED BY COPTERS TO U.S. CARRIERS. Below that, an indelible image: a line of bodies snaking up a ladder to a precipitous shack atop the CIA station chief’s residence, the embassy grounds having been commandeered by what Henry Kissinger had once confidently dismissed as a “fourth-rate military power,” now far too dangerous for helicopters to lift off from. “Ford Unity Plea,” another front-page headline read. But that fantasy could not be sustained even within the confines of a single network newscast. This hell, these scenes out of Hieronymus Bosch, this place people were risking death in order to leave, for which we had sacrificed fifty-six thousand soldiers and half a trillion dollars in national treasure, dividing our nation in half: this is what our investment produced? 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 8694-99  | Added on Thursday, October 23, 2014, 09:40 AM

In Detroit, a black autoworker told the New York Times, “People are losing their cars, houses, jobs. Let them stay there until we do something for people here.” In Valparaiso, Indiana, a salesman asked, “How do you know we’re not getting the bad guys? You can’t say for sure. Nobody can, and Lord knows we’ve got enough Communist infiltration now.” President Ford implored, “We can afford to be generous to refugees” as “a matter of principle.” Mayor Daley of Chicago responded, “Charity begins at home.” The Seattle City Council voted seven to one against a pro-settlement resolution. California governor Jerry Brown said Congress’s refugee bill should be amended with a “jobs for Americans first” pledge. 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 8768-69  | Added on Thursday, October 23, 2014, 09:47 AM

(“We live in the only country in the world where it takes more sense to figure out your income tax than it does to earn the income.”) 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 8879-83  | Added on Thursday, October 23, 2014, 10:04 AM

Reagan or no, third party or not, the message a blind-sided political press came away from in that CPAC conclave was the astonishing depths of revulsion against Ford. Jesse Helms said, “Too often the president’s program is so bad that even Republicans have difficulty supporting it”—and proposed a platform convention peopled only by conservatives, independent of the ideologically corrupt Republicans, to draft a “second Declaration of Independence.” 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 9123-30  | Added on Monday, October 27, 2014, 12:32 AM

That particular argument of Buchanan’s was amplified in an unlikely quarter: by a former Trotskyite, more recently an enthusiastic liberal, now writing a column in the Wall Street Journal as the public face of a new rightward intellectual tendency. Like many prominent right-leaning intellectuals, Irving Kristol was a Jewish veteran of ideological combat in the lunchroom alcoves at the Depression-era City College of New York, where Stalinists did battle with Trotsykists and honed an ideological fierceness resembling that of public intellectuals in Europe. Bouncing around from publication to publication, he became a liberal increasingly adept at lacerating liberal pieties—for instance, writing in an essay titled “Civil Liberties 1952—A Study in Confusion,” that “there is one thing that the American people know about Senator McCarthy: he, like them, is unequivocally anti-Communist. About the spokesmen for American liberalism, they feel they know no such thing.” 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 9199-9213  | Added on Thursday, October 30, 2014, 09:17 PM

Another fledgling ideological force founded by Weyrich got its eighty thousand dollars in seed funding from a rich scion of the old Mellon banking clan. The American Legislative Exchange Council had been a rather sleepy alliance of right-leaning state legislators; its tax status was “501(c)3”—which is to say, a charitable organization whose value as a tax write-off for donors relied on its not getting involved in direct political participation. Of a sudden, its executive director, an Illinois Republican activist named Juanita Barnett, found her group the beneficiary of Richard Mellon Scaife, a Pittsburgh billionaire who’d donated $1 million to Richard Nixon’s reelection campaign and whose plaything was the newspaper of a little Pennsylvania town, the Greensburg Tribune-Review. Once, when he’d heard one of his reporters celebrating the resignation of Spiro Agnew, he had him fired on the spot. His political ambitions were bigger now. When Barnett asked Weyrich what could possibly make her shell of an organization worth eighty thousand dollars, he responded, basically, that it was worth that much precisely because it was a shell of an organization: “Juanita, ALEC is the only state legislative organization in the country—of our persuasion—which has a 501(c)3. If they took ALEC to Washington and did a good job, they . . . could go back to Scaife and get Scaife to set up a political Action Committee to finance state legislative campaign races.” In other words, ALEC could be a “nonpolitical” Trojan horse for right-wing political activity. It worked: dismissing the meddlesome Juanita Barnett, they set up shop both in Washington and in the rent-free office of a conservative Illinois state representative, whose phone lines they illegally made use of, and began writing model bills for state legislatures, unnoticed by the press until 1978. 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 9272-81  | Added on Thursday, October 30, 2014, 09:22 PM

What the Times missed was the political undercurrent. This was supposed to be a skeptical age. But the longing for the conservative innocence Ronald Reagan was selling was strong, for those with eyes to see, in all sorts of quarters. Three panels, in the House and the Senate and under the auspices of Vice President Rockefeller, were hard at work behind closed doors investigating epic abuses of public trust by the nation’s intelligence agencies. Lillian Hellman, the left-wing playwright, lectured Columbia University graduates in a commencement speech reprinted in the New York Times: “You who are graduating today, far more than those who graduated in the sixties, have very possibly lived through the most shocking period in American history . . . you know that government agencies—the CIA, the FBI, the Department of Justice, and God knows what yet hasn’t come to light—have spied on innocent people who did nothing more than express their democratic right to say what they thought. You have read that the CIA has not only had a hand in upsetting foreign governments it did not like, it has very possibly been involved in murder, or plots to murder. Murder. We didn’t think of ourselves that way once upon a time.” 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 9281-83  | Added on Thursday, October 30, 2014, 09:22 PM

In turn, Rockefeller commission member Ronald Reagan granted absolution on the radio: “Isn’t it time to ask if we aren’t threatened more by the people the FBI and CIA are watching than we are by the FBI and the CIA?” 
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November

The Invisible Bridge

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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 9628-30  | Added on Sunday, November 02, 2014, 05:00 PM

One executive worried, “One man, one vote has undermined the power of business in all capitalist countries since World War II.” Another complained, “The have-nots are gaining steadily more political power to distribute the wealth downward.” 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 9701-3  | Added on Sunday, November 02, 2014, 05:09 PM

A former physics major, he seemed to hold out the promise of a wizardly technical fix: “I look for the basic elements of a problem,” he explained in the Wall Street Journal. “If you can’t get agreement on the nature of the problem, the solution is too difficult.” 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 10067-69  | Added on Thursday, November 06, 2014, 09:09 AM

This is a society that is increasingly denying its impotence by calling it ‘tolerance,’ preaching resignation and naming all this ‘progress.’ ” 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 10348-55  | Added on Thursday, November 06, 2014, 08:01 PM

New York Times columnist William Shannon wrote, “There are fleeting moments when the public scene recalls the Weimar republic of 1932–33. In this American phantasmagoria, an empty-faced girl in a scarlet cloak and a clown’s hat points a gun . . . the unemployed mill about . . . the largest city is about to go bankrupt . . . a feckless President, another wooden titan, drones stolidly . . . exorcists, astrologers, and strange oriental gurus wander through . . . the screens, large and small, pulsate with violence and pornography . . . the godfathers last tango with clockwork orange in deep throat . . . women in pants bawl lustily while anguished youths try to be gay . . . a motherly woman raises her gun and fires . . . screams . . . “Underlying all this is a new spirit of nihilism, a radical disbelief in any rational, objective basis for ethical norms or for orderly political change.” 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 10375-80  | Added on Thursday, November 06, 2014, 08:03 PM

Felix Rohatyn, working so hard just maintaining a day-to-day cash flow for the city that he ignored a fire drill in his office building, responded that if the city defaulted, “we’d probably have to bring the troops home from Germany to keep order.” Governor Carey told the same congressional committee the choice was between “federal money and federal troops.” He asked for $5 billion in loan guarantees to avoid “the most costly mistake in the history of this nation,” an “economic Pearl Harbor.” Unmoved, Senator Edward Brooke of Massachusetts, a Republican liberal, responded that if the state needed more money it should just increase taxes. 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 10467-73  | Added on Friday, November 07, 2014, 10:32 AM

FORD SOON FACED A NEW set of intelligence controversies. First Frank Church turned his hearings to political abuses by the Internal Revenue Service (among the thousands of dangerous extremists who allegedly had been politically singled out for audits were Joseph Alsop, James Brown, Nobel Prize–winning scientist Linus Pauling, and two United States senators). Then, hard upon new reports that the CIA had recruited Christian missionaries in defiance of an Eisenhower-era directive outlawing the practice, he revealed to Americans that Big Brother had also been opening their mail—more than 215,000 pieces in New York City alone between 1953 and 1973, including one, in 1968, from presidential candidate Richard Nixon to his speechwriter Ray Price. 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 10476-80  | Added on Friday, November 07, 2014, 10:33 AM

Over on the House side of the Capitol, feisty Bella Abzug of New York, eyeing a run against Senator James Buckley in 1976, publicized two government surveillance projects, code-named “SHAMROCK” and “MINARET,” run by a government bureau that was so secret most Americans didn’t even know it existed. “With a reputed budget of some $1.2 billion and a manpower roster far greater than the CIA,” the Associated Press explained, the National Security Agency had been “established in 1952 with a charter that is still classified as top secret.” 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 10487-89  | Added on Friday, November 07, 2014, 10:34 AM

“People’s right to know should be subordinated to the people’s right to be secure,” said Senator John Tower. It would “adversely affect our intelligence-gathering capability,” said Barry Goldwater. Church replied that this didn’t matter if the government was breaking the law. 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 10495-98  | Added on Friday, November 07, 2014, 10:35 AM

Back in August, Rockefeller Commission member Ronald Reagan had informed his listeners, “My own reaction after months of testimony and discussion during the investigation of the CIA is ‘much ado about—if not nothing, at least very little’ ”: just “instances of some wrongdoing with regard to keyhole peeking,” long since corrected by the agency itself. 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 10500-10506  | Added on Friday, November 07, 2014, 10:35 AM

That fall he acquired a surprising ally in the argument: Senator William J. Fulbright, whose devastating 1966 hearings against the Vietnam War were so subversive to the Establishment’s amour propre that CBS cut away to a rerun of The Andy Griffith Show rather than continue live coverage. Now Fulbright published an article in the Columbia Journalism Review. He allowed that recent revelations about the CIA might be true. “But I have come to feel of late that these are not the kind of truths we need most right now; these truths which must injure if not kill a nation.” What was needed was “restored stability and confidence.” What the press required was “voluntary restraint” to reaffirm the “social contract.” What the public most certainly did not need was the media’s present “inquisition psychology.” 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 10514-23  | Added on Friday, November 07, 2014, 10:37 AM

A stunning colloquy between Senator Walter Mondale, the liberal Democrat from Minnesota, and NSA deputy director Benson Buffham— Mondale: “Were you concerned about its legality?” Buffham: “Legality?” Mondale: “Whether it was legal.” Buffham: “In what sense? Whether that would have been a legal thing to do?” Mondale: “Yes.” Buffham: “That particular aspect didn’t enter into the discussion.” —was not quoted anywhere at all, even by the New York Times, whose article on the NSA hearing ran on page eighty-one. As for the president, he followed the recommendation of Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney and closed down further inquiry into the NSA by extending executive privilege to the officials and telecommunications executives involved. 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 10583-84  | Added on Friday, November 07, 2014, 10:46 AM

Newsweek columnist Milton Friedman, the conservative economist, wrote that the city shared an “instinct for self-destruction matched only by its exaggerated sense of self-importance.” 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 10591-93  | Added on Friday, November 07, 2014, 10:48 AM

Then, that Sunday, in Florida (site of the third presidential primary), at a dinner honoring the visiting president of Egypt, the tuxedo-clad president toasted “the people of Israel.” 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 10593-601  | Added on Friday, November 07, 2014, 10:48 AM

On Monday night, all became plain. The president appeared in the East Room, with the entire White House press corps and the network cameras assembled before him, and revealed the biggest cabinet shakeup in the history of the Republic. “Good evening. I have several announcements to make tonight”: At the Department of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld for James Schlesinger. At the National Security Council, Brent Scowcroft for Henry Kissinger. Dick Cheney to replace Donald Rumsfeld as chief of staff, Elliot Richardson for Rogers Morton at Commerce. At CIA, George H. W. Bush for William Colby (later believed to have been fired for being too cooperative with Congress’s investigation of his agency)—on and on it went, like clowns stumbling out of a tiny car at the circus. Or maybe, Washington hands thought, more like something out of The Godfather. Someone thought to call the interlocking set of simultaneous bureaucratic assassinations the “Halloween Massacre.” 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 10613-17  | Added on Friday, November 07, 2014, 10:49 AM

Then that Monday morning the White House released a letter from Rockefeller to his boss announcing, “After much thought, I have decided further that I do not wish my name to enter into your consideration for the upcoming Republican Vice Presidential nominee.” The Times quoted an unnamed White House official who said “that Mr. Rockefeller had been unable to make his peace with the right wing of the Republican Party. He was, therefore, regarded as a liability by the President Ford Committee.” Mac Mathias said it proved Ford had become “a captive of the Reagan right.” 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Bookmark Loc. 10694  | Added on Friday, November 07, 2014, 02:10 PM


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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 10694-700  | Added on Friday, November 07, 2014, 02:10 PM

Then, speaking before New England business leaders, Ford defensively addressed critics of his personnel shifts: “I want to be absolutely sure these domestic political potshots are not ‘heard ’round the world.’ . . . The temptation to political adversaries to take advantage of any apparent weakness, disunity, and decision could become irresistible. . . . Weakness invites war. . . . Without a clear consensus among the 214 million Americans . . . the ability of a President to carry out his constitutional duties would be dangerously diminished.” The Globe editorialized with distaste, “His confusion between his personal political fortunes and the well-being of the nation was disturbingly reminiscent of Richard Nixon.” 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 10768-74  | Added on Friday, November 07, 2014, 02:17 PM

That fact was confirmed as far more than mere speculation on November 20, when the Church Committee, once more over strenuous White House objections, released a 346-page report titled Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders. It established that the CIA had tried to off Fidel Castro eight times, had supplied weapons to the plotters against the Dominican Republic’s Rafael Trujillo (the plotters succeeded, though not with the CIA’s weapons), and had encouraged but not directly intervened in the assassinations of three more, including Ngo Diem Dinh in November 1963—the same South Vietnamese president whom America (and the CIA) had financed and backed for almost a decade prior. It also reported that the CIA helped a group that kidnapped a Chilean general who stood in the way of their attempt to overthrow Salvador Allende. 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 10782-94  | Added on Friday, November 07, 2014, 02:19 PM

Frank Church’s own contribution was not always helpful. Some derided him as a stuffy, pompous moralist, an orator above all—“Frank Sunday School,” they called him, or sometimes, even better, “Frank Cathedral.” When he was fourteen years old, in 1939, a letter he wrote urging isolationism was printed on the front page of a Boise newspaper. He then served with honor as an intelligence officer in World War II, earning a Bronze Star; then, at twenty-three, he survived what his doctors thought was fatal cancer. Nine years later, in 1956, “the boy wonder from Idaho” was elected to the Senate—where he displayed courage proper to someone who had cheated death. But not always. For he was also a senator, possessed of the bland passion for compromise then native to that tribe. And, at that, a presidential aspirant—possessed by the omnidirectional imperative to placate the myriad factions and personalities of that most fractured of political tribes, the Democratic Party. A successful Democratic presidential nominee also had to defer to the memory of that party’s beloved martyred Hero in Chief; all that certainly helped explain the certain curious willful resistance Church displayed in following his own evidence where it frequently led. He had imagined, when he took on this inquiry as his own, that it would help put the final nails in the coffin for the legacy of Richard M. Nixon. He hardly knew how to respond when so many of the most frightening discoveries pointed instead to the administration of John F. Kennedy—at whose 1960 convention he had delivered a striking keynote speech. 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 10906-16  | Added on Friday, November 07, 2014, 06:58 PM

Compare the Fords. As son Steve explained to reporters: “Everyone in our family is grown up. We’re not under our folks’ care anymore.” They did what they wanted, unashamed to tell the world, and with their parents’ implicit blessing, too. It was hard to imagine them having to make an appointment to speak to Dad. Contrast that to the family of the family-values candidate: four kids, seven marriages, zero college degrees, several expulsions from boarding school, two contemplated suicide attempts. Once, Patti had been studying at Northwestern when her father intervened to have a black man arrested with whom she liked to share friendly banter. She was so humiliated she considered suicide—she “touched the blade to my wrist and felt how easy it would be.” After she transferred to USC, her young brother showed up once on her doorstep, a sixteen-year-old runaway, sick of his mother hassling him to cut his hair and spying on him using the house’s intercoms (she used them as a dedicated surveillance system: better living, electrically). The last straw had been when she searched his room (she found, naturally, a bag of marijuana). Patti soon returned him back home. She feared her mother was about to report her to the authorities for kidnapping. Once, her father asked an acquaintance, referring to this daughter of his, “Do you think a child can be born evil?” 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 10954-56  | Added on Friday, November 07, 2014, 07:03 PM

She thought this “the most aggravating aspect of discussing anything with my father. He has this ability to make statements that are so far outside the parameters of logic that they leave you speechless.”) 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 11049-52  | Added on Friday, November 07, 2014, 07:13 PM

he quoted Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who, he said, after embarking “on a course that made bold use of the government to ease the pain of those times,” was “soon moved to sound a warning”: “We have built new instruments of public power in the hands of the people’s government . . . but in the hands of political puppets of an economic aristocracy, such power would provide shackles for the liberties of our people.” 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 11052-56  | Added on Friday, November 07, 2014, 07:14 PM

Reagan said, “Unfortunately, that warning went unheeded. Today, there is an economic aristocracy, born of government’s growing interference in our lives.” A rather brazen interpretation, given that the speech he quoted, FDR’s annual message to Congress in January 1936, had actually been referring to “financial and industrial groups” who in their “domination of government” and “entrenched greed” do “not want to return to that individualism of which they prate” but seek only “power for themselves, enslavement for the public.” 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 11080-82  | Added on Friday, November 07, 2014, 07:16 PM

That was Ronald Reagan’s sort of language. In 1967 he had signed one of the nation’s strongest gun control laws, after armed Black Panthers stormed into the California legislature on a lobbying mission of their own. But in June 1975, as Gallup reported 67 percent of Americans favored “the registration of all firearms,” 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 11111-15  | Added on Friday, November 07, 2014, 07:20 PM

“There must be no lack of equal opportunity, no inequality before the law,” he said in the televised opening speech of his 1966 gubernatorial campaign. But: “There is a limit to what can be accomplished by laws and regulations, and I seriously question whether anything additional is needed in that line.” That year, in Washington, a new civil rights law banning housing discrimination was being debated; in Chicago, marching through the city’s white bungalow belt in favor of the principle, Martin Luther King was jeered by swastika-wielding protesters, and knives and rocks were thrown at his head. That did not change his mind. 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 11207-12  | Added on Friday, November 07, 2014, 07:29 PM

The previous summer, Congress voted to withdraw arms aid to Turkey, following its invasion of Cyprus, the first real test of the War Powers Act of 1974 forbidding military action without congressional authorization. Simultaneously, a “Carnation Revolution” broke out in Portugal, overthrowing the fascist Portuguese dictatorship (it began with a bloodless coup by military officers and ended in a popular uprising in which grateful citizens stuck carnations into the barrels of government soldiers’ guns; Reagan called it the work of “leftist street hoodlums”). Portugal promptly divested itself of its colonies, including Angola, where, that December, Soviet-backed guerrillas were on the verge of seizing power. That was the final straw, for the American right, against Gerald Ford and his timorous doctrine of détente. 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 11226-35  | Added on Friday, November 07, 2014, 07:32 PM

Clark introduced legislation to cut off military aid and covert action in Angola. His colleague Clifford Case of New Jersey, the ranking Republican on the Foreign Relations Committee, complained, “I don’t think we can just pull out of Angola”—which is what the Foreign Relations Committee had said about Vietnam, too. Anthony Lewis advanced the theory, marveling at his own cynicism, that the leak of CIA involvement had come straight from the top—that the Oval Office hoped Congress would react by cutting off aid, allowing the administration to ask the red-baiting question “Who lost Angola?” in an election year. He pointed out that government officials had been admitting “it made no difference to us which nationalist faction won the internal struggle” (“What the hell is Angola?” asked one senator), and yet we intervened in favor of one faction. “What the world sees as self-inflicted wounds may look to the authors like a way of electing Gerald Ford and keeping Henry Kissinger in office,” he wrote, by running against “a Democratic Congress that he can imply is soft on Communism, loose with secrets, and ready to retreat from American greatness. That line is especially useful for competing with Ronald Reagan.” 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 11247-60  | Added on Friday, November 07, 2014, 07:35 PM

THAT SUNDAY’S 60 MINUTES, THE CBS “Newsmagazine” that had helped induct millions of middle Americans into the ranks of the suspicious circles with its hard-hitting investigative journalism, and had become that fall the first news show to vault to the top of the network ratings after it moved to a new time slot at 7 P.M. on Sundays, featured a Ralph Nader–style exposé of a factory in Virginia owned by a company called Allied Chemical. Its product, a pesticide called Kepone, was alleged to cause brain damage in its workers. Heartbreakingly, the camera lingered on one tremulous victim who, for an excruciating forty-five seconds, tried and failed to drive in a bolt with a screwdriver. Then 60 Minutes’ new reporter, former White House correspondent Dan Rather, moved in for what would become his trademark on 60 Minutes (though the style was already familiar to viewers who remembered when the young newsman stood up at a televised news conference in March 1974 in Houston and embarrassed Richard Nixon with the toughest question of his presidency). In the office of the company’s director of agricultural research, a man named William Moore, Rather pulled out a sheaf of books—“studies sponsored by Allied Chemical”: “Are you familiar with these materials? This—” “No.” “Never seen those?” “Never seen them.” “Right in the summary, very top: ‘The characteristic effect of this compound is the development of DDT-like tremors, the severity of which depends upon dosage level and duration of exposure.’ Quote, unquote—from the first sentence of the summary. You don’t know about this?” “No, no.” But Mr. Moore, Rather revealed, was the author of that very study. 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 11454-67  | Added on Saturday, November 08, 2014, 06:14 PM

It seemed like nothing worked in America anymore. People’s lives were not working; the previous November, Ann Landers received a letter from a young couple who asked the columnist to poll her readership to ask if having a child would be worth it—“Were the rewards enough to make up for the grief?” The letters poured in, and on January 23, she tallied up the score: 70 percent told her no. Wrote a forty-year-old with young twins, “I was an attractive, fulfilled career woman before I had these kids. Now I’m an overly exhausted nervous wreck.” Said a seventy-year-old mother of five, “Not one of our children has given us any pleasure. God knows we did our best, but we were failures as parents, and they are failures as people.” Failures as people: millions of Americans felt that this description fit them to a T. Seeking a solution, any solution, they eagerly forked over their cash to any huckster who promised release, the quicker and more effortlessly the better: therapies like “bioenergetics” (“The Revolutionary Therapy That Uses the Language of the Body to Heal the Problems of the Mind”); Primal Scream (which held that when patients shrieked in a therapist’s office, childhood trauma could be reexperienced, then released; John Lennon and James Earl Jones were fans); or Transcendental Meditation, which promised that deliverance could come if you merely closed your eyes and chanted a mantra (the “TM” organization sold personal mantras, each supposedly “unique,” to hundreds of thousands of devotees). Or “religions” like the Church Universal and Triumphant, or the Reverend Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church, or “Scientology”—this last one invented by a science fiction writer, reportedly on a bet. 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 11515-18  | Added on Saturday, November 08, 2014, 06:17 PM

On the second day came the “truth process.” Laying his charges down on the floor, the trainer, after a guided meditation leading them to the painful emotions and problems they were there to try to resolve, would command them to “take our fingers off the repress button,” and the journalist described the moans and groans that followed as “like listening to a secret sound track of Dante’s Inferno— as if someone had plugged an audio hookup into the purgatorial paintings of Hieronymus Bosch.” 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 11558-68  | Added on Saturday, November 08, 2014, 06:21 PM

They found one person harmed by the program who was willing to talk, a middle-aged, college-educated divorcée desperate for meaning now that her kids had grown—a description she shared with Sara Jane Moore, whose preferred route to redemption had led her to the attempted assassination of Gerald Ford. The woman they interviewed tried TM and saw “glimpses of what it would be like to live on a different level”—until that rosy glow faded, and she discovered “encounter groups” and learned for the first time “what it was like to be close with another woman”—until that wore off and she tried est, which she almost abandoned after the first weekend produced shooting pains in her legs: “If I hadn’t paid two hundred dollars I wouldn’t have gone back.” After the second weekend, though, she believed herself to have been cured of her arthritis, and was left in a state of ecstasy that lasted the week—until she suffered a dissociative breakdown, her first experience of mental illness in her life, then a manic episode in which, first, she couldn’t stop dancing, and then began babbling in a made-up language until she ended up in a mental hospital for the first of two stints. The first scientific study of est confirmed that several such cases had presented themselves to hospital psychiatric wards. 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 11931-36  | Added on Sunday, November 09, 2014, 12:31 AM

Mo Udall foregrounded his upbringing in a town with but ninety-three souls, and his campaign materials pushed his “integrity”—so much so that at a fortnightly on-the-record breakfast for Washington bureau chiefs, columnists, and reporters one of them asked, “Are you prick enough to be president?” The eight-term congressman, whose memoir was titled Too Funny to Be President, responded with a joke whose punch line involved the candidate riding a horse in a parade. The owner insisted it was a mare but the politician said it must be a stallion: “I can distinctly remember riding through the streets and hearing people say, look at the prick on that big white horse.” Political 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 11959-62  | Added on Sunday, November 09, 2014, 12:34 AM

He proposed a bill for catastrophic health coverage for seniors but said we “cannot realistically afford federally dictated national health insurance.” The controlling trope was “common sense,” and “new realism” was the headline phrase. He was fighting for his political life against Ronald Reagan. More and more, he sounded like Ronald Reagan. 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 12029-35  | Added on Sunday, November 09, 2014, 11:19 AM

stuff which had nothing to do with violating national security but everything to do with exposing agency incompetence and immorality. Be that as it may. Following so close on Philip Agee’s call to out CIA agents and the death of Richard Welch, the very fact of “unauthorized leaks” provided the opening. Ron Nessen said they raised “serious questions about how classified material can be handled by Congress when national security is at stake.” The CIA said genial, bow-tied Otis Pike might soon be responsible for the blood of more dead CIA agents. An intimidated liberal Democratic congressman begged Pike to find out who had passed on copies to the press. Pike replied, “What do you recommend, precisely? Lie detector tests to members of Congress?” Maybe. 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 12041-43  | Added on Sunday, November 09, 2014, 11:21 AM

For instance, how the Nixon administration encouraged the Kurdish minority in Iraq to revolt, then abandoned these Kurds when the shah of Iran objected. “Even in the context of covert action,” it concluded concerning that one, “ours was a cynical exercise.” 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 12069-76  | Added on Sunday, November 09, 2014, 11:26 AM

It never became any kind of campaign issue; in public opinion polls slightly more citizens disapproved than approved of the Pike and Church committees, and a majority feared they’d harmed national security. Pike gave an interview that spring to the New Republic. He told interviewer Oriana Fallaci, “It took this investigation to convince me that I had always been told lies, to make me realize that I was tired of being told lies.” And he explained why he thought the intelligence scandals hadn’t achieved the public concern of Watergate—why the “Year of Intelligence” had failed. “Oh, they think it is better not to know. There are too many things that embarrass Americans in that report. You see, this country went through an awful trauma with Watergate. But, even then, all they were asked to believe was that their President had been a bad person. In this new situation they are asked much more; they are asked to believe that their country has been evil. And nobody wants to believe that.” 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 12079-82  | Added on Sunday, November 09, 2014, 11:40 AM

Schorr published a postmortem for the Year of Intelligence: “You peel off Watergate and you find the Plumbers and the Ellsberg break-in. Peel off the Plumbers and you find the 1970 Huston plan. . . . But what would you find if you peeled off another layer and had a close look at that secret world from which these things had been launched?” 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 12091-93  | Added on Sunday, November 09, 2014, 11:42 AM

The day after that, the Supreme Court dialed back the major reforms the congressional culture of suspicion had wrought: the 1974 campaign finance law banning the buying off of political candidates. Giving money to a presidential candidate, the justices now said, was the same thing as speech. 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 12104-8  | Added on Sunday, November 09, 2014, 11:44 AM

An unintended consequence of Buckley v. Valeo was that it advantaged conservatives. For it contained a loophole: independent groups could spend whatever they wanted, on behalf of whomever they wanted, as long as they didn’t coordinate it with candidates who accepted matching funds. Groups, that is to say, like the New Right letterhead organizations braying about Eskimo cannibalism and the Nazi regime of genderless restrooms to be ushered in by the ERA. The more ideological the candidates were, the more this brave new campaign finance world would advantage them—and by the same token it would disadvantage moderates like Gerald Ford. 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 12114-19  | Added on Sunday, November 09, 2014, 11:45 AM

Call it the “Bedtime for Bonzo Problem.” Garry Wills wrote in his newspaper column, “Reagan thinks he is being unfairly treated by the press, and he is probably right. It is unfair to expect accuracy or depth from him.” Mike Royko referred to his “TV-anchorman face.” The February Harper’s featured “The Candidate from Disneyland,” labeling him “Nixon without the savvy or self-pity, another pious boyhood pauper in whom God has confided the friendship of suntanned millionaires. Ronald Duck. That he should be regarded as a serious candidate for President is a shame and embarrassment for the country at large to swallow.” 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 12119-24  | Added on Sunday, November 09, 2014, 11:46 AM

More earnestly—and less dismissibly—Elizabeth Drew reported from the campaign plane, “Reagan is a dim figure. There is so much that we don’t know about him. What is he doing with these public relations people as his key advisors? How does his own mind work? Is he a contrived figure? One cannot shake the idea that this is Ronald Reagan the movie actor. . . . His ‘speeches’ are actually sets of four-by-six-inch cards on which he has written paragraphs and anecdotes with a felt-tipped pen, and which he shuffles to give slight variations. His fund of knowledge seems to be made up largely of clippings—stories and polls he has come across that will make good material.” But texts like these revealed more about their authors than they did about the candidate and his political prospects. 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 12197-200  | Added on Sunday, November 09, 2014, 11:55 AM

The Granite State endured an infestation of hecklers. They came from an outfit called the People’s Bicentennial Commission, whose chairman, Jeremy Rifkin, said “corporate America has conceived a Bicentennial plan to manipulate the mass psychology of an entire nation back into conformity with its vision of what American life should be,” and whose sympathizer Douglas Dowd, a professor at Cornell, published a widely circulated Marxist interpretation of American economic history titled The Twisted Dream. 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 12284-85  | Added on Sunday, November 09, 2014, 12:06 PM

He quoted that in order to record his incredulity: why were so many liberals embracing Carter as though he was one of them? It spoke to another of Carter’s political gifts: being all things to all people. 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 12333-36  | Added on Sunday, November 09, 2014, 12:12 PM

And on Angola, where on February 9 Soviet- and Cuban-backed forces took Huambo, formerly New Lisbon, capital of the forces backed by the United States. Mo Udall, point-blank, said, “President Ford and Secretary Kissinger want another Vietnam in Angola.” Carter, all over the place, said that he was against military intervention “except in a clear-cut case of national defense,” but that he didn’t know what to do about Angola because the administration was keeping so much secret: nothing to offend anybody in that. 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 12361-64  | Added on Sunday, November 09, 2014, 12:16 PM

He quoted one pollster, Peter Hart, who said that “the only majority we find is a cynical majority,” and another who said that only 36 percent who voted in 1974 thought their votes “made a difference.” Candidates like Carter, of course, built this insight into their very campaign plans. But Lydon quipped, “A practical question about such strategies is whether voters are alienated now from ‘alienation campaigns.’ 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 12366-68  | Added on Sunday, November 09, 2014, 12:17 PM

Walter Dean Burnham, then of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, explained why: “The gap between beliefs and actions, between traditional values and the way the system is organized, keeps growing. All the major components of society are in crisis.” 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 12393-97  | Added on Sunday, November 09, 2014, 12:21 PM

News was that the world as we know it might be ending, but that was an evergreen 1970s story; the latest twist was the suggestion by a deputy director of the National Agricultural Laboratory that global food supplies would soon be so scarce it was high time for folks to develop a taste for “locusts, termites, and other insects.” “As the population explosion continues,” Dean F. Gamble told the American Association for the Advancement of Science, “it may be impossible to continue to ignore these unexploited food resources.” 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 12447-51  | Added on Sunday, November 09, 2014, 12:26 PM

The defense psychiatrists, in other words, offered up what was essentially a left-wing view of the self—as plastic, protean, moldable—and of human beings as the product of their environment, not quite responsible for their individual decisions and acts. A prosecution psychiatrist, conversely, said Hearst had been an antiestablishment hellion all along—telling a nun to “go to hell,” described by her boyfriend as possessing an “[u]nparalleled . . . capacity for sarcasm.” Another said: “I think this was all in her. 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 12492-96  | Added on Sunday, November 09, 2014, 12:30 PM

Another thing that was not supposed to be possible in these modern times: “Carter should understand,” Vic Gold had written, “that no ex-Governor of Georgia can become a Presidential nominee, even if there weren’t a nonrecognition factor to overcome. No. He can’t because he is going up against a prejudice bigger than one John F. Kennedy faced in 1960. Much bigger, more complex: if Jesus Christ Himself returned to proclaim Roman Catholicism the Truth Faith, Christianity could survive; but if He spoke His parables in a Georgia accent, St. Patrick’s would convert to a mosque within a week.” Think again. 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 12553-57  | Added on Sunday, November 09, 2014, 06:09 PM

Wallace himself began talking about the bad old days as if it had all been some massive misunderstanding: “I was for segregation because it was the law,” he said in a 1974 interview. “Well, it’s not the law anymore.” That year his gubernatorial campaign courted black voters. (“Sure, I look like a white man. But my heart is as black as anyone’s here,” he said in an infamous stumble, which could hardly disturb any of his supporters: it only proved he wasn’t a “pseudo-intellectual.”) 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 12722-26  | Added on Sunday, November 09, 2014, 06:34 PM

In a May 1975 radio broadcast he quoted Senator Jesse Helms, who said, “I have received reliable information, that Dr. Kissinger has approved plans to turn over effective control of police and fire protection and postal services in the Canal Zone of the Republic of Panama.” Reagan then argued that this meant America would soon be helpless to fight back against the next civil disturbance, and that Americans would have their mail opened by the fearsome head of the state security service, “Lieutenant Colonel”—he paused, struggling to pronounce the unfamiliar name—“Manuel Noriega, a man not unfriendly to the Cuban Communists.” 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 12728-31  | Added on Sunday, November 09, 2014, 06:35 PM

On Memorial Day he tied “our seeming willingness to give away the Panama Canal” to the same liberal fecklessness that produced Truman’s stalemate in Korea, Kennedy’s betrayal at the Bay of Pigs, and now our humiliating retreat in Vietnam. He asked, “Have we stopped to think that young Americans have seldom if ever in their lives seen America act as a great nation?” (Apparently the civil rights movement didn’t count.) 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 12778-80  | Added on Sunday, November 09, 2014, 06:55 PM

The Florida loss had been in the cards. His campaign chairman was an overweight, oafish car dealer who told reporters things like “If I was going to give the world an enema, I’d insert the nozzle in Washington.” 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 12789-91  | Added on Sunday, November 09, 2014, 06:57 PM

Ford dangled a Treasury Department job before the former president of the Florida Conservative Union. He also announced so much pork for Florida, Reagan told his audiences, that “when he [Ford] arrived in their town ‘the band won’t know whether to play ‘Hail to the Chief’ or ‘Santa Claus Is Coming to Town.’ 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 12815-17  | Added on Sunday, November 09, 2014, 07:00 PM

The Times quoted Ford supporters like Senator Charles Percy patting his opponent condescendingly on the head: “Ronald Reagan has sharpened up the Ford organization. His campaign has helped us. It would have been a very poor organization . . . without the Reagan challenge.” 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 12874-76  | Added on Sunday, November 09, 2014, 07:07 PM

The commercials went on the air during the game show Name That Tune. A loophole in the campaign finance law meant that every taxpayer in the United States had become a de facto antiabortion activist. 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 12968-75  | Added on Monday, November 10, 2014, 01:03 AM

Organizing by building a mailing list favors a politics of melodrama, never the give-and-take between the myriad interests groups that make up partisan, let alone bipartisan, coalitions. It makes the political party a mere vehicle of convenience—indeed, Helms had been a registered Democrat until 1970, and had been one of the leading advocates for a third, conservative, party following Nixon’s resignation. As a fellow Republican put it, “It’s frustrating, often impossible to get serious business done. You might be working on a foreign aid bill or a change in the debt limit and all of a sudden you find you’re voting on school prayer or abortion. Helms is no respecter of the institution. He uses the Senate for his own ends, his own causes, and they are not the same as the goals of the country.” It was, however, splendid for flushing out angry anti-Establishment right-wing voters in a Southern state for a presidential primary. 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 13122-23  | Added on Monday, November 10, 2014, 01:25 AM

“How can he be nominated?” asked Ambassador Averell Harriman, the eighty-five-year-old emperor of the Georgetown cocktail circuit. “I don’t know him, and neither do any of my friends.” 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 13152-58  | Added on Monday, November 10, 2014, 01:29 AM

He now had two new opponents. On March 12, California governor Jerry Brown said he soon would enter the presidential race. Carter, traveling in California, responded by announcing he would enter every primary in the nation, no matter who contested him. On March 18, Frank Church finally announced his presidential campaign. He did so just as his work investigating the CIA returned to the news, when Richard Nixon released his answers to a set of questions from the Church Committee over his administration’s role in overthrowing Salvador Allende in Chile. Nixon wrote, newspapers reported, that whatever he might or might not have done, he was only continuing Kennedy’s and Johnson’s policies, and concluded, “I realize it is in vogue to rail against covert activities and clandestine operations,” but “the pendulum has swung too far.” 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 13206-22  | Added on Monday, November 10, 2014, 01:34 AM

The most melodramatic scene in Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward’s The Final Days became a subject for a classic Saturday Night Live sketch: Henry Kissinger (played by John Belushi) visits a sozzled Nixon (Dan Aykroyd) in the Lincoln sitting room, whining self-pityingly, “Will history treat me more kindly than my contemporaries?” He breaks into sobs, begging Kissinger to get down on his knees and join him in prayer. Aykroyd: “Don’t you want to pray, you Christ killer?” Belushi: “I don’t vant to get into zat again, Mr. President. Excuse me, I’ve got to go warn the Strategic Air Command to ignore all presidential orders.” That referenced two of the book’s other mind-blowing revelations: that Kissinger found Nixon a raging anti-Semite, and that Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger ordered military commanders to ignore Nixon’s orders as the presidency slipped through his fingers. Still another was that Kissinger considered Nixon ragingly stupid: “Don’t ever write anything more complicated than a Reader’s Digest article for Nixon,” he supposedly instructed his aides. It also depicted a president on the verge of suicide. “You fellows in your business,” he was depicted telling Alexander Haig, “you have a way of handling problems like this. Somebody leaves a pistol in the drawer. I don’t have a pistol”—“as if,” Woodward and Bernstein wrote, “he were half asking to be given one.” Haig was reported to have passed on orders to keep the president away from pills. His son-in-law Edward Cox said Nixon stalked the White House halls at night, “talking to pictures of former Presidents.” (Aykroyd to a painting of Kennedy: “Having sex with women within these very walls! That never happened when Dick Nixon was in the White House!” Another of the book’s revelations was that Pat and Dick hadn’t had sex in fourteen years.) Showing up at noon meetings so drunk that treasury secretary Simon thought he was acting like a “windup doll.” Pat spending all day in bed, drunk (he’d promised her in 1962, after all, that he’d never run for office again). 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 13384-86  | Added on Monday, November 10, 2014, 11:13 AM

He had a favorite bowdlerization of a quote from Thomas Jefferson: “The American people won’t make a mistake if they’re given all the facts.” Surely Gerald Ford wished that this were actually so. Didn’t Mark Twain once say something about how a lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth has time to lace up its shoes? 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 13439-41  | Added on Monday, November 10, 2014, 11:19 AM

As Pat Buchanan wrote, “The liberal wing of the Republican Party is a spectator now. It lacked the numbers to advance its own candidate, or the will to save its own champion, the Vice President. The civil war in the GOP is between conservatives—militant and moderate.” 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 13562-65  | Added on Monday, November 10, 2014, 07:11 PM

It named frightening stakes for Gerald Ford: “Being well funded, they can afford to conduct independent advertising campaigns on behalf of Reagan. Such expenditures are not chargeable to Reagan’s campaign”—meaning effectively that Reagan could still earn matching funds even if his supporters spent an infinite amount of money, whatever caps were designated by the campaign finance law. 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 13566-68  | Added on Monday, November 10, 2014, 07:11 PM

“They can target an effective direct mail campaign based on response to fund raising mail using outrageous literature designed to motivate people interested in a right-wing cause. . . . In a state where the GOP vote is traditionally small such an effort can be devastating. In caucus states where few people attend the county caucuses such an effort can control the state conventions.” 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 13570-73  | Added on Monday, November 10, 2014, 07:12 PM

But the Reagan hands still flying commercial instead of charter, who hadn’t been sure they would win Texas at all, were a little taken aback by their right-wing infrastructure’s sudden full flowering in the field of presidential politics, too. It had been sudden, this brave new political world coming into bloom, this bastard child of the 1974 Campaign Finance Reform Act. Five hundred and sixteen political action committees were registered with the FEC in 1974; by the end of 1976 there were 1,116 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 13576-77  | Added on Monday, November 10, 2014, 07:12 PM

The memo concluded, with the key words underlined: “We are in real danger of being out-organized by a small number of highly motivated right wing nuts.” 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 13608-10  | Added on Monday, November 10, 2014, 07:17 PM

bill”—Senator Humphrey and Watts Congressman Augustus F. Hawkins’s legislation to require the Federal Reserve to implement monetary policy with full employment (defined originally as a 2 percent unemployment rate) as its target—and if 2 percent or less unemployment did not result, for the government to directly provide jobs. 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 13622-27  | Added on Monday, November 10, 2014, 07:18 PM

Once more, not too many people cared. The New York Times was about the only paper to quote the part about “unsavory and vicious tactics.” None, apparently, quoted the report’s conclusion that “the Constitution has been violated in secret and the power of the executive branch has gone unchecked, unchallenged.” A quote from the former head of the FBI’s domestic surveillance division—“Never once did I hear anybody, including myself, raise the question: ‘Is this course of action which we have agreed upon lawful, is it legal, is it ethical or moral?’ ”—went virtually unnoticed. 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 13638-47  | Added on Monday, November 10, 2014, 07:19 PM

Washington sages started watching Old Man Daley, seeing if the Chicago mayor was ready to move in with an endorsement, the traditional sign that in the party of Jefferson and Jackson the fat lady had sung. He was not ready yet—though he did say the combo of Carter and Adlai Stevenson III, the senator his machine was responsible for electing, would make an “outstanding” ticket. Then, a bombshell. Carter had hired a brilliant young speechwriter named Bob Shrum. Nine days into his employment—and the day after the Pennsylvania primary—Shrum resigned. He made his resignation letter public. He said he’d joined the campaign because he thought Carter had “found the idiom to reach across the deep divisions of our time.” He said he quit because Carter was “manipulative and deceitful.” He gave examples: Of a plan to help coal miners suffering from black lung disease, Carter had allegedly said, “It would offend the operators. And why should I do this for Arnold Miller”—the head of the union—“if he won’t come and endorse me? . . . I don’t think the benefits should be automatic. They chose to be miners.” And of the Israeli-Palestinian crisis, “I don’t want any more statements on the Middle East or Lebanon. Jackson has all the Jews anyway.” 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 13649-51  | Added on Monday, November 10, 2014, 07:19 PM

Shrum addressed Carter in his letter: “You say you wish to keep your options open. Within reason, that is understandable. But an election is the only option the people have. After carefully reflecting on what I have seen and heard here, I don’t know what you would do as president.” 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 13670-75  | Added on Monday, November 10, 2014, 07:22 PM

Soon such praising with faint damns started rolling in from the power-hungry—as in the following uninspiring endorsement from a congressional freshman: “The complete politician is someone who can be his own man and still have everybody like him. That’s the epitome of the politician. Carter appears to be his own man and still have all kinds of groups liking him.” At times like this the front-runner began to look like the same old scum on the pond. A new fresh breeze can then whip through the pines. JERRY BROWN STARTED CAMPAIGNING IN Maryland with the support of the Democratic machine 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 13689-91  | Added on Monday, November 10, 2014, 07:23 PM

What it all meant was that the state that returned Gerald Ford to Congress eight times since 1948 might reject Ford in its primary in 1976—at a stand-or-fall moment in his presidential campaign. Reported the Times, “The Nebraska defeat transforms Mr. Ford’s political condition from serious to critical. If he loses in Michigan next week, it may become terminal.” 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 13728-31  | Added on Monday, November 10, 2014, 07:27 PM

He was shocked to be beaten in Maryland 49 to 37 percent by Jerry Brown. He edged out Udall in Michigan by a nose. Energized stop-Carter forces jammed the phone lines of Congressman Paul Simon of Illinois, thought to be the one brokering a convention usurpation on behalf of Humphrey. Touts also pressed Ted Kennedy for his response. 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 13740-46  | Added on Monday, November 10, 2014, 07:28 PM

Edmund G. “Jerry” Brown Jr. was the son of a very conventional, Irish Catholic, ward-heeler style of Democratic politician, Pat Brown, who rode to glory by doing what all successful Democratic politicians did during the postwar economic boom: he built. A $1.99 billion aqueduct system to deliver water to Southern California. A thousand more miles of freeways. Seven new public university campuses. He built the ladder upon which California’s middle class had climbed. Then he was undone by the shocking challenge of Ronald Reagan in 1966. His fourth child, born in 1938, observed his father’s political fall from a rather odd place: a Jesuit seminary, where he spent three and a half years, one of them entirely silent. He had since identified with the fashionable religion of Zen Buddhism. 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 13757-64  | Added on Monday, November 10, 2014, 07:30 PM

He won the governor’s mansion at the youthful age of thirty-six—well, actually, he bypassed the new governor’s mansion, which had been built for Reagan by his friends for $8.4 million in 2013 dollars, in favor of a modest bachelor apartment, where he slept on a mattress on the floor and kept a copy of Aristotle on the coffee table. He ate in health food restaurants. He refused the gubernatorial chauffeured limousine—he drove himself in a 1967 Plymouth sedan. He quoted Small Is Beautiful, and the radical social philosopher and designer Buckminster Fuller: “We are on a very small Spaceship Earth, and we’ve got to respect the limits.” He did things like appointing antiwar POW Edison Miller to the Orange County Board of Supervisors; Miller was the one who’d turned his back on his fellow marines upon his return to Camp Pendleton. 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 13766  | Added on Monday, November 10, 2014, 07:30 PM

Mike Royko called him “Governor Moonbeam.” 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 13770-76  | Added on Monday, November 10, 2014, 08:08 PM

California loved him. Now the nation would meet him. His April 28 trip to Maryland to campaign was his first travel outside California since he’d been elected a year and a half earlier. As he toured a waste management facility, he turned to reporters: “What is the inner meaning of this? Why are we here? What are we doing?” He toured a Westinghouse plant, shook hands, told a worker, “I hope you’ll vote for me.” The reply: “I will.” A double take: “You will? But you don’t know anything about me.” A reporter asked him who his favorite political philosopher was. He answered, “Thomas Hooker.” Another inquired who Thomas Hooker was. The answer: “I’m just being facetious. He’s the only obscure name I could remember from political science class.” 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 13786-88  | Added on Monday, November 10, 2014, 08:09 PM

Zen stresses living in the moment. So do the Jesuits, so does monastic living—living in the present moment, don’t worry about tomorrow. Divine Providence will take care of it. Be in the present moment. Age quod agis—that’s a Jesuit motto. Do whatever you’re doing. That could be Zen as well as Jesuit.” 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 13800-13802  | Added on Monday, November 10, 2014, 08:10 PM

“We have fiscal limits, we have ecological limits, we even have human limits . . . too much over-promising, too much overselling . . . the human species is not going to make it unless we can figure out another way. . . . How long is it going to take before we blow this whole planet up?” 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 13873-76  | Added on Monday, November 10, 2014, 08:17 PM

THE CHURCH COMMITTEE BEGAN RELEASING supplementary reports, which for some reason now caught the attention of the evening news, forcing replies from the directors of the CIA and FBI—the latter, Clarence Kelley, finally acknowledging abuses by his predecessor J. Edgar Hoover, such as the attempt to make Martin Luther King commit suicide. Then came the voting in Oregon on May 25. The Democrats’ results were a surprise. Carter did not win, nor Brown; Frank Church did. 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 13892-95  | Added on Monday, November 10, 2014, 08:18 PM

Ford won Oregon. That was expected. Reagan won Arkansas, Nevada, and Idaho—and that was expected, too. The shock was in Tennessee, an open primary full of Wallace Democrats. But even conservatives loved the TVA in the Volunteer State. Which was why Ford won Tennessee—an astonishing boost. Despite this, as Elizabeth Drew noted, “That the race between the President and Ronald Reagan has got to this point” was in itself “astonishing.” 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 13919-24  | Added on Monday, November 10, 2014, 08:21 PM

The president zoomed ahead by about a hundred convention votes the last week in May when 119 of 154 New York delegates officially pledged for Ford. But no one knew what would happen to all those delegates nationwide that Ford thought had pledged for him, but which now seemed so very, very soft. The answer might come on June 8—when contests in California, Ohio, and New Jersey would select a third of the delegates needed to nominate. IT WAS THE SAME ON the Democratic side—where Jimmy Carter was struggling, and straddling, to close the sale. 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 13945-51  | Added on Monday, November 10, 2014, 08:23 PM

A cover article appeared in Rolling Stone by the magazine’s drug-addled gonzo literary superhero Hunter S. Thompson; it was more than fifteen thousand words long. He wrote that “on the 200th anniversary of what used to be called ‘The American Dream,’ we are going to have our noses rubbed, day after day—on the tube and in the headlines—in this mess we have made for ourselves”—but that Jimmy Carter just might point the way out. Thompson wrote of a 1974 Law Day speech by Carter in Georgia he happened to stumble into, and called it “the heaviest and most eloquent thing I have ever heard from the mouth of a politician.” The article was called “Jimmy Carter and the Great Leap of Faith.” People yearned to believe. 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 13994-96  | Added on Monday, November 10, 2014, 08:30 PM

He told a favorite joke, about how the government was like a baby (“an alimentary canal with a big appetite at one end and no sense of responsibility at the other”). 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 14063-65  | Added on Monday, November 10, 2014, 08:36 PM

Carter had 1,514 delegates, nine more than he needed to be nominated on the first ballot. Brown added, “The American people have begun to question what Carter is saying, if he’s saying anything at all.” They hadn’t. Gallup’s postprimary poll found voters favoring him over Ford 53 to 39 and over Reagan 58 to 35. 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 14114-16  | Added on Monday, November 10, 2014, 08:40 PM

all these primaries were great for the moral health of America: “Several hundred of the best reporters in the country have been following the candidates around. This keeps them from other investigations, so if anything bad is going on, maybe at least we don’t know about it, which is nice for a change.” Happy birthday, America! 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 14122-27  | Added on Monday, November 10, 2014, 08:41 PM

Then, on Friday June 11, the President of the United States all but put some 1,400 Missouri Republicans to sleep with his flat Midwestern drone. In the same spot on the next day, the former governor of California electrified them. And behind the scenes Morton Blackwell and Don Devine got to work. Ford forces had made a motion to de-credential Reagan delegates on technical grounds; that was a typical feint at contested political conventions. And frequently—for instance, at the Democratic conclave in Miami Beach that nominated George McGovern in 1972—a melodrama would ensue over the question of whether the rules should be interpreted to allow challenged delegates to vote on the disposition of their own case. This was a political tradition. 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 14166-75  | Added on Monday, November 10, 2014, 09:04 PM

The national headlines were crazy, as usual. On June 22, the news was that all 50,000 employees of the state of Massachusetts were going out on strike and that seventy miles of Long Island beaches were closed when the tide brought in a gagging plague of sewage. On June 24, the front page of the Washington Post included the following stories: “The Senate intelligence committee said yesterday that senior officials of both the CIA and the FBI covered up crucial information in the course of investigating President Kennedy’s assassination.” “Anthony (Tony Pro) Provenzano, a central figure in the investigation of former Teamster union President James R. Hoffa’s disappearance, has been indicted on charges involving the 1961 kidnaping and murder of a New Jersey Teamsters official.” “A 19-year-old Wheaton [Illinois] woman, charged with murder in the beating death of her infant son last April, has told psychiatrists and investigators that she was trying to rid the baby of a demon that had possessed him.” “The United States vetoed Angola’s application for U.N. membership today because of the ‘continuing presence and apparent influence of Cuban troops’ in the West African nation.” 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 14327-37  | Added on Monday, November 10, 2014, 09:20 PM

IF THE KEYNOTE OF THE preparations was ambivalence, the word that dominated the post hoc reflections was surprise. An AP special correspondent (“Nation’s Hunger to Feel Good Erupts in Fever of Patriotism”) exulted at how the day “turned out to be a big, warm surprise party. . . . The grim clichés of more than a decade—‘the American malaise,’ ‘the sick society’—were scarcely heard in the land, praise God.” Blacks were “less reproachful,” Indians less “militant,” the distaff sex “paused in her march to full equality” (a good thing!), the young were becoming “less critical.” Elizabeth Drew: “The feeling of the day sort of crept up on many of us, took us by surprise. There was a spirit to it that could not have been anticipated. For those of us who had been in despair about this Bicentennial Fourth of July, who feared the worst, the surprise was a very pleasing one . . . a lot of us have become so jaded that it is hard to believe that anything is real. But the politicians and the salesmen did not destroy the day—they became almost irrelevant. The celebrating seemed genuine. . . . the feelings came up on us when we least expected them.” 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 14341-50  | Added on Monday, November 10, 2014, 09:22 PM

ONE OF THE FEW DISSENTS came from an unusual source. A remarkable thing had taken place while Americans enjoyed their birthday party. For days a hundred Israeli commandos had been drilling painstakingly for “Operation Thunderbolt,” using a precise replica of Entebbe’s airport terminal; the model was based on intelligence gained from construction workers and interviews with released hostages. Late on Bicentennial eve, transport planes ferried the commandos 2,500 miles to Entebbe, Uganda; to avoid radar detection they were never more than a hundred feet above the sea and the land. On July 4 they set down with their planes’ cargo bays already opened, disgorging jeeps that they then drove to the terminal, dropping two Ugandan sentries with silenced pistols. They overpowered the Palestinian kidnappers and their Ugandan security force, then scooped up the hostages and loaded them into the rescue planes under enemy fire. Simultaneously three more cargo planes unloaded the armored personnel carriers whose forces disabled eleven Ugandan MiGs that might have pursued the rescued hostages as they winged their way to freedom. The whole thing took but an hour and a half—102 hostages rescued, only three killed. The Israelis lost only one commando. 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Bookmark Loc. 14360  | Added on Monday, November 10, 2014, 09:24 PM


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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 14360-65  | Added on Monday, November 10, 2014, 09:24 PM

Forces led by Jerry Brown’s state treasurer, Sam Brown, who had organized the Vietnam Moratorium demonstration in 1969, when some two million Americans stayed home from work or school on the same day to protest the war, came in demanding the endorsement of a “full and complete pardon” for all those in “legal or financial jeopardy” for evading the draft or deserting the military, and came away satisfied with an amendment merely promising pardon consideration on a case-by-case basis. (They also got a symbolic concession: a speech from the convention platform by the wheelchair-bound Vietnam veteran Ron Kovic, author of a forthcoming memoir, Born on the Fourth of July .) 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 14387-89  | Added on Monday, November 10, 2014, 09:26 PM

High Times, which began publication a year earlier, had been intended as a single-issue parody of Playboy (complete with a centerfold picture of a high-grade cannabis specimen). It was selling 550,000 copies a month by 1975. 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 14394-95  | Added on Monday, November 10, 2014, 09:27 PM

Carter had promised to end federal penalties for possession of less than an ounce of pot, eleven states having already decriminalized the stuff. 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 14413-17  | Added on Monday, November 10, 2014, 09:29 PM

The first keynote speaker was John Glenn, now a senator, formerly an astronaut—an old-fashioned sort of hero. (“Doubts? Fears? Lagging confidence? Well, no wonder. With all that has befallen us, a lesser nation might well have collapsed.”) The second keynoter was a new-fashioned sort of hero: Barbara Jordan, star of the House Judiciary Committee impeachment hearings two years earlier, who if anything topped her patriotic oration of 1974 (“My faith in the Constitution is whole, it is complete, it is total”). 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 14435-40  | Added on Monday, November 10, 2014, 09:31 PM

Hubert H. Humphrey: “The patriots of 1776 believed, and this party has always believed, that a democratic government must be an active force for the betterment of human life. But there are new Tories abroad in the land. And their words are newly fashionable. They appeal to cynicism. They cater to the people’s mistrust of their own institutions. . . . They tell us our afflictions will be healed if we but leave them alone—if we seek private gain rather than public good. . . . There was no room for the Tories in Philadelphia in 1776. And I say there is no room for them in New York in 1976 or in Washington in 1977.” 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 14453-56  | Added on Monday, November 10, 2014, 09:33 PM

Democrats went off to bed, six of them very nervously: Frank Church, John Glenn, Walter Mondale, Adlai Stevenson, Henry Jackson, and Edmund Muskie, who all got calls from Carter’s personal aide Greg Schneiders that they were under consideration to become Carter’s running mate, and would receive a call between 8:30 and 9 A.M. with his final decision. 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 14479-82  | Added on Monday, November 10, 2014, 09:36 PM

Carter hit it off with Walter “Fritz” Mondale, whom he’d met only twice before, in 1974 when the Minnesota senator dropped in on him in Atlanta, and earlier in 1976 on Capitol Hill. Carter liked that Mondale was a favorite with reporters, was popular with labor and liberals, and was a protégé of Hubert Humphrey, which gave Mondale points with the Establishment. A nice, safe, straddling choice. 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 14499-503  | Added on Monday, November 10, 2014, 09:38 PM

Mondale made his maiden speech, a post-Watergate jeremiad. The line that got the biggest applause of the night: “Roosevelt said that the presidency is preeminently a place of moral leadership. But we have just lived the Worst, Political, Scandal, in American history”— stab, stab, stab, went his finger with each word—“and are now led by a President who pardoned the person who did it.” 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 14525-28  | Added on Monday, November 10, 2014, 09:59 PM

“It’s time for our government leaders to respect the law no less than the humblest citizen”—he was interrupted with lusty cheers in the middle of the sentence—“so that we can end once and for all a double standard of justice. I see no reason—I see no reason!— why big-shot crooks should go free and the poor ones go to jail.” 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 14553-64  | Added on Monday, November 10, 2014, 10:01 PM

Another professional curmudgeon, Mike Royko of Chicago, believed, too. “I hate to get corny at this late date in a cynical life, but the arrival of Jimmy Carter at the affectionate, emotional bedlam of Madison Square Garden, staged as it all may have been, was one very memorable experience,” he began his syndicated column. “This was a guy who, less than two years ago, was almost considered some kind of kook. An unknown Southern local politician, a peanut-picker, a man with virtually no power base, setting out almost like a traveling salesman with a dream to be President of the United States. “Now he was walking into the convention hall of his party’s national convention to get the nomination, and the delegates, including most established powers, were on their feet cheering their heads off. Some were even crying. . . . “We’ve grown used to politicians appealing to our baser instincts. . . . But here comes this guy who dusts off an old word like love, and he managed to persuade the most cantankerous group of individuals in the country—the Democratic Party—to practically fall into each other’s arms. . . . It was the cornball American dream come true, and it was something to see and remember. . . . I hope he can be believed. We don’t need any more highly skillful liars. We’ve already been pushed to the brink of a national nervous breakdown by that. We deserve a break.” 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 14564-65  | Added on Monday, November 10, 2014, 10:01 PM

Harris polled the American people to see what they thought. They wanted Carter over Ford by 66 percent to 27, Carter over Reagan 68 to 26—the greatest postconvention margin ever. Which meant that Republicans and independents believed, too. 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 14843-50  | Added on Monday, November 10, 2014, 10:54 PM

So why would Ronald Reagan pick as a running mate a veritable stranger whose ideology by Reagan’s own words rendered him “false with the people who vote for” him? Surely because he wanted to win, and John Sears, who had gotten him this far, had told him this was what it would take to get there. But: then he had to rationalize this to himself—as a moral act, as a noble act, as an act consistent with what Ronald Reagan would do. And how did Ronald Reagan manage to do that? The same way he rationalized everything that did not accord with the world as he preferred it exist: he cast himself as hero. He told Schweiker at one point in their conversation, “I have a strong feeling that I’m looking at myself some years ago.” He would convert Richard Schweiker from liberal to conservative. After all, he had converted so many others. It was his gift; it was his grace. Everything would work out in the end, gloriously. 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 14869-71  | Added on Monday, November 10, 2014, 10:56 PM

Congressman John Ashbrook of Ohio, who had run a quixotic campaign from the right against Richard Nixon in New Hampshire in 1972, publicly called it “the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard of.” (Privately he had told the Reagan aide who called him with the news, “Reagan can plumb fuck himself,” then hung up.) 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 14882-84  | Added on Monday, November 10, 2014, 10:57 PM

But still, it worked, after a fashion. CBS’s previous plan for that evening’s newscast was for Walter Cronkite to announce that Ford had clinched the nomination. That might have ended things then and there. The Schweiker pick really had rescued Reagan. The question was how long the rescue would last. 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Bookmark Loc. 14943  | Added on Monday, November 10, 2014, 11:03 PM


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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 14941-45  | Added on Monday, November 10, 2014, 11:03 PM

a 1963 report said the research was “considered by many authorities in medicine and related fields to be professionally unethical”—leading to the inspiring conclusion, “Public disclosure of some aspects of MKULTRA activity could induce serious adverse reaction in U.S. public opinion.” A January 1975 “Memorandum for the Record,” signed simply “CIA Officer,” said, “Over my stated objection, the MKULTRA files were destroyed by order of the Director, Central Intelligence—Mr. Helms—shortly before his departure from office.” 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 14949-50  | Added on Monday, November 10, 2014, 11:04 PM

in February 1976, just to show that not all such fears turn out to be hoaxes, the H1NI virus—“swine flu”— killed an army recruit at Fort Dix, its first victim since 1919 (when it killed more Americans than died on the World War I battlefields). 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 15023-24  | Added on Monday, November 10, 2014, 11:12 PM

And here is what Evans and Novak had not understood: that Reagan’s refusal to wax morose about Watergate was not an impediment to his political appeal. It was central to his political appeal. 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 15028-33  | Added on Monday, November 10, 2014, 11:13 PM

And here was an answer to the Ford aide who was so frustrated that this campaign even had to be fought, even more frustrated that it had become so close. Every time a major distinction emerged between the two candidates, the nub was what kind of nation America was. The Panama Canal issue, for example. Ford’s argument was, fundamentally, that the world’s rules must apply to America as well, that the way America had all but annexed the sovereignty of another nation was an embarrassing and dangerous relic of another time. Reagan’s riposte: the world’s rules did not apply to America at all—for into the hands of America God has placed the destiny of an afflicted mankind. 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 15097-108  | Added on Monday, November 10, 2014, 11:20 PM

A PLATFORM FIGHT SEEMED THE smartest play. Whatever Ford’s delegate lead, this was, by any measure, a predominantly right-wing gathering. In one survey 63 percent of the delegates called themselves “conservatives,” up 10 percent from 1972, with the number who called themselves “liberals” dropping from 12 percent to 6. That was in part a function of a new rightward tilt in the nation’s electorate—but it was also due to a historical quirk. States that voted Republican in the previous presidential election got bonus delegates for the next convention—so that in 1964, when Goldwater won only six states, five of them in the Deep South and the sixth his native Arizona, those states were further advantaged in a delegate formula that already favored states with small, generally rural—hence conservative—populations. In 1971 the progressive Republican organization the Ripon Society sued on the grounds that such imbalance was unconstitutionally antidemocratic. (Conservatives, in turn, called the lawsuit antidemocratic—an attempt to win through the judiciary what couldn’t be won through grassroots political effort.) The suit made it all the way to the Supreme Court—which ruled that such things were up to the parties to decide. So the question was put to debate at the Republican convention in Miami Beach in 1972—and reformers, led by the moderate congressman William Steiger, lost in a floor vote, 910 to 434. (Nixon, who liked the rules as they were, did everything he could to fix the vote, including tapping the Ripon operatives’ phones.) 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 15120-26  | Added on Monday, November 10, 2014, 11:22 PM

MONDAY, AUGUST 9, WAS THE opening of the week for the Rules, Platform, and Credentials committee meetings. It was also the second anniversary of Richard Nixon’s helicopter ride to oblivion. Writers noted the connection when they described the trailers the campaigns were setting up in the convention parking lot: extensive temporary networks of secret communications lines to the delegations and leaders and whips on the convention floor: phones, television monitors, walkie-talkies—not unlike the listening post across the street from the Watergate used to monitor the Democratic National Committee, revealed when those Cubans were arrested that summer night in 1972. The lines were guarded by security cameras and swept daily for bugs. Because the Ford campaign’s phone lines had to pass beneath the Reagan trailer, they were encased in steel to guard against possible taps. 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 15214-18  | Added on Monday, November 10, 2014, 11:39 PM

Wrote columnist Charles Bartlett (sufficiently an insider to have once set up young Jacqueline Bouvier on a blind date with Senator John F. Kennedy), “Although a delusion is being floated that he is acting on his own, this has to be a Helms-Reagan strategy, because the two have taken the long, winding road together.” He described the scheme as “raising a series of nerve-tingling, party-splitting issues which will oblige the President to take positions on which a majority of the uncommitted delegates may not be willing to follow him.” He called that “burning down the house to roast the wienie,” 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 15229-30  | Added on Monday, November 10, 2014, 11:41 PM

But politics is about more than mathematics. It is also a matter of will. Polite Georgetown insiders didn’t like to admit this. 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 15236-39  | Added on Monday, November 10, 2014, 11:42 PM

This was some Sears-style cleverness of their own: Reagan delegates could defect to Buckley, signaling their frustration with the Reagan campaign while simultaneously denying Ford the nomination on the first ballot, forcing the Reagan campaign to capitulate to the “true” conservatives by the time of the second ballot, perhaps by dropping Schweiker. (“I think it’s a distinct possibility,” Helms said.) 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 15279-81  | Added on Monday, November 10, 2014, 11:46 PM

Liberals tend to get into the biggest political trouble when they presume that a reform is an inevitable concomitant of progress. This is when they are most unprepared for the blinding backlash that invariably ensues. 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 15436-38  | Added on Tuesday, November 11, 2014, 12:06 AM

The Washington Post went to press with the observation, “The spectacle of a President enduring such blatant pressure tactics from the party rank and file is mind-boggling to anyone who recalls the manner in which Mr. Ford’s two most immediate predecessors, Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard M. Nixon, lorded over their party convention.” 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 15523-26  | Added on Tuesday, November 11, 2014, 12:16 AM

But when Rockefeller began, a journalist said, “the convention’s enthusiasm pull[ed] back like a tide.” The public address system failed for a moment; Rockefeller later fumed that Dick Cheney must have pulled the plug. As for Goldwater, as he made his way to the podium, slowly, on crutches from a knee infection (he hadn’t even wanted to show up), the word “sellout!” rang out in the great hall. Afterward, in an interview, he sounded like Dr. Frankenstein surveying the work of his monster. 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 15526-29  | Added on Tuesday, November 11, 2014, 12:16 AM

His former supporters now working for Reagan, he said, were “some of the most vicious people I have ever known. If you waver an inch they call and write and say you’re a dirty s.o.b.” Extremism in defense of liberty: now a vice. Goldwater was gulping bourbon. He told his interviewer, “Reagan has become one of those people, the really ideological ones who won’t change.” 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 15554-61  | Added on Tuesday, November 11, 2014, 12:19 AM

Back in the arena, under the red Mississippi standard, Dent and Reagan’s leader in the delegation, Billy Mounger, were toe-to-toe, throwing hot words at one another, Dent arguing that the delegation was so divided they should hold a formal caucus to vote on its will. Other key players joined the scrum; like iron filings drawn to a magnet, reporters pulled toward them to listen in. The Magnolia State Republicans’ twenty-nine-year-old executive director, Haley Barbour, belted out the names of Mississippi’s eighty-two counties in backward alphabetical order, Yazoo to Adams, to safeguard the privacy of the deliberations. It didn’t work; the screaming was too loud. Mounger to Dent: “You’re not a member of this delegation! We don’t want a vote!” Dent to Mounger: “I know why you don’t want a vote! We’ve got the votes and you don’t!” 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 15567-72  | Added on Tuesday, November 11, 2014, 12:21 AM

The gavel sounded, closing the first evening’s session. At that, the Texas contingent joined forces with Reagan’s twenty-nine delegates in the Michigan delegation and charged through a Ford cocktail party in a sunken pit of the Crown Center Hotel lobby chanting, “We want Reagan! We want Reagan!” with hands outstretched in the “hook ’em horns” gesture, encircling the traitors, who joined the battle themselves: “Ford can win! Ford can win!” “We’re against Ford! We’re against Ford!” Grown men and women. The custodians of a major American political party. “The pandemonium,” Texas Monthly reported, “is total.” 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 15625-31  | Added on Tuesday, November 11, 2014, 12:28 AM

They had voted to keep the unit rule and, by three votes with one abstention, to vote their delegation as a bloc against 16-C—for, by inference, Gerald Ford. The word flashed across Kansas City that it just might be over, and the stampede to Ford could begin. Coincidentally, CBS News reported that for the first time since it had begun counting, Ford was over the top with 1,132 “firm or committed” delegates. The Reaganites at the Ramada streamed to the hotel pool, where they had hoped to enjoy a victory party. The cases of beer had been sent over with the compliments of conservative benefactor Joseph Coors. They flipped them open and drowned their sorrows before the evening’s full-convention debates and votes over the platform and the rules. IT 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 15661-64  | Added on Tuesday, November 11, 2014, 11:02 AM

He concluded: “I would hope that when the record of our service is finally written . . . up to the very end we resisted with every fiber of our being the oppressive hand of an all-powerful central and dominating government” (strange: as treasury secretary he’d been the architect of the biggest increase in government power since World War II, Nixon’s wage and price controls); “and up to that very end we had an abiding faith in an Almighty God and that there is more good than evil in man.” 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 15758-60  | Added on Tuesday, November 11, 2014, 11:14 AM

Just about the only person who was calm through the entire thing was Ronald Reagan. He watched it on television in his hotel suite, dissolving in laughter. Then, he saw a televised image of himself on television watching it on television—that doesn’t look good —and his smile disappeared. 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 15761-66  | Added on Tuesday, November 11, 2014, 11:14 AM

A PANIC SHOT THROUGH THE Ford skybox: Jim Baker handed Harry Dent a copy of the Birmingham News with the headline, “Ford Would Write Off the Cotton South,” which was apparently circulating through the Mississippi delegation they thought they’d sewn up. This was the sort of lightning-fast development that made conventions really interesting—that historians wrote about decades later, like when a mysterious “voice from the sewers” in Chicago in 1940 cried, “We want Roosevelt! We want Roosevelt!” and started the demonstration that stilled political doubts about whether Franklin Roosevelt should be nominated for an unprecedented third term. 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 15766-73  | Added on Tuesday, November 11, 2014, 11:15 AM

Mississippi Reagan partisans Pickering and Mounger brandished the paper, demanding a new caucus to dissolve the unit rule, which might just pry lose enough votes for Reagan to go over the top on 16-C, with the votes of thirty-one of sixty delegates plus alternates. But media hound Clarke Reed, the only one who could call a poll of the caucus, was detained in an interview with NBC, and Harry Dent, thinking fast, and moving fast—a close convention was about not only commanding time but mastering space—was able to dash up to where Mississippi’s thirty alternates were, those ambitious young professionals recruited by Reed who ended up being overwhelmingly for Ford, and told them not to budge from their seats. Ford quickly got on the horn and claimed to Reed that he’d be campaigning long and hard in Jimmy Carter’s home region. Harry Dent managed to spin the call for a poll of the caucus as such a dastardly dirty trick, that one of the last uncommitted Mississippi delegates unpinned a Ford badge from Dent’s lapel and—“That does it!”—pinned it on his own. 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 15773-74  | Added on Tuesday, November 11, 2014, 11:15 AM

So the last 16-C fire was doused—at the price of a pledge that the Republican Party would remain enthralled by the “Cotton South.” 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 15775-77  | Added on Tuesday, November 11, 2014, 11:16 AM

Debate time expired. The Idaho chairman was recognized and called for the vote. It was alphabetical, Ford having tried and failed in a rules challenge to get states called randomly. That was because Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, California, and Colorado were all Reagan-heavy states. And that meant the suspense continued, as Reagan rocketed ahead. 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 15785-87  | Added on Tuesday, November 11, 2014, 11:17 AM

“THE FIRST ABORTION DEBATE AT a national political convention started at 1:15 a.m.,” the feminist Republican activist Tanya Melich later recounted. “Just as the Ford campaign wished.” 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 15796-805  | Added on Tuesday, November 11, 2014, 02:08 PM

Millicent Fenwick tried to get recognition to call a roll-call vote on the question; the feminists wanted their adversaries on the record on national television. But that could be politically embarrassing for the president. The rules allowed a roll call by written request, which Fenwick sought recognition to present. But Arizona congressman John Rhodes, who had spelled Dole as chairman, said time had expired, and wouldn’t call on her. “A phalanx of people surrounded him,” Melich wrote, “and several strong-armed men blocked our page from giving him Fenwick’s note.” Rhodes called a voice vote; Melich thought she heard her side’s “ayes” as having been overwhelming. Not the chair, though. The language of the platform draft would stand: It called for “public dialogue on abortion”—but also endorsed a “constitutional amendment to restore protection of the right to life for unborn children.” However, that was a development of interest mostly to history. Once more the abortion fight got little coverage. Either outcome of it would have had no bearing on the question that mattered most: who would the Republicans nominate? And despite the 16-C outcome, the Reagan camp nurtured hope for the big prize. 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 15813-24  | Added on Tuesday, November 11, 2014, 02:10 PM

Richard Bruce Cheney of Casper, Wyoming, had begun his Washington career in 1969 at the age of twenty-eight interning in the office of moderate congressman William Steiger from Wisconsin, having dropped out of a doctoral program in political science at the university in Madison. In the Nixon White House he apprenticed himself to another moderate, Donald Rumsfeld, who headed Nixon’s Office of Economic Opportunity; Cheney then followed Rumsfeld to the Ford White House, first as chief of staff, then (after Rumsfeld engineered the “Halloween Massacre”) as secretary of defense. Cheney’s defining passion in Ford’s White House was his rage at Congress’s Watergate-era reassertion of power against the executive branch and the national security state. One of his ideas had been to been to appoint Robert Bork, the former acting attorney general who’d fired Archibald Cox, as the new CIA director (“a strong team player,” Rumsfeld called him). Another was to burglarize Seymour Hersh’s apartment for his exposés on the CIA. He’d also been the most aggressive advocate for a White House meeting with Solzhenitsyn. Like his mentor Rumsfeld he was a masterful bureaucratic infighter, which was how, after taking Rumsfeld’s place as chief of staff in the Halloween Massacre, he had managed to also insinuate himself now, in effect, as Ford’s campaign manager. From that perch he argued to the candidate that the platforms didn’t mean anything; he should just swallow the “Morality in Foreign Policy” plank because if he fought it the nomination might slip out of his grasp. 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 15827-31  | Added on Tuesday, November 11, 2014, 02:11 PM

Ford yielded to Cheney’s argument. They called no witnesses in opposition to the Reagan amendment. Voice vote; the ayes had it. Which was how, by the time weary delegates were finally able to go to bed, in addition to becoming the first American party to go on the record against abortion they were now the first to revile détente. Jim Lake, Reagan’s press secretary, later reflected that they should have made its language stronger—“an outright sock in the jaw.” James Baker said that would have been the right play: make it two words, “fire Kissinger,” and the football just might have been tipped. 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 15878-81  | Added on Tuesday, November 11, 2014, 02:16 PM

Elizabeth Drew of the New Yorker struggled with herself, dropping objectivity, outing herself—“we”—as a partisan, an enemy of passion itself: “We tend to think this is OK because we think Ford is OK, safe. But what are the real distinctions among political emotions? Some of the most menacing political figures in the history of the world have used stadiums and bands to whip up their followers.” 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 15917-22  | Added on Tuesday, November 11, 2014, 02:28 PM

Then, Mary McGrory observed a little cruelly, “The unexpected appearance of a black woman, Gloria Toote of New York, as a seconder, quieted them down.” So did the nineteen seconding speeches for Gerald Ford, which began at twenty minutes before midnight. The candidate of boredom. The candidate of calm. He got 1,187 votes on the roll call to 1,070 for Reagan; West Virginia put him over the top at 1:25 A.M. When the chairman moved to make it unanimous, Ray Barnhart of Texas, the guy who’d called Betty Ford’s dance with Tony Orlando “bad taste,” fought his way to the floor microphone and shouted, “No! No! No! No! No!” 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 15929-32  | Added on Tuesday, November 11, 2014, 02:29 PM

Dole was a conservative, which was why Gerald Ford chose him—so Ronald Reagan would sign off on him. Dole himself had half-expected to be picked by Reagan, and had even sent feelers to Lyn Nofziger regarding the job. He later described himself as having been “Schweikered.” Later, sources revealed that Ford had wanted Ruckelshaus. But Reagan didn’t want him—and that was that. 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 15942-45  | Added on Tuesday, November 11, 2014, 02:31 PM

Reagan opened, as usual, with a joke: “Backstage politics is like looking at civilization with its pants down.” He acknowledged their tears: “Sure, there’s disappointment in what happened, but the cause—the cause goes on.” Reagan, too, was fighting back tears. 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 15945-50  | Added on Tuesday, November 11, 2014, 02:31 PM

“It’s just one battle in a long war, and it will go on as long as we all wage it. . . . The cause is still there.” He quoted his favorite English ballad, from Dryden: “Though I am wounded, I am not slain; I shall rise and fight again.” He promised he and Nancy “are not just going to go back and sit in a rocking chair and say, ‘That’s all for us’ ”—and neither should you: “Don’t give up on your ideals. Don’t get cynical. Look at yourself and realize all you were willing to do, and realize there are millions of Americans out there who feel as you do—who want it to be the shining city on the hill.” 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 15952-58  | Added on Tuesday, November 11, 2014, 02:32 PM

A GIANT PAINTING OF GERALD Ford hung from the ceiling for the last session. A reporter thought it “depicted Ford’s smile as a primate’s sneer.” The roll call of the states yielded 1,921 votes for Bob Dole and 338 for others, including Reagan, William F. Buckley, John Sears, William Simon, Reagan’s young conservative staffer David Keene—and forty-one for Jesse Helms, whose name was officially placed in nomination by Bob Bauman. The move recalled a signal moment in conservative history. Barry Goldwater’s name had been placed in nomination in 1960, allowing the Arizonan to give a speech refusing the honor, making a call to arms, and offering a promissory note—“Let’s grow up, conservatives. If we want to take this party back, and I think we can someday, let’s get back to work”—that was redeemed four years later in 1964. 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Bookmark Loc. 15964  | Added on Tuesday, November 11, 2014, 02:34 PM


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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 15963-72  | Added on Tuesday, November 11, 2014, 02:34 PM

And now it was a convention in which Senator Jesse Helms had a prime-time televised speaking spot, and he was milking it for all it was worth: What we do here . . . can be the prelude to a sort of spiritual rebirth across this land. The American people believe in God, and now is the time for us to show it. The American people are worried about the forces in our society that seem to be tearing down the moral fabric of our nation, particularly as it is centered around the family, and they see government as threatening the moral order, and they are concerned about the secularization of education as though God didn’t matter in the classroom. They are worried about the textbooks and the federal government’s manipulation of the curriculum. In other words, our platform, the one we adopted here this week, speaks to the concerns of the American people. . . . It is our covenant, it is our pledge, and we must live up to it.” The New Right had arrived. This wasn’t Gerald Ford’s show. 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 15990-97  | Added on Tuesday, November 11, 2014, 02:36 PM

Ford turned to the subject of August 9, 1974, when “I placed my hand on the Bible, which Betty held, and took the same constitutional oath that was administered to George Washington. I had faith in our people, our institutions, and in myself. ‘My fellow Americans,’ I said, ‘our long national nightmare is over.’ It was an hour in our history that troubled our minds and tore at our hearts. Anger and hatred had risen to dangerous levels, dividing friends and families. The polarization of our political order had aroused unworthy passions of reprisal and revenge. Our governmental system was closer to stalemate than at any time since Abraham Lincoln took the same oath of office. Our economy was in the throes of runaway inflation, taking us headlong into the worst recession since Franklin D. Roosevelt took the same oath.” He spoke, then, of a marble fireplace in the White House carved with a prayer written by John Adams. “It concludes, ‘May none but honest and wise men rule under this roof.’ 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 16030-35  | Added on Tuesday, November 11, 2014, 02:40 PM

Nancy Reagan recollected for a documentary camera that Reagan’s words to her when he finally made his way out of the box were “I haven’t the foggiest idea of what I’m going to say!” Which is to say, it was a surprise to everyone, an improvisation, this spectacle of Ford granting Reagan this opportunity to speak. Elizabeth Drew reported in authoritative tones: “The President’s aides were reluctant to have him do so, in order to make sure that Reagan did not cause the President to suffer by contrast.” And as Mr. and Mrs. Reagan finally completed the long odyssey from skybox to stage, the cheers indeed seemed so much louder than the ones that had come before for Ford. 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 16045-47  | Added on Tuesday, November 11, 2014, 02:41 PM

That got a massive ovation. And since that no-pale-pastels platform was more his, some said, than Ford’s, it sounded like some kind of declaration of victory—a declaration that it was he, and his minions, who had delivered the nation this newly revitalized Republican Party. 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 16049-62  | Added on Tuesday, November 11, 2014, 02:42 PM

Then he launched into a story. It was lovely—amazing, really. Even more amazing given all the evidence that he was apparently spinning this all out on the fly: I had an assignment the other day. Someone asked me to write a letter for a time capsule that is going to be opened in Los Angeles a hundred years from now, on our Tricentennial. It sounded like an easy assignment. They suggested I write something about the problems and issues of the day. And I said I could do so. Riding down the coast in an automobile, looking at the blue Pacific on one side and the Santa Ynez Mountains on the other, and I couldn’t help but wonder if it was going to be that beautiful a hundred years from now as it was on that summer day. Then, as I tried to write—let your own minds turn to that task: you’re going to write for people a hundred years from now who know all about us, we know nothing about them; we don’t know what kind of a world they’ll be living in. And suddenly I thought to myself as I wrote of the problems: they’ll be the domestic problems of which the President spoke here tonight; the challenges confronting us—the erosion of freedom that has taken place under Democrat rule in this country; the invasion of private rights; the controls and restrictions on the vitality of the great free economy that we enjoy. These are our challenges that we must meet. And then again there is that challenge of which he spoke, that we live in a world in which the great powers have poised and aimed at each other horrible missiles of destruction— 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 16065-66  | Added on Tuesday, November 11, 2014, 02:42 PM

—nuclear weapons that can in a matter of minutes arrive in each other’s country and destroy, virtually, the civilized world we live in. And suddenly it dawned on me— 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 16069-70  | Added on Tuesday, November 11, 2014, 02:42 PM

—those who would read this letter a hundred years from now will know whether those missiles were fired. They will know whether we met our challenge. 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 16072-75  | Added on Tuesday, November 11, 2014, 02:42 PM

Whether they had the freedom that we have known up until now will depend on what we do here. Will they look back with appreciation and say, thank God for those people in 1976 who headed off that loss of freedom, who kept us now a hundred years later free, who kept our world from nuclear destruction? And if we fail, they probably won’t get to read the letter at all because it spoke of individual freedom and they won’t be allowed to talk of that or read it. 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 16077-81  | Added on Tuesday, November 11, 2014, 02:42 PM

This is our challenge. And this is why we are here in this hall tonight. Better than we’ve ever done before, we’ve got to quit talking to each other and about each other and go out and communicate to the world that we may be fewer in numbers than we’ve ever been, but we carry the message they’ve been waiting for. We must go forth from here united, determined that what a great general said a few years ago was true: there is no substitute for victory. 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 16091-93  | Added on Tuesday, November 11, 2014, 02:44 PM

Reporters scrawling: Elizabeth Drew wrote that Reagan spoke “more effectively than I ever before heard him speak.” She spoke for the consensus of reporters—awed at how Reagan could pull together such inspiring remarks on the fly. 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 16098-103  | Added on Tuesday, November 11, 2014, 02:45 PM

VIC GOLD, THE POLITICAL PUBLIC relations expert, a sardonic debunker, the guy who knew all the backstage magicians and lived to expose their bags of tricks, wrote in a book he published the next year, PR as in President, about the meeting that took place between Reagan and Ford the Monday evening of the convention, where the governor accepted the president’s invitation to speak to the convention that Thursday night. Which is to say the speech was never spontaneous at all. “Carruthers’ problem”—Bill Carruthers, the Ford campaign’s stage-management wizard—“was where to fit the Reagan speech into his closing night ceremonies.” 
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The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein)
- Highlight Loc. 16487-93  | Added on Tuesday, November 11, 2014, 03:06 PM

to reconstruct the story of the return of the Vietnam War POWs and to document Ronald Reagan’s relative absence from the national political discussion in 1973–74, I spent a dazzling week at the Vanderbilt Television News Archive, where I’d spend half my life if I could. It’s the closest thing we mortals will ever get to being inside a time machine: every single second of every single network newscast is fully accessible on a computer screen within seconds, just like it was YouTube. And although the catalogue is available and searchable online, the actual videos are not, because the networks consider them intellectual property, not what they actually are: part of our nation’s historical patrimony. So I link to the archive’s record of the relevant newscasts, though to actually watch them requires a trip to Nashville, which I heartily recommend. 
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The Autobiography of a Corpse

Autobiography of a Corpse (New York Review Books Classics) (Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky)
- Highlight on Page 74 | Loc. 1395-1403  | Added on Sunday, November 09, 2014, 07:36 PM

“Well, I was just wondering—you’ll think it’s silly—how many footsteps there are in an asphalt cauldron. Understand? How many footsteps? Moscow is full of people walking somewhere. Like the two of us now: walking along, then ‘goodbye-goodbye’— and that’s it. Whereas our footsteps—I mean our footprints, until the first wind or broom—will remain. Think how many, many footprints have been trampled into the asphalt, footprints on top of footprints, till they’ve worn holes through to the ground. Then both footsteps and asphalt are dumped into a cauldron and stirred with a steel spoon, as in a folktale— in folktales, you know, they practice witchcraft with footprints and even cut them out. So now listen: If every once in a while, once in a lifetime, say, everything that man, that people had trampled underfoot, sullied, sinned against, and lied about could be swept up into a pile and thrown into a furnace and burned, you understand, burned, so that it all went up in smoke, then life could begin again. From the beginning.” 
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Autobiography of a Corpse (New York Review Books Classics) (Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky)
- Highlight on Page 78 | Loc. 1461-66  | Added on Sunday, November 09, 2014, 07:41 PM

But sometimes one figment wasn’t enough for me, so for conversation and companionship I invented Dr. Schrott. The real Dr. Schrott lived somewhere at some point, but I never knew him. I first heard of him from an odd fellow whose abundant good health compelled him to take constant cures. Dr. Schrott, he said, had invented a panacea: a hunger cure. I had no use for it at the time, but when my circumstances suddenly changed and I switched to a ten-kopeck regimen, I dug up Dr. Schrott (forgotten at the bottom of my memory like an inflatable pillow folded in six and buried at the bottom of a rucksack), unfolded him, and blew him up to size, so to speak, to capacity. Now I had only to close the air valve and make use of my phantasm. 
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Autobiography of a Corpse (New York Review Books Classics) (Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky)
- Highlight on Page 79 | Loc. 1472-73  | Added on Sunday, November 09, 2014, 07:42 PM

At first we met mainly in dreams, but later on we also met outside of dreams. Wherever and whenever we met, the worthy Dr. Schrott would touch my palm with his bony fingers and inspect me from head to toe. 
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Autobiography of a Corpse (New York Review Books Classics) (Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky)
- Highlight on Page 84 | Loc. 1542-49  | Added on Sunday, November 09, 2014, 07:48 PM

When Leibniz, the inventor of optimism and the legend about the best of all possible worlds, became ill, his obliging mind instantly devised a machine—a cunning construct of clamps, screws, and wooden laths—to deaden the pain. Whenever the pain invaded his thinking and prevented him from writing about the harmony of monads, Leibniz, aided by a manservant (so his secretary Eckhart tells us), would apply to his person those specially made braces—of wood and iron—and order the screws tightened: The laths would clamp the pain, and the optimist would go on with his work. That machine to clamp pain is, in essence, a model of the world invented by Leibniz. Loosen the screws, release the “I” from the complex chain of things gripping it, and the unclamped pain will again swell and spread, destroying the preestablished harmony , faith, and all that comes after. 
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Autobiography of a Corpse (New York Review Books Classics) (Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky)
- Highlight on Page 85 | Loc. 1571-79  | Added on Sunday, November 09, 2014, 07:50 PM

So then, dead silence, like the silence in this graveyard; people massed by the barrier, all eyes on the board. Two players hunched over the board. Carved figures inside the little squares. And not a sound: behind the barrier, at the board, on the board. I’m a poor judge of positional chess. As I recall, the only piece that interested me was a tiny pawn clad in glossy black. As if to break free of the game, the pawn strode two squares over the front line to stand alone and isolated among empty squares. The game was being played on the king’s flank, gradually concentrating on the f-file. Attack—counterattack. Then suddenly, in response to a jump by white’s knight to cover white’s exposed f3, black, as if meaning to lose a tempo , advanced its seemingly forgotten and doomed pawn on the d-file: The little hop-o’-my-thumb strode boldly from black square to white, leaving itself open to attack. Now only a diagonal move by black’s queen might defend it; but the queen, as if on purpose, stepped aside, leaving the pawn on the d-file in mortal danger. My heart, silly as it sounds, began to beat faster, as though that black hop-o’-my-thumb were somehow necessary and dear to me. 
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Autobiography of a Corpse (New York Review Books Classics) (Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky)
- Highlight on Page 88 | Loc. 1613-14  | Added on Sunday, November 09, 2014, 08:03 PM

It was nearly dark when I returned to my manuscript. The letters, now quiet on their numbered pages, peered up from the lines like gnarled black gnomes. I stuffed them in my pocket; the clock hand was creeping toward nine. 
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Autobiography of a Corpse (New York Review Books Classics) (Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky)
- Highlight on Page 95 | Loc. 1715-21  | Added on Sunday, November 09, 2014, 08:13 PM

The spark-like flash from an electric machine lasts only 1/50,000th of a second. But it remains in the eye for one-seventh of a second. Thus seven fleeting flashes, separated by pauses of almost one-seventh of a second, will be perceived by the eye as a continuous, second-long flash. Yet the actual flashes take up only 7/50,000ths of a second. In other words, for 49,993/50,000ths of the length of the experiment there is darkness perceived as light. Do you understand? Now extend that second to a minute, the minute to an hour, the hour to a year, to a century, turn that flash into the sun, and it turns out that the sun may be taken out of orbit for 99/100ths of a day and we, who live under that sun, won’t notice—you understand—we won’t even notice and, cast into darkness, will rejoice in an illusory sun and an illusory day. 
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Autobiography of a Corpse (New York Review Books Classics) (Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky)
- Highlight on Page 96 | Loc. 1732-33  | Added on Sunday, November 09, 2014, 08:15 PM

What’s more, none of my subjects—students from a physics seminar—knew what was wanted of them. But then we none of us, subjects all in daily experiments with the sun, know what is wanted of us. 
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Autobiography of a Corpse (New York Review Books Classics) (Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky)
- Highlight on Page 98 | Loc. 1769-74  | Added on Sunday, November 09, 2014, 08:17 PM

“I took a mechanical step forward. But having taken that step, I thought: Where? I remembered: not right away and not without effort. Now I knew what was missing. My heart was strangely empty and light. I remembered everything about ‘her,’ from the vibrations of her voice to the flutter of her eyelashes; I could see her waiting there, around the bend, yet I could not understand why I needed her: so unlike me; so like everyone else. Yes, the black crack, having closed up, had restored all things, all but one: Ripped from my heart and cast into the night along with suns and planets, it had not found its way back; the sun was again in the sky, the earth was again in its orbit, but that thing was missing—the crack had swallowed it. 
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Autobiography of a Corpse (New York Review Books Classics) (Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky)
- Highlight on Page 100 | Loc. 1796-98  | Added on Sunday, November 09, 2014, 08:19 PM

The ocean has its ebb tides, and so does being. The feeling of being may be conveyed in two ways: as ‘I am’ and ‘there is.’ ‘I’ knows itself as ‘I am’; ‘not-I’ is known to it as ‘there is.’ 
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Autobiography of a Corpse (New York Review Books Classics) (Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky)
- Highlight on Page 101 | Loc. 1808-16  | Added on Sunday, November 09, 2014, 08:20 PM

“I must go,” he said. Lövenix turned toward me. At last I could see his face: Slightly puffy, with a bold gash-like mouth, it was somehow sharpened and translucent; only in the glow of his motionless but burning eyes did there lurk some ineradicable life. I seemed to recall having seen that face and gaze before, in an old engraving in a book from someone’s long-flown life. “But you haven’t finished . . .” “One can never finish. My point is this: If there is no single thread of time, if being is not continuous, if ‘the universe is not whole’ but cloven by cracks into odd, unrelated pieces, then all those textbook ethics based on the principle of responsibility, on the connectedness of my tomorrow with my yesterday, all fall away and are replaced by a single crackist ethic. The formula? Just this: For everything left behind the crack, I, who have stepped over the crack, am not responsible. I am here, the deed is there, behind me. I and what I have done are in different worlds, and between those worlds there are no windows. Oh, that I realized long ago. 
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Autobiography of a Corpse (New York Review Books Classics) (Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky)
- Highlight on Page 109 | Loc. 1926-28  | Added on Sunday, November 09, 2014, 11:41 PM

One Not adept began thus: “I think, therefore I am.” But existence is not a consequence of thought—thought is a consequence of existence. 
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Autobiography of a Corpse (New York Review Books Classics) (Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky)
- Highlight on Page 110 | Loc. 1936-44  | Added on Sunday, November 09, 2014, 11:44 PM

Thus one wise Not withdrew from the world of ostensibilities to a small quiet study where he spent long years in solitary reflection without ever opening his window on the “outside world”; he became estranged from that world from which he had cut himself off with his sensorium and thinking. Then one day, wandering up to the window by chance, he remembered that world outside and pulled the cord of the blind. Imagine the Not’s surprise when out the window he saw no world at all, as if the whole world, lambent with stars and suns, clad in green and azure, had fallen away, had come unstuck from the panes like a cheap paste-on picture washed off by the rain. Still clutching the cord, the scholar stared into the yawning darkness. There was absolutely no doubt: This was nothing, the most ordinary nothing. The scholar let go of the cord—the blind rustled down. Then he went to his writing table and set to work on what would become his famous treatise arguing that the outside world is just a bad habit of the so-called nervous system . 
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Autobiography of a Corpse (New York Review Books Classics) (Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky)
- Highlight Loc. 3601-4  | Added on Sunday, November 09, 2014, 11:46 PM

In his Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (1710), the Irish philosopher George Berkeley argues that the outside world exists only through being perceived: “All the choir of heaven and furniture of the earth, in a word all those bodies which compose the mighty frame of the world, have not any subsistence without a mind, their being is to be perceived or known.” 
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Autobiography of a Corpse (New York Review Books Classics) (Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky)
- Highlight on Page 110 | Loc. 1944-46  | Added on Sunday, November 09, 2014, 11:47 PM

True, naysayers maintained that the “fact” substantiating this treatise was easily explained. The window shutters were closed, a circumstance that the absentminded philosopher had forgotten when he raised the blind: He mistook wooden shutters painted black for the outside world and jumped to conclusions. It happens. 
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Autobiography of a Corpse (New York Review Books Classics) (Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky)
- Highlight on Page 110 | Loc. 1948-49  | Added on Sunday, November 09, 2014, 11:47 PM

But these are isolated cases. As a rule, as I’ve said, the Nots, who came into Being owing to some incomprehensible oversight or error, must naturally fear and do fear the truth since the truth is something that, in its very essence, annuls all Nots. 
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Autobiography of a Corpse (New York Review Books Classics) (Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky)
- Highlight on Page 111 | Loc. 1955-61  | Added on Sunday, November 09, 2014, 11:49 PM

Here I must acquaint you, my worthy Ises, with an alien concept specific to Nots—death. Although Nots do contrive at times with extreme naturalness to feign existence, this hoax is exposed sooner or later by what they call “death.” The Not—who supposedly existed only a moment ago—suddenly weakens, becomes still, stops feigning life, and ceases to be: The truth bursts forth. Over the so-called grave of the Not now exposed by death, as yet unexposed Nots sing something about “eternal memory,” speak about the soul’s immortality, and so on, but neither the speakers nor the listeners believe this; “eternal memory” is usually forgotten in a few revolutions of the hour hand. Some Nots, the most ambitious ones, cling to their “immortal name,” but a name is a just a handful of letters and scarcely worth discussing. 
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Autobiography of a Corpse (New York Review Books Classics) (Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky)
- Highlight on Page 115 | Loc. 2017-22  | Added on Sunday, November 09, 2014, 11:55 PM

The most anti-existential aspect of the Nots is their reason, that builder of multiple multiplicities: “thus,” “therefore,” and so on. In the Land of Nots even a pitiful cactus grows from root to spine; yet a Not’s thought, tucked inside eight interlocking bones that form the “head,” tends from spine to root, flows from effect to cause, contrary to all of Nature, which flows from cause to effect, which spurs growth from roots to leaves. Upon receiving a stimulus (a shot, as it were) from without, the Not’s “reason” turns all perceptions upside down, thinks against the current of time, turning to “before” only after “after,” moving from effect to cause. 
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Autobiography of a Corpse (New York Review Books Classics) (Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky)
- Highlight Loc. 3614-16  | Added on Sunday, November 09, 2014, 11:57 PM

The title of this story derives from a Russian idiom—blizok lokot, da ne ukusish: literally, “your elbow is near, but you can’t bite it”—used to denote something that seems easily doable and within reach but is actually undoable and out of reach. “So near and yet so far” is the rough English equivalent. 
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Autobiography of a Corpse (New York Review Books Classics) (Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky)
- Highlight on Page 116 | Loc. 2036-43  | Added on Sunday, November 09, 2014, 11:59 PM

I did not remain long in the Nots’ little world. Pushing on farther and farther, deeper and deeper into the wastes of Nothing, I left the Not land where shadows are cast by things, and reached a world where, rather than shadows by things, things are cast by shadows, where the sun barely rises above the arc of the horizon, fumbling the quavery contours of things with its weak and tremulous rays. I now entered the Dead Land where there are neither suns nor things—only an eternal whirling and silent creeping of shadows. Here the sadness that had come over me while still in the Land of Nots became unbearable: I pictured my distant, dazzling homeland and you, my real and undoubted Ises, far away, beyond the wastes of the worlds—and I turned back. Again I crossed the worlds—the world of shadows, timidly trembling at the feet of things (here I bid my Not acquaintances a final farewell)—and at last I reached the land where things have no shadows, where everything is flooded with a light forever at its zenith. 
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The Peripheral

The Peripheral (William Gibson)
- Highlight on Page 9 | Loc. 222-23  | Added on Tuesday, November 11, 2014, 07:27 PM

Camera down giving her the white rectangle of the van, shrinking in the street below. Camera up, the building towered away forever, a cliff the size of the world. 
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The Peripheral (William Gibson)
- Highlight on Page 144 | Loc. 1868-71  | Added on Wednesday, November 12, 2014, 07:45 PM

“Indeed,” said Lowbeer. “The use of explosives is unusual, and we prefer to keep it so. Too much like asymmetric warfare.” “Terrorism,” said the rental. “We prefer not to use that term,” said Lowbeer, studying her candle flame with something that looked to Netherton to be regret, “if only because terror should remain the sole prerogative of the state.” 
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The Peripheral (William Gibson)
- Highlight on Page 282 | Loc. 3535-36  | Added on Thursday, November 13, 2014, 09:53 PM

“Eras are conveniences, particularly for those who never experienced them. We carve history from totalities beyond our grasp. Bolt labels on the result. Handles. Then speak of the handles as though they were things in themselves.” 
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The Peripheral (William Gibson)
- Highlight on Page 321 | Loc. 4010-15  | Added on Thursday, November 13, 2014, 10:44 PM

No comets crashing, nothing you could really call a nuclear war. Just everything else, tangled in the changing climate: droughts, water shortages, crop failures, honeybees gone like they almost were now, collapse of other keystone species, every last alpha predator gone, antibiotics doing even less than they already did, diseases that were never quite the one big pandemic but big enough to be historic events in themselves. And all of it around people: how people were, how many of them there were, how they’d changed things just by being there. The shadows on the lawn were black holes, bottomless, or like velvet had been spread, perfectly flat. 
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The Peripheral (William Gibson)
- Highlight on Page 321 | Loc. 4015-22  | Added on Thursday, November 13, 2014, 10:45 PM

But science, he said, had been the wild card, the twist. With everything stumbling deeper into a ditch of shit, history itself become a slaughterhouse, science had started popping. Not all at once, no one big heroic thing, but there were cleaner, cheaper energy sources, more effective ways to get carbon out of the air, new drugs that did what antibiotics had done before, nanotechnology that was more than just car paint that healed itself or camo crawling on a ball cap. Ways to print food that required much less in the way of actual food to begin with. So everything, however deeply fucked in general, was lit increasingly by the new, by things that made people blink and sit up, but then the rest of it would just go on, deeper into the ditch. A progress accompanied by constant violence, he said, by sufferings unimaginable. She felt him stretch past that, to the future where he lived, then pull himself there, quick, unwilling to describe the worst of what had happened, would happen. 
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The Peripheral (William Gibson)
- Highlight on Page 322 | Loc. 4029-37  | Added on Thursday, November 13, 2014, 10:47 PM

“What about China?” The Wheelie Boy’s tablet creaked faintly, raising the angle of its camera. “They’d had a head start,” he said. “At what?” “At how the world would work, after the jackpot. This,” and the tablet creaked again, surveying her mother’s lawn, “is still ostensibly a democracy. A majority of empowered survivors, considering the jackpot, and no doubt their own positions, wanted none of that. Blamed it, in fact.” “Who runs it, then?” “Oligarchs, corporations, neomonarchists. Hereditary monarchies provided conveniently familiar armatures. Essentially feudal, according to its critics. Such as they are.” “The King of England?” “The City of London,” he said. “The Guilds of the City. In alliance with people like Lev’s father. Enabled by people like Lowbeer.” “The whole world’s funny?” She remembered Lowbeer saying that. “The klept,” he said, misunderstanding her, “isn’t funny at all.” 
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The Peripheral (William Gibson)
- Highlight on Page 329 | Loc. 4121-22  | Added on Thursday, November 13, 2014, 10:58 PM

“Conspiracy theory’s got to be simple. Sense doesn’t come into it. People are more scared of how complicated shit actually is than they ever are about whatever’s supposed to be behind the conspiracy.” 
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The Peripheral (William Gibson)
- Highlight on Page 389 | Loc. 4875-79  | Added on Friday, November 14, 2014, 12:58 AM

“Totally looks like somebody,” she said. It really did. It was the opposite of something they’d build to meet some general idea of beauty. And if she understood correctly, nobody knew who it looked like. It was like the pictures in a box at a yard sale, nobody remembering who those people were, or even whose family, let alone how they came to be there. It gave her a sense of things falling, down some hole that had no bottom. Whole worlds falling, and maybe hers too, and it made her want to phone Janice, who was out at the house, and see how her mother was doing. 
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History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 (Edward Gibbon)
- Highlight on Page 374 | Loc. 5435-38  | Added on Saturday, November 15, 2014, 02:21 PM

The first considerable action of his reign seemed to evince his sincerity as well as his moderation. After the example of Marcus, he gave himself a colleague in the person of Maximian, on whom he bestowed at first the title of Cæsar, and afterwards that of Augustus. But the motives of his conduct, as well as the object of his choice, were of a very different nature from those of his admired predecessor.
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History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 (Edward Gibbon)
- Highlight on Page 374 | Loc. 5440-43  | Added on Saturday, November 15, 2014, 02:21 PM

Maximian was born a peasant, and, like Aurelian, in the territory of Sirmium. Ignorant of letters, careless of laws, the rusticity of his appearance and manners still betrayed in the most elevated fortune the meanness of his extraction. War was the only art which he professed. In a long course of service, he had distinguished himself on every frontier of the empire;
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History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 (Edward Gibbon)
- Highlight on Page 374 | Loc. 5444-46  | Added on Saturday, November 15, 2014, 02:22 PM

Nor were the vices of Maximian less useful to his benefactor. Insensible to pity, and fearless of consequences, he was the ready instrument of every act of cruelty which the policy of that artful prince might at once suggest and disclaim.
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History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 (Edward Gibbon)
- Highlight on Page 374 | Loc. 5451-53  | Added on Saturday, November 15, 2014, 02:22 PM

From a motive either of pride or superstition, the two emperors assumed the titles, the one of Jovius, the other of Herculius. Whilst the motion of the world (such was the language of their venal orators) was maintained by the all-seeing wisdom of Jupiter, the invincible arm of Hercules purged the earth from monsters and tyrants.
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History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 (Edward Gibbon)
- Highlight on Page 374 | Loc. 5454-58  | Added on Saturday, November 15, 2014, 02:23 PM

But even the omnipotence of Jovius and Herculius was insufficient to sustain the weight of the public administration. The prudence of Diocletian discovered that the empire, assailed on every side by the barbarians, required on every side the presence of a great army, and of an emperor. With this view, he resolved once more to divide his unwieldy power, and with the inferior title of Cæsars, * to confer on two generals of approved merit an unequal share of the sovereign authority. Galerius, surnamed Armentarius, from his original profession of a herdsman, and Constantius, who from his pale complexion had acquired the denomination of Chlorus, were the two persons invested with the second honors of the Imperial purple.
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History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 (Edward Gibbon)
- Highlight on Page 374 | Loc. 5463-68  | Added on Saturday, November 15, 2014, 02:25 PM

To strengthen the bonds of political, by those of domestic, union, each of the emperors assumed the character of a father to one of the Cæsars, Diocletian to Galerius, and Maximian to Constantius; and each, obliging them to repudiate their former wives, bestowed his daughter in marriage or his adopted son. These four princes distributed among themselves the wide extent of the Roman empire. The defence of Gaul, Spain, and Britain, was intrusted to Constantius: Galerius was stationed on the banks of the Danube, as the safeguard of the Illyrian provinces. Italy and Africa were considered as the department of Maximian; and for his peculiar portion, Diocletian reserved Thrace, Egypt, and the rich countries of Asia.
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History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 (Edward Gibbon)
- Highlight on Page 374 | Loc. 5469-72  | Added on Saturday, November 15, 2014, 02:26 PM

The Cæsars, in their exalted rank, revered the majesty of the emperors, and the three younger princes invariably acknowledged, by their gratitude and obedience, the common parent of their fortunes. The suspicious jealousy of power found not any place among them; and the singular happiness of their union has been compared to a chorus of music, whose harmony was regulated and maintained by the skilful hand of the first artist.
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History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 (Edward Gibbon)
- Highlight on Page 374 | Loc. 5480-88  | Added on Saturday, November 15, 2014, 02:28 PM

When Cæsar subdued the Gauls, that great nation was already divided into three orders of men; the clergy, the nobility, and the common people. The first governed by superstition, the second by arms, but the third and last was not of any weight or account in their public councils. It was very natural for the plebeians, oppressed by debt, or apprehensive of injuries, to implore the protection of some powerful chief, who acquired over their persons and property the same absolute right as, among the Greeks and Romans, a master exercised over his slaves. The greatest part of the nation was gradually reduced into a state of servitude; compelled to perpetual labor on the estates of the Gallic nobles, and confined to the soil, either by the real weight of fetters, or by the no less cruel and forcible restraints of the laws. During the long series of troubles which agitated Gaul, from the reign of Gallienus to that of Diocletian, the condition of these servile peasants was peculiarly miserable; and they experienced at once the complicated tyranny of their masters, of the barbarians, of the soldiers, and of the officers of the revenue.
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History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 (Edward Gibbon)
- Bookmark on Page 374 | Loc. 5488  | Added on Saturday, November 15, 2014, 02:28 PM


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History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 (Edward Gibbon)
- Highlight on Page 374 | Loc. 5488-99  | Added on Saturday, November 15, 2014, 02:30 PM

Their patience was at last provoked into despair. On every side they rose in multitudes, armed with rustic weapons, and with irresistible fury. The ploughman became a foot soldier, the shepherd mounted on horseback, the deserted villages and open towns were abandoned to the flames, and the ravages of the peasants equalled those of the fiercest barbarians. They asserted the natural rights of men, but they asserted those rights with the most savage cruelty. The Gallic nobles, justly dreading their revenge, either took refuge in the fortified cities, or fled from the wild scene of anarchy. The peasants reigned without control; and two of their most daring leaders had the folly and rashness to assume the Imperial ornaments. Their power soon expired at the approach of the legions. The strength of union and discipline obtained an easy victory over a licentious and divided multitude. A severe retaliation was inflicted on the peasants who were found in arms; the affrighted remnant returned to their respective habitations, and their unsuccessful effort for freedom served only to confirm their slavery. So strong and uniform is the current of popular passions, that we might almost venture, from very scanty materials, to relate the particulars of this war; but we are not disposed to believe that the principal leaders, Ælianus and Amandus, were Christians, or to insinuate, that the rebellion, as it happened in the time of Luther, was occasioned by the abuse of those benevolent principles of Christianity, which inculcate the natural freedom of mankind.
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History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 (Edward Gibbon)
- Highlight on Page 374 | Loc. 5549-51  | Added on Saturday, November 15, 2014, 02:40 PM

Their acclamations were loud and unanimous; and the virtues of the conqueror may induce us to believe, that they sincerely rejoiced in a revolution, which, after a separation of ten years, restored Britain to the body of the Roman empire.
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History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 (Edward Gibbon)
- Highlight on Page 374 | Loc. 5613-15  | Added on Saturday, November 15, 2014, 02:45 PM

The treaty long subsisted; and till the establishment of Christianity introduced stricter notions of religious worship, it was annually ratified by a solemn sacrifice in the Isle of Elephantine, in which the Romans, as well as the barbarians, adored the same visible or invisible powers of the universe.
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History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 (Edward Gibbon)
- Highlight on Page 374 | Loc. 5629-30  | Added on Saturday, November 15, 2014, 02:47 PM

Philosophy, with the aid of experience, has at length banished the study of alchemy; and the present age, however desirous of riches, is content to seek them by the humbler means of commerce and industry.
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History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 (Edward Gibbon)
- Highlight on Page 374 | Loc. 5645-52  | Added on Saturday, November 15, 2014, 02:49 PM

When Tiridates appeared on the frontiers of Armenia, he was received with an unfeigned transport of joy and loyalty. During twenty-six years, the country had experienced the real and imaginary hardships of a foreign yoke. The Persian monarchs adorned their new conquest with magnificent buildings; but those monuments had been erected at the expense of the people, and were abhorred as badges of slavery. The apprehension of a revolt had inspired the most rigorous precautions: oppression had been aggravated by insult, and the consciousness of the public hatred had been productive of every measure that could render it still more implacable. We have already remarked the intolerant spirit of the Magian religion. The statues of the deified kings of Armenia, and the sacred images of the sun and moon, were broke in pieces by the zeal of the conqueror; and the perpetual fire of Ormuzd was kindled and preserved upon an altar erected on the summit of Mount Bagavan.
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History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 (Edward Gibbon)
- Highlight on Page 374 | Loc. 5684-99  | Added on Saturday, November 15, 2014, 02:52 PM

The armies soon encountered each other in the plains of Mesopotamia, and two battles were fought with various and doubtful success; but the third engagement was of a more decisive nature; and the Roman army received a total overthrow, which is attributed to the rashness of Galerius, who, with an inconsiderable body of troops, attacked the innumerable host of the Persians. But the consideration of the country that was the scene of action, may suggest another reason for his defeat. The same ground on which Galerius was vanquished, had been rendered memorable by the death of Crassus, and the slaughter of ten legions. It was a plain of more than sixty miles, which extended from the hills of Carrhæ to the Euphrates; a smooth and barren surface of sandy desert, without a hillock, without a tree, and without a spring of fresh water. The steady infantry of the Romans, fainting with heat and thirst, could neither hope for victory if they preserved their ranks, nor break their ranks without exposing themselves to the most imminent danger. In this situation they were gradually encompassed by the superior numbers, harassed by the rapid evolutions, and destroyed by the arrows of the barbarian cavalry. The king of Armenia had signalized his valor in the battle, and acquired personal glory by the public misfortune. He was pursued as far as the Euphrates; his horse was wounded, and it appeared impossible for him to escape the victorious enemy. In this extremity Tiridates embraced the only refuge which appeared before him: he dismounted and plunged into the stream. His armor was heavy, the river very deep, and at those parts at least half a mile in breadth; yet such was his strength and dexterity, that he reached in safety the opposite bank. With regard to the Roman general, we are ignorant of the circumstances of his escape; but when he returned to Antioch, Diocletian received him, not with the tenderness of a friend and colleague, but with the indignation of an offended sovereign. The haughtiest of men, clothed in his purple, but humbled by the sense of his fault and misfortune, was obliged to follow the emperor's chariot above a mile on foot, and to exhibit, before the whole court, the spectacle of his disgrace.
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History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 (Edward Gibbon)
- Highlight on Page 374 | Loc. 5731-33  | Added on Sunday, November 16, 2014, 12:10 PM

Apharban concluded his discourse in the style of eastern allegory, by observing that the Roman and Persian monarchies were the two eyes of the world, which would remain imperfect and mutilated if either of them should be put out.
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History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 (Edward Gibbon)
- Highlight on Page 374 | Loc. 5734-43  | Added on Sunday, November 16, 2014, 12:11 PM

"It well becomes the Persians," replied Galerius, with a transport of fury, which seemed to convulse his whole frame, "it well becomes the Persians to expatiate on the vicissitudes of fortune, and calmly to read us lectures on the virtues of moderation. Let them remember their own moderation, towards the unhappy Valerian. They vanquished him by fraud, they treated him with indignity. They detained him till the last moment of his life in shameful captivity, and after his death they exposed his body to perpetual ignominy." Softening, however, his tone, Galerius insinuated to the ambassador, that it had never been the practice of the Romans to trample on a prostrate enemy; and that, on this occasion, they should consult their own dignity rather than the Persian merit. He dismissed Apharban with a hope that Narses would soon be informed on what conditions he might obtain, from the clemency of the emperors, a lasting peace, and the restoration of his wives and children. In this conference we may discover the fierce passions of Galerius, as well as his deference to the superior wisdom and authority of Diocletian. The ambition of the former grasped at the conquest of the East, and had proposed to reduce Persia into the state of a province. The prudence of the latter, who adhered to the moderate policy of Augustus and the Antonines, embraced the favorable opportunity of terminating a successful war by an honorable and advantageous peace.
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History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 (Edward Gibbon)
- Highlight on Page 374 | Loc. 5785-95  | Added on Sunday, November 16, 2014, 12:16 PM

The arduous work of rescuing the distressed empire from tyrants and barbarians had now been completely achieved by a succession of Illyrian peasants. As soon as Diocletian entered into the twentieth year of his reign, he celebrated that memorable æra, as well as the success of his arms, by the pomp of a Roman triumph. Maximian, the equal partner of his power, was his only companion in the glory of that day. The two Cæsars had fought and conquered, but the merit of their exploits was ascribed, according to the rigor of ancient maxims, to the auspicious influence of their fathers and emperors. The triumph of Diocletian and Maximian was less magnificent, perhaps, than those of Aurelian and Probus, but it was dignified by several circumstances of superior fame and good fortune. Africa and Britain, the Rhine, the Danube, and the Nile, furnished their respective trophies; but the most distinguished ornament was of a more singular nature, a Persian victory followed by an important conquest. The representations of rivers, mountains, and provinces, were carried before the Imperial car. The images of the captive wives, the sisters, and the children of the Great King, afforded a new and grateful spectacle to the vanity of the people. In the eyes of posterity, this triumph is remarkable, by a distinction of a less honorable kind. It was the last that Rome ever beheld. Soon after this period, the emperors ceased to vanquish, and Rome ceased to be the capital of the empire.
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History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 (Edward Gibbon)
- Bookmark on Page 374 | Loc. 5797  | Added on Sunday, November 16, 2014, 12:25 PM


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History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 (Edward Gibbon)
- Highlight on Page 374 | Loc. 5796-5816  | Added on Sunday, November 16, 2014, 12:27 PM

The presence of some god, or the memory of some hero, seemed to animate every part of the city, and the empire of the world had been promised to the Capitol. The native Romans felt and confessed the power of this agreeable illusion. It was derived from their ancestors, had grown up with their earliest habits of life, and was protected, in some measure, by the opinion of political utility. The form and the seat of government were intimately blended together, nor was it esteemed possible to transport the one without destroying the other. But the sovereignty of the capital was gradually annihilated in the extent of conquest; the provinces rose to the same level, and the vanquished nations acquired the name and privileges, without imbibing the partial affections, of Romans. During a long period, however, the remains of the ancient constitution, and the influence of custom, preserved the dignity of Rome. The emperors, though perhaps of African or Illyrian extraction, respected their adopted country, as the seat of their power, and the centre of their extensive dominions. The emergencies of war very frequently required their presence on the frontiers; but Diocletian and Maximian were the first Roman princes who fixed, in time of peace, their ordinary residence in the provinces; and their conduct, however it might be suggested by private motives, was justified by very specious considerations of policy. The court of the emperor of the West was, for the most part, established at Milan, whose situation, at the foot of the Alps, appeared far more convenient than that of Rome, for the important purpose of watching the motions of the barbarians of Germany. Milan soon assumed the splendor of an Imperial city. The houses are described as numerous and well built; the manners of the people as polished and liberal. A circus, a theatre, a mint, a palace, baths, which bore the name of their founder Maximian; porticos adorned with statues, and a double circumference of walls, contributed to the beauty of the new capital; nor did it seem oppressed even by the proximity of Rome. To rival the majesty of Rome was the ambition likewise of Diocletian, who employed his leisure, and the wealth of the East, in the embellishment of Nicomedia, a city placed on the verge of Europe and Asia, almost at an equal distance between the Danube and the Euphrates. By the taste of the monarch, and at the expense of the people, Nicomedia acquired, in the space of a few years, a degree of magnificence which might appear to have required the labor of ages, and became inferior only to Rome, Alexandria, and Antioch, in extent of populousness. The life of Diocletian and Maximian was a life of action, and a considerable portion of it was spent in camps, or in the long and frequent marches; but whenever the public business allowed them any relaxation, they seemed to have retired with pleasure to their 
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History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 (Edward Gibbon)
- Highlight on Page 374 | Loc. 5816-19  | Added on Sunday, November 16, 2014, 12:27 PM

residences of Nicomedia and Milan. Till Diocletian, in the twentieth year of his reign, celebrated his Roman triumph, it is extremely doubtful whether he ever visited the ancient capital of the empire. Even on that memorable occasion his stay did not exceed two months. Disgusted with the licentious familiarity of the people, he quitted Rome with precipitation thirteen days before it was expected that he should have appeared in the senate, invested with the ensigns of the consular dignity.
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History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 (Edward Gibbon)
- Highlight on Page 374 | Loc. 5820-43  | Added on Sunday, November 16, 2014, 12:30 PM

The dislike expressed by Diocletian towards Rome and Roman freedom, was not the effect of momentary caprice, but the result of the most artful policy. That crafty prince had framed a new system of Imperial government, which was afterwards completed by the family of Constantine; and as the image of the old constitution was religiously preserved in the senate, he resolved to deprive that order of its small remains of power and consideration. We may recollect, about eight years before the elevation, of Diocletian the transient greatness, and the ambitious hopes, of the Roman senate. As long as that enthusiasm prevailed, many of the nobles imprudently displayed their zeal in the cause of freedom; and after the successes of Probus had withdrawn their countenance from the republican party, the senators were unable to disguise their impotent resentment. As the sovereign of Italy, Maximian was intrusted with the care of extinguishing this troublesome, rather than dangerous spirit, and the task was perfectly suited to his cruel temper. The most illustrious members of the senate, whom Diocletian always affected to esteem, were involved, by his colleague, in the accusation of imaginary plots; and the possession of an elegant villa, or a well-cultivated estate, was interpreted as a convincing evidence of guilt. The camp of the Prætorians, which had so long oppressed, began to protect, the majesty of Rome; and as those haughty troops were conscious of the decline of their power, they were naturally disposed to unite their strength with the authority of the senate. By the prudent measures of Diocletian, the numbers of the Prætorians were insensibly reduced, their privileges abolished, and their place supplied by two faithful legions of Illyricum, who, under the new titles of Jovians and Herculians, were appointed to perform the service of the Imperial guards. But the most fatal though secret wound, which the senate received from the hands of Diocletian and Maximian, was inflicted by the inevitable operation of their absence. As long as the emperors resided at Rome, that assembly might be oppressed, but it could scarcely be neglected. The successors of Augustus exercised the power of dictating whatever laws their wisdom or caprice might suggest; but those laws were ratified by the sanction of the senate. The model of ancient freedom was preserved in its deliberations and decrees; and wise princes, who respected the prejudices of the Roman people, were in some measure obliged to assume the language and behavior suitable to the general and first magistrate of the republic. In the armies and in the provinces, they displayed the dignity of monarchs; and when they fixed their residence at a distance from the capital, they forever laid aside the dissimulation which Augustus had recommended to his successors. In the exercise of the legislative as well as the executive power, the sovereign advised with his ministers, instead of consulting the great council of the nation. The name of the senate was mentioned with honor till the last period of the empire; the vanity of its members was still flattered with honorary distinctions; but the assembly which had so long been the source, and so long the instrument of power, was respectfully suffered to sink into oblivion. The senate of Rome, losing all connection with the Imperial court and the actual constitution, was left a venerable but useless monument of antiquity on the Capitoline hill.
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History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 (Edward Gibbon)
- Highlight on Page 374 | Loc. 5849-66  | Added on Sunday, November 16, 2014, 12:32 PM

The name of Emperor, which was at first of a military nature, was associated with another of a more servile kind. The epithet of Dominus, or Lord, in its primitive signification, was expressive, not of the authority of a prince over his subjects, or of a commander over his soldiers, but of the despotic power of a master over his domestic slaves. Viewing it in that odious light, it had been rejected with abhorrence by the first Cæsars. Their resistance insensibly became more feeble, and the name less odious; till at length the style of our Lord and Emperor was not only bestowed by flattery, but was regularly admitted into the laws and public monuments. Such lofty epithets were sufficient to elate and satisfy the most excessive vanity; and if the successors of Diocletian still declined the title of King, it seems to have been the effect not so much of their moderation as of their delicacy. Wherever the Latin tongue was in use, (and it was the language of government throughout the empire,) the Imperial title, as it was peculiar to themselves, conveyed a more respectable idea than the name of king, which they must have shared with a hundred barbarian chieftains; or which, at the best, they could derive only from Romulus, or from Tarquin. But the sentiments of the East were very different from those of the West. From the earliest period of history, the sovereigns of Asia had been celebrated in the Greek language by the title of Basileus, or King; and since it was considered as the first distinction among men, it was soon employed by the servile provincials of the East, in their humble addresses to the Roman throne. Even the attributes, or at least the titles, of the Divinity, were usurped by Diocletian and Maximian, who transmitted them to a succession of Christian emperors. Such extravagant compliments, however, soon lose their impiety by losing their meaning; and when the ear is once accustomed to the sound, they are heard with indifference, as vague though excessive professions of respect. From the time of Augustus to that of Diocletian, the Roman princes, conversing in a familiar manner among their fellow-citizens, were saluted only with the same respect that was usually paid to senators and magistrates. Their principal distinction was the Imperial or military robe of purple; whilst the senatorial garment was marked by a broad, and the equestrian by a narrow, band or stripe of the same honorable color.
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History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 (Edward Gibbon)
- Highlight on Page 374 | Loc. 5866-99  | Added on Sunday, November 16, 2014, 12:35 PM

The pride, or rather the policy, of Diocletian, engaged that artful prince to introduce the stately magnificence of the court of Persia. He ventured to assume the diadem, an ornament detested by the Romans as the odious ensign of royalty, and the use of which had been considered as the most desperate act of the madness of Caligula. It was no more than a broad white fillet set with pearls, which encircled the emperor's head. The sumptuous robes of Diocletian and his successors were of silk and gold; and it is remarked with indignation, that even their shoes were studded with the most precious gems. The access to their sacred person was every day rendered more difficult by the institution of new forms and ceremonies. The avenues of the palace were strictly guarded by the various schools, as they began to be called, of domestic officers. The interior apartments were intrusted to the jealous vigilance of the eunuchs, the increase of whose numbers and influence was the most infallible symptom of the progress of despotism. When a subject was at length admitted to the Imperial presence, he was obliged, whatever might be his rank, to fall prostrate on the ground, and to adore, according to the eastern fashion, the divinity of his lord and master. Diocletian was a man of sense, who, in the course of private as well as public life, had formed a just estimate both of himself and of mankind: nor is it easy to conceive, that in substituting the manners of Persia to those of Rome, he was seriously actuated by so mean a principle as that of vanity. He flattered himself, that an ostentation of splendor and luxury would subdue the imagination of the multitude; that the monarch would be less exposed to the rude license of the people and the soldiers, as his person was secluded from the public view; and that habits of submission would insensibly be productive of sentiments of veneration. Like the modesty affected by Augustus, the state maintained by Diocletian was a theatrical representation; but it must be confessed, that of the two comedies, the former was of a much more liberal and manly character than the latter. It was the aim of the one to disguise, and the object of the other to display, the unbounded power which the emperors possessed over the Roman world. Ostentation was the first principle of the new system instituted by Diocletian. The second was division. He divided the empire, the provinces, and every branch of the civil as well as military administration. He multiplied the wheels of the machine of government, and rendered its operations less rapid, but more secure. Whatever advantages and whatever defects might attend these innovations, they must be ascribed in a very great degree to the first inventor; but as the new frame of policy was gradually improved and completed by succeeding princes, it will be more satisfactory to delay the consideration of it till the season of its full maturity and perfection. Reserving, therefore, for the reign of Constantine a more exact picture of the new empire, we shall content ourselves with describing the principal and decisive outline, as it was traced by the hand of Diocletian. He had associated three colleagues in the exercise of the supreme power; and as he was convinced that the abilities of a single man were inadequate to the public defence, he considered the joint administration of four princes not as a temporary expedient, but as a fundamental law of the constitution. It was his intention, that the two elder princes should be distinguished by the use of the diadem, and the title of Augusti; that, as affection or esteem might direct their choice, they should regularly call to their assistance two subordinate colleagues; and that the Csars, rising in their turn to the first rank, should supply an uninterrupted succession of emperors. The empire was divided into four parts. The East and Italy were the most honorable, the Danube and the Rhine the most laborious stations. The former claimed the presence of the Augusti, the latter were intrusted to the administration of the Csars. The strength of the legions was in the hands of the four partners of sovereignty, and the despair of successively vanquishing four formidable rivals might intimidate the ambition of an aspiring general. In their civil government, the emperors were supposed to exercise the undivided power of the monarch, and their edicts, inscribed with their joint names, were received in all the provinces, as promulgated by their mutual councils and authority. Notwithstanding these precautions, the political union of the Roman world was gradually dissolved, and a principle of division was introduced, which, in the course of a few years, occasioned the perpetual separation of the Eastern and Western Empires.
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History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 (Edward Gibbon)
- Highlight on Page 374 | Loc. 5900-5910  | Added on Sunday, November 16, 2014, 12:36 PM

The system of Diocletian was accompanied with another very material disadvantage, which cannot even at present be totally overlooked; a more expensive establishment, and consequently an increase of taxes, and the oppression of the people. Instead of a modest family of slaves and freedmen, such as had contented the simple greatness of Augustus and Trajan, three or four magnificent courts were established in the various parts of the empire, and as many Roman kings contended with each other and with the Persian monarch for the vain superiority of pomp and luxury. The number of ministers, of magistrates, of officers, and of servants, who filled the different departments of the state, was multiplied beyond the example of former times; and (if we may borrow the warm expression of a contemporary) "when the proportion of those who received, exceeded the proportion of those who contributed, the provinces were oppressed by the weight of tributes." From this period to the extinction of the empire, it would be easy to deduce an uninterrupted series of clamors and complaints. According to his religion and situation, each writer chooses either Diocletian, or Constantine, or Valens, or Theodosius, for the object of his invectives; but they unanimously agree in representing the burden of the public impositions, and particularly the land tax and capitation, as the intolerable and increasing grievance of their own times.

Crime and Punishment

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Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
- Highlight on Page 14 | Loc. 163-65  | Added on Sunday, November 16, 2014, 05:21 PM

There are chance meetings with strangers that interest us from the first moment, before a word is spoken. Such was the impression made on Raskolnikov by the person sitting a little distance from him, who looked like a retired clerk. The young man often recalled this impression afterwards, and even ascribed it to presentiment.
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Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
- Highlight on Page 31 | Loc. 420-21  | Added on Sunday, November 16, 2014, 05:28 PM

"What if man is not really a scoundrel, man in general, I mean, the whole race of mankind--then all the rest is prejudice, simply artificial terrors and there are no barriers and it's all as it should be."
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Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
- Highlight on Page 31 | Loc. 429-35  | Added on Sunday, November 16, 2014, 05:29 PM

It would have been difficult to sink to a lower ebb of disorder, but to Raskolnikov in his present state of mind this was positively agreeable. He had got completely away from everyone, like a tortoise in its shell, and even the sight of a servant girl who had to wait upon him and looked sometimes into his room made him writhe with nervous irritation. He was in the condition that overtakes some monomaniacs entirely concentrated upon one thing. His landlady had for the last fortnight given up sending him in meals, and he had not yet thought of expostulating with her, though he went without his dinner. Nastasya, the cook and only servant, was rather pleased at the lodger's mood and had entirely given up sweeping and doing his room, only once a week or so she would stray into his room with a broom. She waked him up that day.
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Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
- Highlight on Page 44 | Loc. 614-18  | Added on Sunday, November 16, 2014, 06:22 PM

Almost from the first, while he read the letter, Raskolnikov's face was wet with tears; but when he finished it, his face was pale and distorted and a bitter, wrathful and malignant smile was on his lips. He laid his head down on his threadbare dirty pillow and pondered, pondered a long time. His heart was beating violently, and his brain was in a turmoil. At last he felt cramped and stifled in the little yellow room that was like a cupboard or a box. His eyes and his mind craved for space. He took up his hat and went out, this time without dread of meeting anyone; he had forgotten his dread.
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Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
- Highlight on Page 49 | Loc. 699-706  | Added on Sunday, November 16, 2014, 06:29 PM

So he tortured himself, fretting himself with such questions, and finding a kind of enjoyment in it. And yet all these questions were not new ones suddenly confronting him, they were old familiar aches. It was long since they had first begun to grip and rend his heart. Long, long ago his present anguish had its first beginnings; it had waxed and gathered strength, it had matured and concentrated, until it had taken the form of a fearful, frenzied and fantastic question, which tortured his heart and mind, clamouring insistently for an answer. Now his mother's letter had burst on him like a thunderclap. It was clear that he must not now suffer passively, worrying himself over unsolved questions, but that he must do something, do it at once, and do it quickly. Anyway he must decide on something, or else... "Or throw up life altogether!" he cried suddenly, in a frenzy--"accept one's lot humbly as it is, once for all and stifle everything in oneself, giving up all claim to activity, life and love!"
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Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
- Highlight on Page 49 | Loc. 706-11  | Added on Sunday, November 16, 2014, 06:29 PM

"Do you understand, sir, do you understand what it means when you have absolutely nowhere to turn?" Marmeladov's question came suddenly into his mind, "for every man must have somewhere to turn...." He gave a sudden start; another thought, that he had had yesterday, slipped back into his mind. But he did not start at the thought recurring to him, for he knew, he had felt beforehand, that it must come back, he was expecting it; besides it was not only yesterday's thought. The difference was that a month ago, yesterday even, the thought was a mere dream: but now... now it appeared not a dream at all, it had taken a new menacing and quite unfamiliar shape, and he suddenly became aware of this himself.... He felt a hammering in his head, and there was a darkness before his eyes.
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Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
- Highlight on Page 54 | Loc. 768-86  | Added on Sunday, November 16, 2014, 06:33 PM

"Don't be anxious, I won't let him have her," the policeman said resolutely, and he set off after them. "Ah, the vice one sees nowadays!" he repeated aloud, sighing. At that moment something seemed to sting Raskolnikov; in an instant a complete revulsion of feeling came over him. "Hey, here!" he shouted after the policeman. The latter turned round. "Let them be! What is it to do with you? Let her go! Let him amuse himself." He pointed at the dandy, "What is it to do with you?" The policeman was bewildered, and stared at him open-eyed. Raskolnikov laughed. "Well!" ejaculated the policeman, with a gesture of contempt, and he walked after the dandy and the girl, probably taking Raskolnikov for a madman or something even worse. "He has carried off my twenty copecks," Raskolnikov murmured angrily when he was left alone. "Well, let him take as much from the other fellow to allow him to have the girl and so let it end. And why did I want to interfere? Is it for me to help? Have I any right to help? Let them devour each other alive--what is to me? How did I dare to give him twenty copecks? Were they mine?" In spite of those strange words he felt very wretched. He sat down on the deserted seat. His thoughts strayed aimlessly.... He found it hard to fix his mind on anything at that moment. He longed to forget himself altogether, to forget everything, and then to wake up and begin life anew.... "Poor girl!" he said, looking at the empty corner where she had sat--"She will come to herself and weep, and then her mother will find out.... She will give her a beating, a horrible, shameful beating and then maybe, turn her out of doors.... And even if she does not, the Darya Frantsovnas will get wind of it, and the girl will soon be slipping out on the sly here and there. Then there will be the hospital directly (that's always the luck of those girls with respectable mothers, who go wrong on the sly) and then... again the hospital... drink... the taverns... and more hospital, in two or three years--a wreck, and her life over at eighteen or nineteen.... Have not I seen cases like that? And how have they been brought to it? Why, they've all come to it like that. Ugh! But what does it matter? That's as it should be, they tell us. A certain percentage, they tell us, must every year go... that way... to the devil, I suppose, so that the rest may remain chaste, and not be interfered with. A percentage! What splendid words they have; they are so scientific, so consolatory.... Once you've said 'percentage' there's nothing more to worry about. If we had any other word... maybe we might feel more uneasy.... But what if Dounia were one of the percentage! Of another one if not that one?
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Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
- Highlight on Page 56 | Loc. 788-94  | Added on Sunday, November 16, 2014, 06:34 PM

He wondered at himself. Razumihin was one of his old comrades at the university. It was remarkable that Raskolnikov had hardly any friends at the university; he kept aloof from everyone, went to see no one, and did not welcome anyone who came to see him, and indeed everyone soon gave him up. He took no part in the students' gatherings, amusements or conversations. He worked with great intensity without sparing himself, and he was respected for this, but no one liked him. He was very poor, and there was a sort of haughty pride and reserve about him, as though he were keeping something to himself. He seemed to some of his comrades to look down upon them all as children, as though he were superior in development, knowledge and convictions, as though their beliefs and interests were beneath him.
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Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
- Highlight on Page 69 | Loc. 956-61  | Added on Sunday, November 16, 2014, 11:26 PM

He was only a few steps from his lodging. He went in like a man condemned to death. He thought of nothing and was incapable of thinking; but he felt suddenly in his whole being that he had no more freedom of thought, no will, and that everything was suddenly and irrevocably decided. Certainly, if he had to wait whole years for a suitable opportunity, he could not reckon on a more certain step towards the success of the plan than that which had just presented itself. In any case, it would have been difficult to find out beforehand and with certainty, with greater exactness and less risk, and without dangerous inquiries and investigations, that next day at a certain time an old woman, on whose life an attempt was contemplated, would be at home and entirely alone.
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Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
- Highlight on Page 72 | Loc. 1000-1007  | Added on Sunday, November 16, 2014, 11:31 PM

"Well, listen then. On the other side, fresh young lives thrown away for want of help and by thousands, on every side! A hundred thousand good deeds could be done and helped, on that old woman's money which will be buried in a monastery! Hundreds, thousands perhaps, might be set on the right path; dozens of families saved from destitution, from ruin, from vice, from the Lock hospitals--and all with her money. Kill her, take her money and with the help of it devote oneself to the service of humanity and the good of all. What do you think, would not one tiny crime be wiped out by thousands of good deeds? For one life thousands would be saved from corruption and decay. One death, and a hundred lives in exchange--it's simple arithmetic! Besides, what value has the life of that sickly, stupid, ill-natured old woman in the balance of existence! No more than the life of a louse, of a black-beetle, less in fact because the old woman is doing harm. She is wearing out the lives of others; the other day she bit Lizaveta's finger out of spite; it almost had to be amputated."
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Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
- Highlight on Page 77 | Loc. 1063-65  | Added on Sunday, November 16, 2014, 11:37 PM

We may note in passing, one peculiarity in regard to all the final resolutions taken by him in the matter; they had one strange characteristic: the more final they were, the more hideous and the more absurd they at once became in his eyes. In spite of all his agonising inward struggle, he never for a single instant all that time could believe in the carrying out of his plans.
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Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
- Highlight on Page 78 | Loc. 1080-88  | Added on Sunday, November 16, 2014, 11:41 PM

At first--long before indeed--he had been much occupied with one question; why almost all crimes are so badly concealed and so easily detected, and why almost all criminals leave such obvious traces? He had come gradually to many different and curious conclusions, and in his opinion the chief reason lay not so much in the material impossibility of concealing the crime, as in the criminal himself. Almost every criminal is subject to a failure of will and reasoning power by a childish and phenomenal heedlessness, at the very instant when prudence and caution are most essential. It was his conviction that this eclipse of reason and failure of will power attacked a man like a disease, developed gradually and reached its highest point just before the perpetration of the crime, continued with equal violence at the moment of the crime and for longer or shorter time after, according to the individual case, and then passed off like any other disease. The question whether the disease gives rise to the crime, or whether the crime from its own peculiar nature is always accompanied by something of the nature of disease, he did not yet feel able to decide.
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Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
- Highlight on Page 79 | Loc. 1088-94  | Added on Sunday, November 16, 2014, 11:41 PM

When he reached these conclusions, he decided that in his own case there could not be such a morbid reaction, that his reason and will would remain unimpaired at the time of carrying out his design, for the simple reason that his design was "not a crime...." We will omit all the process by means of which he arrived at this last conclusion; we have run too far ahead already.... We may add only that the practical, purely material difficulties of the affair occupied a secondary position in his mind. "One has but to keep all one's will-power and reason to deal with them, and they will all be overcome at the time when once one has familiarised oneself with the minutest details of the business...." But this preparation had never been begun. His final decisions were what he came to trust least, and when the hour struck, it all came to pass quite differently, as it were accidentally and unexpectedly.
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Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
- Highlight on Page 79 | Loc. 1101-9  | Added on Sunday, November 16, 2014, 11:42 PM

He was crushed and even humiliated. He could have laughed at himself in his anger.... A dull animal rage boiled within him. He stood hesitating in the gateway. To go into the street, to go a walk for appearance' sake was revolting; to go back to his room, even more revolting. "And what a chance I have lost for ever!" he muttered, standing aimlessly in the gateway, just opposite the porter's little dark room, which was also open. Suddenly he started. From the porter's room, two paces away from him, something shining under the bench to the right caught his eye.... He looked about him--nobody. He approached the room on tiptoe, went down two steps into it and in a faint voice called the porter. "Yes, not at home! Somewhere near though, in the yard, for the door is wide open." He dashed to the axe (it was an axe) and pulled it out from under the bench, where it lay between two chunks of wood; at once, before going out, he made it fast in the noose, he thrust both hands into his pockets and went out of the room; no one had noticed him! "When reason fails, the devil helps!" he thought with a strange grin. This chance raised his spirits extraordinarily.
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Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
- Highlight on Page 80 | Loc. 1113-20  | Added on Sunday, November 16, 2014, 11:43 PM

When he had happened to imagine all this beforehand, he had sometimes thought that he would be very much afraid. But he was not very much afraid now, was not afraid at all, indeed. His mind was even occupied by irrelevant matters, but by nothing for long. As he passed the Yusupov garden, he was deeply absorbed in considering the building of great fountains, and of their refreshing effect on the atmosphere in all the squares. By degrees he passed to the conviction that if the summer garden were extended to the field of Mars, and perhaps joined to the garden of the Mihailovsky Palace, it would be a splendid thing and a great benefit to the town. Then he was interested by the question why in all great towns men are not simply driven by necessity, but in some peculiar way inclined to live in those parts of the town where there are no gardens nor fountains; where there is most dirt and smell and all sorts of nastiness. Then his own walks through the Hay Market came back to his mind, and for a moment he waked up to reality. "What nonsense!" he thought, "better think of nothing at all!"
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Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
- Highlight on Page 84 | Loc. 1164-71  | Added on Sunday, November 16, 2014, 11:48 PM

Trying to untie the string and turning to the window, to the light (all her windows were shut, in spite of the stifling heat), she left him altogether for some seconds and stood with her back to him. He unbuttoned his coat and freed the axe from the noose, but did not yet take it out altogether, simply holding it in his right hand under the coat. His hands were fearfully weak, he felt them every moment growing more numb and more wooden. He was afraid he would let the axe slip and fall.... A sudden giddiness came over him. "But what has he tied it up like this for?" the old woman cried with vexation and moved towards him. He had not a minute more to lose. He pulled the axe quite out, swung it with both arms, scarcely conscious of himself, and almost without effort, almost mechanically, brought the blunt side down on her head. He seemed not to use his own strength in this. But as soon as he had once brought the axe down, his strength returned to him.
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Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
- Highlight on Page 104 | Loc. 1397-99  | Added on Monday, November 17, 2014, 12:07 AM

On the stairs he remembered that he was leaving all the things just as they were in the hole in the wall, "and very likely, it's on purpose to search when I'm out," he thought, and stopped short. But he was possessed by such despair, such cynicism of misery, if one may so call it, that with a wave of his hand he went on. "Only to get it over!"
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Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
- Highlight on Page 104 | Loc. 1399-1403  | Added on Monday, November 17, 2014, 12:07 AM

In the street the heat was insufferable again; not a drop of rain had fallen all those days. Again dust, bricks and mortar, again the stench from the shops and pot-houses, again the drunken men, the Finnish pedlars and half-broken-down cabs. The sun shone straight in his eyes, so that it hurt him to look out of them, and he felt his head going round--as a man in a fever is apt to feel when he comes out into the street on a bright sunny day. When he reached the turning into the street, in an agony of trepidation he looked down it... at the house... and at once averted his eyes.
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Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
- Highlight on Page 114 | Loc. 1527-33  | Added on Monday, November 17, 2014, 12:18 AM

Raskolnikov fancied that the head clerk treated him more casually and contemptuously after his speech, but strange to say he suddenly felt completely indifferent to anyone's opinion, and this revulsion took place in a flash, in one instant. If he had cared to think a little, he would have been amazed indeed that he could have talked to them like that a minute before, forcing his feelings upon them. And where had those feelings come from? Now if the whole room had been filled, not with police officers, but with those nearest and dearest to him, he would not have found one human word for them, so empty was his heart. A gloomy sensation of agonising, everlasting solitude and remoteness, took conscious form in his soul. It was not the meanness of his sentimental effusions before Ilya Petrovitch, nor the meanness of the latter's triumph over him that had caused this sudden revulsion in his heart.
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Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
- Highlight on Page 115 | Loc. 1533-40  | Added on Monday, November 17, 2014, 12:19 AM

Oh, what had he to do now with his own baseness, with all these petty vanities, officers, German women, debts, police-offices? If he had been sentenced to be burnt at that moment, he would not have stirred, would hardly have heard the sentence to the end. Something was happening to him entirely new, sudden and unknown. It was not that he understood, but he felt clearly with all the intensity of sensation that he could never more appeal to these people in the police-office with sentimental effusions like his recent outburst, or with anything whatever; and that if they had been his own brothers and sisters and not police-officers, it would have been utterly out of the question to appeal to them in any circumstance of life. He had never experienced such a strange and awful sensation. And what was most agonising--it was more a sensation than a conception or idea, a direct sensation, the most agonising of all the sensations he had known in his life.
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Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
- Highlight on Page 124 | Loc. 1642-47  | Added on Monday, November 17, 2014, 10:59 AM

Raskolnikov got up from the sofa. As he had mounted the stairs to Razumihin's, he had not realised that he would be meeting his friend face to face. Now, in a flash, he knew, that what he was least of all disposed for at that moment was to be face to face with anyone in the wide world. His spleen rose within him. He almost choked with rage at himself as soon as he crossed Razumihin's threshold. "Good-bye," he said abruptly, and walked to the door. "Stop, stop! You queer fish." "I don't want to," said the other, again pulling away his hand. "Then why the devil have you come? Are you mad, or what? Why, this is... almost insulting! I won't let you go like that."
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Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
- Highlight on Page 124 | Loc. 1647-49  | Added on Monday, November 17, 2014, 10:59 AM

"Well, then, I came to you because I know no one but you who could help... to begin... because you are kinder than anyone--cleverer, I mean, and can judge... and now I see that I want nothing. Do you hear? Nothing at all... no one's services... no one's sympathy. I am by myself... alone. Come, that's enough. Leave me alone."
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Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
- Highlight on Page 127 | Loc. 1682-94  | Added on Monday, November 17, 2014, 11:03 AM

The pain from the lash went off, and Raskolnikov forgot about it; one uneasy and not quite definite idea occupied him now completely. He stood still, and gazed long and intently into the distance; this spot was especially familiar to him. When he was attending the university, he had hundreds of times--generally on his way home--stood still on this spot, gazed at this truly magnificent spectacle and almost always marvelled at a vague and mysterious emotion it roused in him. It left him strangely cold; this gorgeous picture was for him blank and lifeless. He wondered every time at his sombre and enigmatic impression and, mistrusting himself, put off finding the explanation of it. He vividly recalled those old doubts and perplexities, and it seemed to him that it was no mere chance that he recalled them now. It struck him as strange and grotesque, that he should have stopped at the same spot as before, as though he actually imagined he could think the same thoughts, be interested in the same theories and pictures that had interested him... so short a time ago. He felt it almost amusing, and yet it wrung his heart. Deep down, hidden far away out of sight all that seemed to him now--all his old past, his old thoughts, his old problems and theories, his old impressions and that picture and himself and all, all.... He felt as though he were flying upwards, and everything were vanishing from his sight. Making an unconscious movement with his hand, he suddenly became aware of the piece of money in his fist. He opened his hand, stared at the coin, and with a sweep of his arm flung it into the water; then he turned and went home. It seemed to him, he had cut himself off from everyone and from everything at that moment.
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Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
- Highlight on Page 135 | Loc. 1771-72  | Added on Monday, November 17, 2014, 11:09 AM

Raskolnikov looked at all this with profound astonishment and a dull, unreasoning terror. He made up his mind to keep quiet and see what would happen. "I believe I am not wandering. I believe it's reality," he thought.
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Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
- Highlight on Page 142 | Loc. 1852-56  | Added on Monday, November 17, 2014, 11:17 AM

No sooner had she left the room than the sick man flung off the bedclothes and leapt out of bed like a madman. With burning, twitching impatience he had waited for them to be gone so that he might set to work. But to what work? Now, as though to spite him, it eluded him. "Good God, only tell me one thing: do they know of it yet or not? What if they know it and are only pretending, mocking me while I am laid up, and then they will come in and tell me that it's been discovered long ago and that they have only... What am I to do now? That's what I've forgotten, as though on purpose; forgotten it all at once, I remembered a minute ago."
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Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
- Highlight on Page 179 | Loc. 2285-89  | Added on Monday, November 17, 2014, 02:46 PM

"Where is it," thought Raskolnikov. "Where is it I've read that someone condemned to death says or thinks, an hour before his death, that if he had to live on some high rock, on such a narrow ledge that he'd only room to stand, and the ocean, everlasting darkness, everlasting solitude, everlasting tempest around him, if he had to remain standing on a square yard of space all his life, a thousand years, eternity, it were better to live so than to die at once! Only to live, to live and live! Life, whatever it may be!... How true it is! Good God, how true! Man is a vile creature!... And vile is he who calls him vile for that," he added a moment later.
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Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
- Highlight on Page 190 | Loc. 2408-20  | Added on Monday, November 17, 2014, 03:00 PM

"Well, go to hell then," he said gently and thoughtfully. "Stay," he roared, as Raskolnikov was about to move. "Listen to me. Let me tell you, that you are all a set of babbling, posing idiots! If you've any little trouble you brood over it like a hen over an egg. And you are plagiarists even in that! There isn't a sign of independent life in you! You are made of spermaceti ointment and you've lymph in your veins instead of blood. I don't believe in anyone of you! In any circumstances the first thing for all of you is to be unlike a human being! Stop!" he cried with redoubled fury, noticing that Raskolnikov was again making a movement--"hear me out! You know I'm having a house-warming this evening, I dare say they've arrived by now, but I left my uncle there--I just ran in--to receive the guests. And if you weren't a fool, a common fool, a perfect fool, if you were an original instead of a translation... you see, Rodya, I recognise you're a clever fellow, but you're a fool!--and if you weren't a fool you'd come round to me this evening instead of wearing out your boots in the street! Since you have gone out, there's no help for it! I'd give you a snug easy chair, my landlady has one... a cup of tea, company.... Or you could lie on the sofa--any way you would be with us.... Zossimov will be there too. Will you come?" "No." "R-rubbish!" Razumihin shouted, out of patience. "How do you know? You can't answer for yourself! You don't know anything about it.... Thousands of times I've fought tooth and nail with people and run back to them afterwards.... One feels ashamed and goes back to a man! So remember, Potchinkov's house on the third storey...." "Why, Mr. Razumihin, I do believe you'd let anybody beat you from sheer benevolence."
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Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
- Highlight on Page 193 | Loc. 2446-55  | Added on Monday, November 17, 2014, 03:02 PM

The crowd broke up. The police still remained round the woman, someone mentioned the police station.... Raskolnikov looked on with a strange sensation of indifference and apathy. He felt disgusted. "No, that's loathsome... water... it's not good enough," he muttered to himself. "Nothing will come of it," he added, "no use to wait. What about the police office...? And why isn't Zametov at the police office? The police office is open till ten o'clock...." He turned his back to the railing and looked about him. "Very well then!" he said resolutely; he moved from the bridge and walked in the direction of the police office. His heart felt hollow and empty. He did not want to think. Even his depression had passed, there was not a trace now of the energy with which he had set out "to make an end of it all." Complete apathy had succeeded to it. "Well, it's a way out of it," he thought, walking slowly and listlessly along the canal bank. "Anyway I'll make an end, for I want to.... But is it a way out? What does it matter! There'll be the square yard of space--ha! But what an end! Is it really the end? Shall I tell them or not? Ah... damn! How tired I am! If I could find somewhere to sit or lie down soon! What I am most ashamed of is its being so stupid. But I don't care about that either! What idiotic ideas come into one's head."
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Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
- Highlight on Page 199 | Loc. 2505-11  | Added on Monday, November 17, 2014, 03:08 PM

"Better have nothing to do with him," decided the big porter. "A regular rogue! Just what he wants, you may be sure, but once take him up, you won't get rid of him.... We know the sort!" "Shall I go there or not?" thought Raskolnikov, standing in the middle of the thoroughfare at the cross-roads, and he looked about him, as though expecting from someone a decisive word. But no sound came, all was dead and silent like the stones on which he walked, dead to him, to him alone.... All at once at the end of the street, two hundred yards away, in the gathering dusk he saw a crowd and heard talk and shouts. In the middle of the crowd stood a carriage.... A light gleamed in the middle of the street. "What is it?" Raskolnikov turned to the right and went up to the crowd. He seemed to clutch at everything and smiled coldly when he recognised it, for he had fully made up his mind to go to the police station and knew that it would all soon be over.
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Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
- Highlight on Page 215 | Loc. 2697-2703  | Added on Monday, November 17, 2014, 03:24 PM

"I'll pray for you all the rest of my life," the little girl declared hotly, and suddenly smiling again she rushed at him and hugged him warmly once more. Raskolnikov told her his name and address and promised to be sure to come next day. The child went away quite enchanted with him. It was past ten when he came out into the street. In five minutes he was standing on the bridge at the spot where the woman had jumped in. "Enough," he pronounced resolutely and triumphantly. "I've done with fancies, imaginary terrors and phantoms! Life is real! haven't I lived just now? My life has not yet died with that old woman! The Kingdom of Heaven to her--and now enough, madam, leave me in peace! Now for the reign of reason and light... and of will, and of strength... and now we will see! We will try our strength!" he added defiantly, as though challenging some power of darkness. "And I was ready to consent to live in a square of space!
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Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
- Highlight on Page 215 | Loc. 2703-10  | Added on Monday, November 17, 2014, 03:25 PM

"I am very weak at this moment, but... I believe my illness is all over. I knew it would be over when I went out. By the way, Potchinkov's house is only a few steps away. I certainly must go to Razumihin even if it were not close by... let him win his bet! Let us give him some satisfaction, too--no matter! Strength, strength is what one wants, you can get nothing without it, and strength must be won by strength--that's what they don't know," he added proudly and self-confidently and he walked with flagging footsteps from the bridge. Pride and self-confidence grew continually stronger in him; he was becoming a different man every moment. What was it had happened to work this revolution in him? He did not know himself; like a man catching at a straw, he suddenly felt that he, too, 'could live, that there was still life for him, that his life had not died with the old woman.' Perhaps he was in too great a hurry with his conclusions, but he did not think of that.
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Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
- Highlight on Page 233 | Loc. 2925-27  | Added on Monday, November 17, 2014, 06:13 PM

According to his observations the patient's illness was due partly to his unfortunate material surroundings during the last few months, but it had partly also a moral origin, "was, so to speak, the product of several material and moral influences, anxieties, apprehensions, troubles, certain ideas... and so on."
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Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
- Highlight on Page 239 | Loc. 3003-12  | Added on Monday, November 17, 2014, 06:25 PM

"That's nonsense, I tell you, how could I think it seriously? You, yourself, described him as a monomaniac when you fetched me to him... and we added fuel to the fire yesterday, you did, that is, with your story about the painter; it was a nice conversation, when he was, perhaps, mad on that very point! If only I'd known what happened then at the police station and that some wretch... had insulted him with this suspicion! Hm... I would not have allowed that conversation yesterday. These monomaniacs will make a mountain out of a mole-hill... and see their fancies as solid realities.... As far as I remember, it was Zametov's story that cleared up half the mystery, to my mind. Why, I know one case in which a hypochondriac, a man of forty, cut the throat of a little boy of eight, because he couldn't endure the jokes he made every day at table! And in this case his rags, the insolent police officer, the fever and this suspicion! All that working upon a man half frantic with hypochondria, and with his morbid exceptional vanity! That may well have been the starting-point of illness. Well, bother it all!... And, by the way, that Zametov certainly is a nice fellow, but hm... he shouldn't have told all that last night. He is an awful chatterbox!"
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Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
- Highlight on Page 241 | Loc. 3036-44  | Added on Monday, November 17, 2014, 06:29 PM

"Naturally," answered Razumihin. "I have no mother, but my uncle comes every year and almost every time he can scarcely recognise me, even in appearance, though he is a clever man; and your three years' separation means a great deal. What am I to tell you? I have known Rodion for a year and a half; he is morose, gloomy, proud and haughty, and of late--and perhaps for a long time before--he has been suspicious and fanciful. He has a noble nature and a kind heart. He does not like showing his feelings and would rather do a cruel thing than open his heart freely. Sometimes, though, he is not at all morbid, but simply cold and inhumanly callous; it's as though he were alternating between two characters. Sometimes he is fearfully reserved! He says he is so busy that everything is a hindrance, and yet he lies in bed doing nothing. He doesn't jeer at things, not because he hasn't the wit, but as though he hadn't time to waste on such trifles. He never listens to what is said to him. He is never interested in what interests other people at any given moment. He thinks very highly of himself and perhaps he is right. Well, what more? I think your arrival will have a most beneficial influence upon him."
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Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
- Highlight on Page 248 | Loc. 3120-22  | Added on Monday, November 17, 2014, 06:37 PM

"My God!" exclaimed Pulcheria Alexandrovna, "little did I think that I should ever fear seeing my son, my darling, darling Rodya! I am afraid, Dmitri Prokofitch," she added, glancing at him timidly. "Don't be afraid, mother," said Dounia, kissing her, "better have faith in him." "Oh, dear, I have faith in him, but I haven't slept all night," exclaimed the poor woman.
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Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
- Highlight on Page 250 | Loc. 3143-49  | Added on Monday, November 17, 2014, 06:43 PM

He only wanted a sling on his arm or a bandage on his finger to complete the impression of a man with a painful abscess or a broken arm. The pale, sombre face lighted up for a moment when his mother and sister entered, but this only gave it a look of more intense suffering, in place of its listless dejection. The light soon died away, but the look of suffering remained, and Zossimov, watching and studying his patient with all the zest of a young doctor beginning to practise, noticed in him no joy at the arrival of his mother and sister, but a sort of bitter, hidden determination to bear another hour or two of inevitable torture. He saw later that almost every word of the following conversation seemed to touch on some sore place and irritate it. But at the same time he marvelled at the power of controlling himself and hiding his feelings in a patient who the previous day had, like a monomaniac, fallen into a frenzy at the slightest word.
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Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
- Highlight on Page 254 | Loc. 3195-3200  | Added on Monday, November 17, 2014, 06:51 PM

"Oh, nothing--don't be uneasy. It was when I was wandering about yesterday, rather delirious, I chanced upon a man who had been run over... a clerk..." "Delirious? But you remember everything!" Razumihin interrupted. "That's true," Raskolnikov answered with special carefulness. "I remember everything even to the slightest detail, and yet--why I did that and went there and said that, I can't clearly explain now." "A familiar phenomenon," interposed Zossimov, "actions are sometimes performed in a masterly and most cunning way, while the direction of the actions is deranged and dependent on various morbid impressions--it's like a dream."
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Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
- Highlight on Page 256 | Loc. 3213-18  | Added on Monday, November 17, 2014, 06:53 PM

"I only meant to say that I beg your forgiveness, mother," he concluded, shortly and abruptly. "That's enough, Rodya, I am sure that everything you do is very good," said his mother, delighted. "Don't be too sure," he answered, twisting his mouth into a smile. A silence followed. There was a certain constraint in all this conversation, and in the silence, and in the reconciliation, and in the forgiveness, and all were feeling it. "It is as though they were afraid of me," Raskolnikov was thinking to himself, looking askance at his mother and sister. Pulcheria Alexandrovna was indeed growing more timid the longer she kept silent. "Yet in their absence I seemed to love them so much," flashed through his mind.
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Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
- Highlight on Page 258 | Loc. 3231-42  | Added on Monday, November 17, 2014, 06:54 PM

"What does that matter!" put in Dounia. "H'm! But I don't know why you want to tell us such gossip, mother," said Raskolnikov irritably, as it were in spite of himself. "Ah, my dear, I don't know what to talk about," broke from Pulcheria Alexandrovna. "Why, are you all afraid of me?" he asked, with a constrained smile. "That's certainly true," said Dounia, looking directly and sternly at her brother. "Mother was crossing herself with terror as she came up the stairs." His face worked, as though in convulsion. "Ach, what are you saying, Dounia! Don't be angry, please, Rodya.... Why did you say that, Dounia?" Pulcheria Alexandrovna began, overwhelmed--"You see, coming here, I was dreaming all the way, in the train, how we should meet, how we should talk over everything together.... And I was so happy, I did not notice the journey! But what am I saying? I am happy now.... You should not, Dounia.... I am happy now--simply in seeing you, Rodya...." "Hush, mother," he muttered in confusion, not looking at her, but pressing her hand. "We shall have time to speak freely of everything!" As he said this, he was suddenly overwhelmed with confusion and turned pale. Again that awful sensation he had known of late passed with deadly chill over his soul. Again it became suddenly plain and perceptible to him that he had just told a fearful lie--that he would never now be able to speak freely of everything--that he would never again be able to speak of anything to anyone. The anguish of this thought was such that for a moment he almost forgot himself. He got up from his seat, and not looking at anyone walked towards the door.
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Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
- Highlight on Page 311 | Loc. 3833-41  | Added on Monday, November 17, 2014, 11:17 PM

With slow faltering steps, with shaking knees, Raskolnikov made his way back to his little garret, feeling chilled all over. He took off his cap and put it on the table, and for ten minutes he stood without moving. Then he sank exhausted on the sofa and with a weak moan of pain he stretched himself on it. So he lay for half an hour. He thought of nothing. Some thoughts or fragments of thoughts, some images without order or coherence floated before his mind--faces of people he had seen in his childhood or met somewhere once, whom he would never have recalled, the belfry of the church at V., the billiard table in a restaurant and some officers playing billiards, the smell of cigars in some underground tobacco shop, a tavern room, a back staircase quite dark, all sloppy with dirty water and strewn with egg-shells, and the Sunday bells floating in from somewhere.... The images followed one another, whirling like a hurricane. Some of them he liked and tried to clutch at, but they faded and all the while there was an oppression within him, but it was not overwhelming, sometimes it was even pleasant.... The slight shivering still persisted, but that too was an almost pleasant sensation.
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Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
- Highlight on Page 312 | Loc. 3848-53  | Added on Monday, November 17, 2014, 11:19 PM

He felt with sudden loathing how weak, how physically weak he had become. "I ought to have known it," he thought with a bitter smile. "And how dared I, knowing myself, knowing how I should be, take up an axe and shed blood! I ought to have known beforehand.... Ah, but I did know!" he whispered in despair. At times he came to a standstill at some thought. "No, those men are not made so. The real Master to whom all is permitted storms Toulon, makes a massacre in Paris, forgets an army in Egypt, wastes half a million men in the Moscow expedition and gets off with a jest at Vilna. And altars are set up to him after his death, and so all is permitted. No, such people, it seems, are not of flesh but of bronze!"
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Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
- Highlight on Page 367 | Loc. 4493-98  | Added on Tuesday, November 18, 2014, 12:19 AM

"It was not because of your dishonour and your sin I said that of you, but because of your great suffering. But you are a great sinner, that's true," he added almost solemnly, "and your worst sin is that you have destroyed and betrayed yourself for nothing. Isn't that fearful? Isn't it fearful that you are living in this filth which you loathe so, and at the same time you know yourself (you've only to open your eyes) that you are not helping anyone by it, not saving anyone from anything? Tell me," he went on almost in a frenzy, "how this shame and degradation can exist in you side by side with other, opposite, holy feelings? It would be better, a thousand times better and wiser to leap into the water and end it all!"
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Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
- Highlight on Page 368 | Loc. 4498-4504  | Added on Tuesday, November 18, 2014, 12:19 AM

Raskolnikov looked strangely at her. He read it all in her face; so she must have had that thought already, perhaps many times, and earnestly she had thought out in her despair how to end it and so earnestly, that now she scarcely wondered at his suggestion. She had not even noticed the cruelty of his words. (The significance of his reproaches and his peculiar attitude to her shame she had, of course, not noticed either, and that, too, was clear to him.) But he saw how monstrously the thought of her disgraceful, shameful position was torturing her and had long tortured her. "What, what," he thought, "could hitherto have hindered her from putting an end to it?" Only then he realised what those poor little orphan children and that pitiful half-crazy Katerina Ivanovna, knocking her head against the wall in her consumption, meant for Sonia.
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Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
- Highlight on Page 368 | Loc. 4504-12  | Added on Tuesday, November 18, 2014, 12:20 AM

But, nevertheless, it was clear to him again that with her character and the amount of education she had after all received, she could not in any case remain so. He was still confronted by the question, how could she have remained so long in that position without going out of her mind, since she could not bring herself to jump into the water? Of course he knew that Sonia's position was an exceptional case, though unhappily not unique and not infrequent, indeed; but that very exceptionalness, her tinge of education, her previous life might, one would have thought, have killed her at the first step on that revolting path. What held her up--surely not depravity? All that infamy had obviously only touched her mechanically, not one drop of real depravity had penetrated to her heart; he saw that. He saw through her as she stood before him.... "There are three ways before her," he thought, "the canal, the madhouse, or... at last to sink into depravity which obscures the mind and turns the heart to stone." The last idea was the most revolting, but he was a sceptic, he was young, abstract, and therefore cruel, and so he could not help believing that the last end was the most likely.
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Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
- Highlight on Page 371 | Loc. 4533-36  | Added on Tuesday, November 18, 2014, 12:23 AM

"You are not looking in the right place.... It's in the fourth gospel," she whispered sternly, without looking at him. "Find it and read it to me," he said. He sat down with his elbow on the table, leaned his head on his hand and looked away sullenly, prepared to listen. "In three weeks' time they'll welcome me in the madhouse! I shall be there if I am not in a worse place," he muttered to himself. Sonia heard Raskolnikov's request distrustfully and moved hesitatingly to the table. She took the book however.
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Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
- Highlight on Page 373 | Loc. 4547-55  | Added on Tuesday, November 18, 2014, 12:24 AM

Raskolnikov saw in part why Sonia could not bring herself to read to him and the more he saw this, the more roughly and irritably he insisted on her doing so. He understood only too well how painful it was for her to betray and unveil all that was her own. He understood that these feelings really were her secret treasure, which she had kept perhaps for years, perhaps from childhood, while she lived with an unhappy father and a distracted stepmother crazed by grief, in the midst of starving children and unseemly abuse and reproaches. But at the same time he knew now and knew for certain that, although it filled her with dread and suffering, yet she had a tormenting desire to read and to read to him that he might hear it, and to read now whatever might come of it!... He read this in her eyes, he could see it in her intense emotion. She mastered herself, controlled the spasm in her throat and went on reading the eleventh chapter of St. John. She went on to the nineteenth verse: "And many of the Jews came to Martha and Mary to comfort them concerning their brother.
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Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
- Highlight on Page 376 | Loc. 4585-91  | Added on Tuesday, November 18, 2014, 12:28 AM

I am not going to see them. I've broken with them completely." "What for?" asked Sonia amazed. Her recent meeting with his mother and sister had left a great impression which she could not analyse. She heard his news almost with horror. "I have only you now," he added. "Let us go together.... I've come to you, we are both accursed, let us go our way together!" His eyes glittered "as though he were mad," Sonia thought, in her turn. "Go where?" she asked in alarm and she involuntarily stepped back. "How do I know? I only know it's the same road, I know that and nothing more. It's the same goal!" She looked at him and understood nothing. She knew only that he was terribly, infinitely unhappy. "No one of them will understand, if you tell them, but I have understood. I need you, that is why I have come to you." "I don't understand," whispered Sonia.
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Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
- Highlight on Page 377 | Loc. 4591-4600  | Added on Tuesday, November 18, 2014, 12:29 AM

"You'll understand later. Haven't you done the same? You, too, have transgressed... have had the strength to transgress. You have laid hands on yourself, you have destroyed a life... your own (it's all the same!). You might have lived in spirit and understanding, but you'll end in the Hay Market.... But you won't be able to stand it, and if you remain alone you'll go out of your mind like me. You are like a mad creature already. So we must go together on the same road! Let us go!" "What for? What's all this for?" said Sonia, strangely and violently agitated by his words. "What for? Because you can't remain like this, that's why! You must look things straight in the face at last, and not weep like a child and cry that God won't allow it. What will happen, if you should really be taken to the hospital to-morrow? She is mad and in consumption, she'll soon die and the children? Do you mean to tell me Polenka won't come to grief? Haven't you seen children here at the street corners sent out by their mothers to beg? I've found out where those mothers live and in what surroundings. Children can't remain children there! At seven the child is vicious and a thief. Yet children, you know, are the image of Christ: 'theirs is the kingdom of Heaven.' He bade us honour and love them, they are the humanity of the future...."
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Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
- Highlight on Page 378 | Loc. 4600-4605  | Added on Tuesday, November 18, 2014, 12:29 AM

"What's to be done, what's to be done?" repeated Sonia, weeping hysterically and wringing her hands. "What's to be done? Break what must be broken, once for all, that's all, and take the suffering on oneself. What, you don't understand? You'll understand later.... Freedom and power, and above all, power! Over all trembling creation and all the ant-heap!... That's the goal, remember that! That's my farewell message. Perhaps it's the last time I shall speak to you. If I don't come to-morrow, you'll hear of it all, and then remember these words. And some day later on, in years to come, you'll understand perhaps what they meant. If I come to-morrow, I'll tell you who killed Lizaveta.... Good-bye." Sonia started with terror.
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Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
- Highlight on Page 410 | Loc. 4989  | Added on Tuesday, November 18, 2014, 11:18 AM

The black snake of wounded vanity had been gnawing at his heart all night.
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Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
- Highlight on Page 420 | Loc. 5130-32  | Added on Tuesday, November 18, 2014, 11:32 AM

How vexed I am that when I was expounding our system, I referred prematurely to the question of personal privacy! It's always a stumbling-block to people like you, they turn it into ridicule before they understand it. And how proud they are of it, too!
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Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
- Highlight on Page 429 | Loc. 5243-50  | Added on Tuesday, November 18, 2014, 02:30 PM

It was one of Katerina Ivanovna's characteristics to paint everyone she met in the most glowing colours. Her praises were so exaggerated as sometimes to be embarrassing; she would invent various circumstances to the credit of her new acquaintance and quite genuinely believe in their reality. Then all of a sudden she would be disillusioned and would rudely and contemptuously repulse the person she had only a few hours before been literally adoring. She was naturally of a gay, lively and peace-loving disposition, but from continual failures and misfortunes she had come to desire so keenly that all should live in peace and joy and should not dare to break the peace, that the slightest jar, the smallest disaster reduced her almost to frenzy, and she would pass in an instant from the brightest hopes and fancies to cursing her fate and raving, and knocking her head against the wall.
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Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
- Highlight on Page 451 | Loc. 5550-54  | Added on Tuesday, November 18, 2014, 02:54 PM

When Lebeziatnikov finished his long-winded harangue with the logical deduction at the end, he was quite tired, and the perspiration streamed from his face. He could not, alas, even express himself correctly in Russian, though he knew no other language, so that he was quite exhausted, almost emaciated after this heroic exploit. But his speech produced a powerful effect. He had spoken with such vehemence, with such conviction that everyone obviously believed him. Pyotr Petrovitch felt that things were going badly with him.
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Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
- Highlight on Page 456 | Loc. 5631-37  | Added on Tuesday, November 18, 2014, 05:18 PM

he was still superficially excited, still vigorous and defiant from his triumph over Luzhin. But, strange to say, by the time he reached Sonia's lodging, he felt a sudden impotence and fear. He stood still in hesitation at the door, asking himself the strange question: "Must he tell her who killed Lizaveta?" It was a strange question because he felt at the very time not only that he could not help telling her, but also that he could not put off the telling. He did not yet know why it must be so, he only felt it, and the agonising sense of his impotence before the inevitable almost crushed him. To cut short his hesitation and suffering, he quickly opened the door and looked at Sonia from the doorway. She was sitting with her elbows on the table and her face in her hands, but seeing Raskolnikov she got up at once and came to meet him as though she were expecting him.
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Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
- Highlight on Page 459 | Loc. 5661-63  | Added on Tuesday, November 18, 2014, 06:58 PM

"But I can't know the Divine Providence.... And why do you ask what can't be answered? What's the use of such foolish questions? How could it happen that it should depend on my decision--who has made me a judge to decide who is to live and who is not to live?" "Oh, if the Divine Providence is to be mixed up in it, there is no doing anything," Raskolnikov grumbled morosely.
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Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
- Highlight on Page 460 | Loc. 5668-72  | Added on Tuesday, November 18, 2014, 06:59 PM

He tried to smile, but there was something helpless and incomplete in his pale smile. He bowed his head and hid his face in his hands. And suddenly a strange, surprising sensation of a sort of bitter hatred for Sonia passed through his heart. As it were wondering and frightened of this sensation, he raised his head and looked intently at her; but he met her uneasy and painfully anxious eyes fixed on him; there was love in them; his hatred vanished like a phantom. It was not the real feeling; he had taken the one feeling for the other. It only meant that that minute had come.
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Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
- Highlight on Page 460 | Loc. 5673-74  | Added on Tuesday, November 18, 2014, 06:59 PM

His sensations that moment were terribly like the moment when he had stood over the old woman with the axe in his hand and felt that "he must not lose another minute."
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Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
- Highlight on Page 460 | Loc. 5675-80  | Added on Tuesday, November 18, 2014, 06:59 PM

He could not utter a word. This was not at all, not at all the way he had intended to "tell" and he did not understand what was happening to him now. She went up to him, softly, sat down on the bed beside him and waited, not taking her eyes off him. Her heart throbbed and sank. It was unendurable; he turned his deadly pale face to her. His lips worked, helplessly struggling to utter something. A pang of terror passed through Sonia's heart. "What's the matter?" she repeated, drawing a little away from him. "Nothing, Sonia, don't be frightened.... It's nonsense. It really is nonsense, if you think of it," he muttered, like a man in delirium. "Why have I come to torture you?" he added suddenly, looking at her. "Why, really? I keep asking myself that question, Sonia...."
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Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
- Highlight on Page 462 | Loc. 5685-99  | Added on Tuesday, November 18, 2014, 07:00 PM

Sonia's face grew paler and paler, and she breathed painfully. "I know." She paused a minute. "Have they found him?" she asked timidly. "No." "Then how do you know about it?" she asked again, hardly audibly and again after a minute's pause. He turned to her and looked very intently at her. "Guess," he said, with the same distorted helpless smile. A shudder passed over her. "But you... why do you frighten me like this?" she said, smiling like a child. "I must be a great friend of his... since I know," Raskolnikov went on, still gazing into her face, as though he could not turn his eyes away. "He... did not mean to kill that Lizaveta... he... killed her accidentally.... He meant to kill the old woman when she was alone and he went there... and then Lizaveta came in... he killed her too." Another awful moment passed. Both still gazed at one another. "You can't guess, then?" he asked suddenly, feeling as though he were flinging himself down from a steeple. "N-no..." whispered Sonia. "Take a good look." As soon as he had said this again, the same familiar sensation froze his heart. He looked at her and all at once seemed to see in her face the face of Lizaveta. He remembered clearly the expression in Lizaveta's face, when he approached her with the axe and she stepped back to the wall, putting out her hand, with childish terror in her face, looking as little children do when they begin to be frightened of something, looking intently and uneasily at what frightens them, shrinking back and holding out their little hands on the point of crying. Almost the same thing happened now to Sonia. With the same helplessness and the same terror, she looked at him for a while and, suddenly putting out her left hand, pressed her fingers faintly against his breast and slowly began to get up from the bed, moving further from him and keeping her eyes fixed even more immovably on him. Her terror infected him. The same fear showed itself on his face. In the same way he stared at her and almost with the same childish smile.
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Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
- Highlight on Page 467 | Loc. 5741-47  | Added on Tuesday, November 18, 2014, 07:04 PM

he cried a minute later in despair, looking with infinite anguish at her. "Here you expect an explanation from me, Sonia; you are sitting and waiting for it, I see that. But what can I tell you? You won't understand and will only suffer misery... on my account! Well, you are crying and embracing me again. Why do you do it? Because I couldn't bear my burden and have come to throw it on another: you suffer too, and I shall feel better! And can you love such a mean wretch?" "But aren't you suffering, too?" cried Sonia. Again a wave of the same feeling surged into his heart, and again for an instant softened it. "Sonia, I have a bad heart, take note of that. It may explain a great deal. I have come because I am bad. There are men who wouldn't have come. But I am a coward and... a mean wretch. But... never mind! That's not the point. I must speak now, but I don't know how to begin."
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Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
- Highlight on Page 468 | Loc. 5755-61  | Added on Tuesday, November 18, 2014, 07:06 PM

Well, would he have brought himself to that if there had been no other means? Wouldn't he have felt a pang at its being so far from monumental and... and sinful, too? Well, I must tell you that I worried myself fearfully over that 'question' so that I was awfully ashamed when I guessed at last (all of a sudden, somehow) that it would not have given him the least pang, that it would not even have struck him that it was not monumental... that he would not have seen that there was anything in it to pause over, and that, if he had had no other way, he would have strangled her in a minute without thinking about it! Well, I too... left off thinking about it... murdered her, following his example. And that's exactly how it was! Do you think it funny? Yes, Sonia, the funniest thing of all is that perhaps that's just how it was."
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Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
- Highlight on Page 469 | Loc. 5762-73  | Added on Tuesday, November 18, 2014, 07:07 PM

"You are right again, Sonia. Of course that's all nonsense, it's almost all talk! You see, you know of course that my mother has scarcely anything, my sister happened to have a good education and was condemned to drudge as a governess. All their hopes were centered on me. I was a student, but I couldn't keep myself at the university and was forced for a time to leave it. Even if I had lingered on like that, in ten or twelve years I might (with luck) hope to be some sort of teacher or clerk with a salary of a thousand roubles" (he repeated it as though it were a lesson) "and by that time my mother would be worn out with grief and anxiety and I could not succeed in keeping her in comfort while my sister... well, my sister might well have fared worse! And it's a hard thing to pass everything by all one's life, to turn one's back upon everything, to forget one's mother and decorously accept the insults inflicted on one's sister. Why should one? When one has buried them to burden oneself with others--wife and children--and to leave them again without a farthing? So I resolved to gain possession of the old woman's money and to use it for my first years without worrying my mother, to keep myself at the university and for a little while after leaving it--and to do this all on a broad, thorough scale, so as to build up a completely new career and enter upon a new life of independence.... Well... that's all.... Well, of course in killing the old woman I did wrong.... Well, that's enough." He struggled to the end of his speech in exhaustion and let his head sink.
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Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
- Highlight on Page 471 | Loc. 5782-93  | Added on Tuesday, November 18, 2014, 07:08 PM

I told you just now I could not keep myself at the university. But do you know that perhaps I might have done? My mother would have sent me what I needed for the fees and I could have earned enough for clothes, boots and food, no doubt. Lessons had turned up at half a rouble. Razumihin works! But I turned sulky and wouldn't. (Yes, sulkiness, that's the right word for it!) I sat in my room like a spider. You've been in my den, you've seen it.... And do you know, Sonia, that low ceilings and tiny rooms cramp the soul and the mind? Ah, how I hated that garret! And yet I wouldn't go out of it! I wouldn't on purpose! I didn't go out for days together, and I wouldn't work, I wouldn't even eat, I just lay there doing nothing. If Nastasya brought me anything, I ate it, if she didn't, I went all day without; I wouldn't ask, on purpose, from sulkiness! At night I had no light, I lay in the dark and I wouldn't earn money for candles. I ought to have studied, but I sold my books; and the dust lies an inch thick on the notebooks on my table. I preferred lying still and thinking. And I kept thinking.... And I had dreams all the time, strange dreams of all sorts, no need to describe! Only then I began to fancy that... No, that's not it! Again I am telling you wrong! You see I kept asking myself then: why am I so stupid that if others are stupid--and I know they are--yet I won't be wiser? Then I saw, Sonia, that if one waits for everyone to get wiser it will take too long.... Afterwards I understood that that would never come to pass, that men won't change and that nobody can alter it and that it's not worth wasting effort over it.
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Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
- Highlight on Page 471 | Loc. 5793-96  | Added on Tuesday, November 18, 2014, 07:09 PM

Yes, that's so. That's the law of their nature, Sonia,... that's so!... And I know now, Sonia, that whoever is strong in mind and spirit will have power over them. Anyone who is greatly daring is right in their eyes. He who despises most things will be a lawgiver among them and he who dares most of all will be most in the right! So it has been till now and so it will always be. A man must be blind not to see it!"
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Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
- Highlight on Page 471 | Loc. 5798-5802  | Added on Tuesday, November 18, 2014, 07:09 PM

"I divined then, Sonia," he went on eagerly, "that power is only vouchsafed to the man who dares to stoop and pick it up. There is only one thing, one thing needful: one has only to dare! Then for the first time in my life an idea took shape in my mind which no one had ever thought of before me, no one! I saw clear as daylight how strange it is that not a single person living in this mad world has had the daring to go straight for it all and send it flying to the devil! I... I wanted to have the daring... and I killed her. I only wanted to have the daring, Sonia! That was the whole cause of it!"
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Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
- Highlight on Page 479 | Loc. 5895-5901  | Added on Tuesday, November 18, 2014, 07:39 PM

Never, never had he felt himself so fearfully alone! Yes, he felt once more that he would perhaps come to hate Sonia, now that he had made her more miserable. "Why had he gone to her to beg for her tears? What need had he to poison her life? Oh, the meanness of it!" "I will remain alone," he said resolutely, "and she shall not come to the prison!" Five minutes later he raised his head with a strange smile. That was a strange thought. "Perhaps it really would be better in Siberia," he thought suddenly. He could not have said how long he sat there with vague thoughts surging through his mind. All at once the door opened and Dounia came in. At first she stood still and looked at him from the doorway, just as he had done at Sonia; then she came in and sat down in the same place as yesterday, on the chair facing him. He looked silently and almost vacantly at her.
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Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
- Highlight on Page 480 | Loc. 5902-10  | Added on Tuesday, November 18, 2014, 07:39 PM

"Brother, now I know all, all. Dmitri Prokofitch has explained and told me everything. They are worrying and persecuting you through a stupid and contemptible suspicion.... Dmitri Prokofitch told me that there is no danger, and that you are wrong in looking upon it with such horror. I don't think so, and I fully understand how indignant you must be, and that that indignation may have a permanent effect on you. That's what I am afraid of. As for your cutting yourself off from us, I don't judge you, I don't venture to judge you, and forgive me for having blamed you for it. I feel that I too, if I had so great a trouble, should keep away from everyone. I shall tell mother nothing of this, but I shall talk about you continually and shall tell her from you that you will come very soon. Don't worry about her; I will set her mind at rest; but don't you try her too much--come once at least; remember that she is your mother. And now I have come simply to say" (Dounia began to get up) "that if you should need me or should need... all my life or anything... call me, and I'll come. Good-bye!"
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Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
- Highlight on Page 482 | Loc. 5921-23  | Added on Tuesday, November 18, 2014, 07:41 PM

He wandered aimlessly. The sun was setting. A special form of misery had begun to oppress him of late. There was nothing poignant, nothing acute about it; but there was a feeling of permanence, of eternity about it; it brought a foretaste of hopeless years of this cold leaden misery, a foretaste of an eternity "on a square yard of space." Towards evening this sensation usually began to weigh on him more heavily.
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Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
- Highlight on Page 493 | Loc. 6058-67  | Added on Tuesday, November 18, 2014, 07:53 PM

A strange period began for Raskolnikov: it was as though a fog had fallen upon him and wrapped him in a dreary solitude from which there was no escape. Recalling that period long after, he believed that his mind had been clouded at times, and that it had continued so, with intervals, till the final catastrophe. He was convinced that he had been mistaken about many things at that time, for instance as to the date of certain events. Anyway, when he tried later on to piece his recollections together, he learnt a great deal about himself from what other people told him. He had mixed up incidents and had explained events as due to circumstances which existed only in his imagination. At times he was a prey to agonies of morbid uneasiness, amounting sometimes to panic. But he remembered, too, moments, hours, perhaps whole days, of complete apathy, which came upon him as a reaction from his previous terror and might be compared with the abnormal insensibility, sometimes seen in the dying. He seemed to be trying in that latter stage to escape from a full and clear understanding of his position. Certain essential facts which required immediate consideration were particularly irksome to him. How glad he would have been to be free from some cares, the neglect of which would have threatened him with complete, inevitable ruin.
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Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
- Highlight on Page 494 | Loc. 6070-74  | Added on Tuesday, November 18, 2014, 07:54 PM

At times, finding himself in a solitary and remote part of the town, in some wretched eating-house, sitting alone lost in thought, hardly knowing how he had come there, he suddenly thought of Svidrigaïlov. He recognised suddenly, clearly, and with dismay that he ought at once to come to an understanding with that man and to make what terms he could. Walking outside the city gates one day, he positively fancied that they had fixed a meeting there, that he was waiting for Svidrigaïlov. Another time he woke up before daybreak lying on the ground under some bushes and could not at first understand how he had come there.
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Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
- Highlight on Page 496 | Loc. 6095-6101  | Added on Tuesday, November 18, 2014, 07:56 PM

He felt very miserable. If it had been possible to escape to some solitude, he would have thought himself lucky, even if he had to spend his whole life there. But although he had almost always been by himself of late, he had never been able to feel alone. Sometimes he walked out of the town on to the high road, once he had even reached a little wood, but the lonelier the place was, the more he seemed to be aware of an uneasy presence near him. It did not frighten him, but greatly annoyed him, so that he made haste to return to the town, to mingle with the crowd, to enter restaurants and taverns, to walk in busy thoroughfares. There he felt easier and even more solitary. One day at dusk he sat for an hour listening to songs in a tavern and he remembered that he positively enjoyed it. But at last he had suddenly felt the same uneasiness again, as though his conscience smote him.
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Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
- Highlight on Page 502 | Loc. 6172-76  | Added on Tuesday, November 18, 2014, 08:02 PM

"Yes, a means of escape had come! It had been too stifling, too cramping, the burden had been too agonising. A lethargy had come upon him at times. From the moment of the scene with Nikolay at Porfiry's he had been suffocating, penned in without hope of escape. After Nikolay's confession, on that very day had come the scene with Sonia; his behaviour and his last words had been utterly unlike anything he could have imagined beforehand; he had grown feebler, instantly and fundamentally! And he had agreed at the time with Sonia, he had agreed in his heart he could not go on living alone with such a thing on his mind!
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Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
- Highlight on Page 512 | Loc. 6310-16  | Added on Tuesday, November 18, 2014, 08:16 PM

Here we have bookish dreams, a heart unhinged by theories. Here we see resolution in the first stage, but resolution of a special kind: he resolved to do it like jumping over a precipice or from a bell tower and his legs shook as he went to the crime. He forgot to shut the door after him, and murdered two people for a theory. He committed the murder and couldn't take the money, and what he did manage to snatch up he hid under a stone. It wasn't enough for him to suffer agony behind the door while they battered at the door and rung the bell, no, he had to go to the empty lodging, half delirious, to recall the bell-ringing, he wanted to feel the cold shiver over again.... Well, that we grant, was through illness, but consider this: he is a murderer, but looks upon himself as an honest man, despises others, poses as injured innocence. No, that's not the work of a Nikolay, my dear Rodion Romanovitch!"
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Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
- Highlight on Page 515 | Loc. 6356-59  | Added on Tuesday, November 18, 2014, 08:20 PM

Raskolnikov looked sadly and expressively at him. "Ah, don't disdain life!" Porfiry went on. "You have a great deal of it still before you. How can you say you don't want a mitigation of sentence? You are an impatient fellow!" "A great deal of what lies before me?" "Of life. What sort of prophet are you, do you know much about it? Seek and ye shall find. This may be God's means for bringing you to Him. And it's not for ever, the bondage...." "The time will be shortened," laughed Raskolnikov.
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Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
- Highlight on Page 516 | Loc. 6362-67  | Added on Tuesday, November 18, 2014, 08:21 PM

"Hang it, if you like! You've lost faith and you think that I am grossly flattering you; but how long has your life been? How much do you understand? You made up a theory and then were ashamed that it broke down and turned out to be not at all original! It turned out something base, that's true, but you are not hopelessly base. By no means so base! At least you didn't deceive yourself for long, you went straight to the furthest point at one bound. How do I regard you? I regard you as one of those men who would stand and smile at their torturer while he cuts their entrails out, if only they have found faith or God. Find it and you will live. You have long needed a change of air. Suffering, too, is a good thing. Suffer! Maybe Nikolay is right in wanting to suffer.
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Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
- Highlight on Page 517 | Loc. 6374-82  | Added on Tuesday, November 18, 2014, 08:22 PM

What you need now is fresh air, fresh air, fresh air!" Raskolnikov positively started. "But who are you? what prophet are you? From the height of what majestic calm do you proclaim these words of wisdom?" "Who am I? I am a man with nothing to hope for, that's all. A man perhaps of feeling and sympathy, maybe of some knowledge too, but my day is over. But you are a different matter, there is life waiting for you. Though, who knows? maybe your life, too, will pass off in smoke and come to nothing. Come, what does it matter, that you will pass into another class of men? It's not comfort you regret, with your heart! What of it that perhaps no one will see you for so long? It's not time, but yourself that will decide that. Be the sun and all will see you. The sun has before all to be the sun. Why are you smiling again? At my being such a Schiller? I bet you're imagining that I am trying to get round you by flattery. Well, perhaps I am, he-he-he! Perhaps you'd better not believe my word, perhaps you'd better never believe it altogether--I'm made that way, I confess it. But let me add, you can judge for yourself, I think, how far I am a base sort of man and how far I am honest."
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Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
- Highlight on Page 572 | Loc. 7101-11  | Added on Wednesday, November 19, 2014, 11:03 AM

"Bah!" he shouted, "here is a place. Why should it be Petrovsky? It will be in the presence of an official witness anyway...." He almost smiled at this new thought and turned into the street where there was the big house with the tower. At the great closed gates of the house, a little man stood with his shoulder leaning against them, wrapped in a grey soldier's coat, with a copper Achilles helmet on his head. He cast a drowsy and indifferent glance at Svidrigaïlov. His face wore that perpetual look of peevish dejection, which is so sourly printed on all faces of Jewish race without exception. They both, Svidrigaïlov and Achilles, stared at each other for a few minutes without speaking. At last it struck Achilles as irregular for a man not drunk to be standing three steps from him, staring and not saying a word. "What do you want here?" he said, without moving or changing his position. "Nothing, brother, good morning," answered Svidrigaïlov. "This isn't the place." "I am going to foreign parts, brother." "To foreign parts?" "To America." "America." Svidrigaïlov took out the revolver and cocked it. Achilles raised his eyebrows. "I say, this is not the place for such jokes!" "Why shouldn't it be the place?" "Because it isn't." "Well, brother, I don't mind that. It's a good place. When you are asked, you just say he was going, he said, to America." He put the revolver to his right temple. "You can't do it here, it's not the place," cried Achilles, rousing himself, his eyes growing bigger and bigger. Svidrigaïlov pulled the trigger.
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Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
- Highlight on Page 574 | Loc. 7113-17  | Added on Wednesday, November 19, 2014, 11:04 AM

But nothing would have turned him back: his decision was taken. "Besides, it doesn't matter, they still know nothing," he thought, "and they are used to thinking of me as eccentric." He was appallingly dressed: his clothes torn and dirty, soaked with a night's rain. His face was almost distorted from fatigue, exposure, the inward conflict that had lasted for twenty-four hours. He had spent all the previous night alone, God knows where. But anyway he had reached a decision.
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Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
- Highlight on Page 580 | Loc. 7184-88  | Added on Wednesday, November 19, 2014, 11:10 AM

"I don't remember clearly. You see, sister, I wanted to make up my mind once for all, and several times I walked by the Neva, I remember that I wanted to end it all there, but... I couldn't make up my mind," he whispered, looking at her mistrustfully again. "Thank God! That was just what we were afraid of, Sofya Semyonovna and I. Then you still have faith in life? Thank God, thank God!" Raskolnikov smiled bitterly. "I haven't faith, but I have just been weeping in mother's arms; I haven't faith, but I have just asked her to pray for me. I don't know how it is, Dounia, I don't understand it."
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Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
- Highlight on Page 581 | Loc. 7198-7208  | Added on Wednesday, November 19, 2014, 11:11 AM

"Crime? What crime?" he cried in sudden fury. "That I killed a vile noxious insect, an old pawnbroker woman, of use to no one!... Killing her was atonement for forty sins. She was sucking the life out of poor people. Was that a crime? I am not thinking of it and I am not thinking of expiating it, and why are you all rubbing it in on all sides? 'A crime! a crime!' Only now I see clearly the imbecility of my cowardice, now that I have decided to face this superfluous disgrace. It's simply because I am contemptible and have nothing in me that I have decided to, perhaps too for my advantage, as that... Porfiry... suggested!" "Brother, brother, what are you saying? Why, you have shed blood?" cried Dounia in despair. "Which all men shed," he put in almost frantically, "which flows and has always flowed in streams, which is spilt like champagne, and for which men are crowned in the Capitol and are called afterwards benefactors of mankind. Look into it more carefully and understand it! I too wanted to do good to men and would have done hundreds, thousands of good deeds to make up for that one piece of stupidity, not stupidity even, simply clumsiness, for the idea was by no means so stupid as it seems now that it has failed.... (Everything seems stupid when it fails.) By that stupidity I only wanted to put myself into an independent position, to take the first step, to obtain means, and then everything would have been smoothed over by benefits immeasurable in comparison.... But I...
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Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
- Highlight on Page 582 | Loc. 7208-10  | Added on Wednesday, November 19, 2014, 11:12 AM

I couldn't carry out even the first step, because I am contemptible, that's what's the matter! And yet I won't look at it as you do. If I had succeeded I should have been crowned with glory, but now I'm trapped."
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Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
- Highlight on Page 582 | Loc. 7211-13  | Added on Wednesday, November 19, 2014, 11:12 AM

The fear of appearances is the first symptom of impotence. I've never, never recognised this more clearly than now, and I am further than ever from seeing that what I did was a crime. I've never, never been stronger and more convinced than now."
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Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
- Highlight on Page 583 | Loc. 7215  | Added on Wednesday, November 19, 2014, 11:12 AM

"Dounia darling, if I am guilty forgive me (though I cannot be forgiven if I am guilty).
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Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
- Highlight on Page 584 | Loc. 7232-34  | Added on Wednesday, November 19, 2014, 11:14 AM

"I am wicked, I see that," he thought to himself, feeling ashamed a moment later of his angry gesture to Dounia. "But why are they so fond of me if I don't deserve it? Oh, if only I were alone and no one loved me and I too had never loved anyone! Nothing of all this would have happened.
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Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
- Highlight on Page 584 | Loc. 7234-40  | Added on Wednesday, November 19, 2014, 11:15 AM

I wonder shall I in those fifteen or twenty years grow so meek that I shall humble myself before people and whimper at every word that I am a criminal? Yes, that's it, that's it, that's what they are sending me there for, that's what they want. Look at them running to and fro about the streets, every one of them a scoundrel and a criminal at heart and, worse still, an idiot. But try to get me off and they'd be wild with righteous indignation. Oh, how I hate them all!" He fell to musing by what process it could come to pass, that he could be humbled before all of them, indiscriminately--humbled by conviction. And yet why not? It must be so. Would not twenty years of continual bondage crush him utterly? Water wears out a stone. And why, why should he live after that? Why should he go now when he knew that it would be so? It was the hundredth time perhaps that he had asked himself that question since the previous evening, but still he went.
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Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
- Highlight on Page 588 | Loc. 7282-87  | Added on Wednesday, November 19, 2014, 11:21 AM

At the same instant, another thought dawned upon him, as though it had been lying in wait to strike him then. "Why, with what object did I go to her just now? I told her--on business; on what business? I had no sort of business! To tell her I was going; but where was the need? Do I love her? No, no, I drove her away just now like a dog. Did I want her crosses? Oh, how low I've sunk! No, I wanted her tears, I wanted to see her terror, to see how her heart ached! I had to have something to cling to, something to delay me, some friendly face to see! And I dared to believe in myself, to dream of what I would do! I am a beggarly contemptible wretch, contemptible!"
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Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
- Highlight on Page 588 | Loc. 7288-96  | Added on Wednesday, November 19, 2014, 11:21 AM

intently at every object and could not fix his attention on anything; everything slipped away. "In another week, another month I shall be driven in a prison van over this bridge, how shall I look at the canal then? I should like to remember this!" slipped into his mind. "Look at this sign! How shall I read those letters then? It's written here 'Campany,' that's a thing to remember, that letter a, and to look at it again in a month--how shall I look at it then? What shall I be feeling and thinking then?... How trivial it all must be, what I am fretting about now! Of course it must all be interesting... in its way... (Ha-ha-ha! What am I thinking about?) I am becoming a baby, I am showing off to myself; why am I ashamed? Foo! how people shove! that fat man--a German he must be--who pushed against me, does he know whom he pushed? There's a peasant woman with a baby, begging. It's curious that she thinks me happier than she is. I might give her something, for the incongruity of it. Here's a five copeck piece left in my pocket, where did I get it? Here, here... take it, my good woman!" "God bless you," the beggar chanted in a lachrymose voice.
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The Brothers Karamazov

The Brothers Karamazov (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
- Highlight Loc. 5023-24  | Added on Wednesday, November 19, 2014, 02:38 PM

My story is laid in Spain, in Seville, in the most terrible time of the Inquisition, when fires were lighted every day to the glory of God, and ‘in the splendid auto da fé the wicked heretics were burnt.’
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The Brothers Karamazov (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
- Highlight Loc. 5044-52  | Added on Wednesday, November 19, 2014, 02:41 PM

“There are cries, sobs, confusion among the people, and at that moment the cardinal himself, the Grand Inquisitor, passes by the [pg 274] cathedral. He is an old man, almost ninety, tall and erect, with a withered face and sunken eyes, in which there is still a gleam of light. He is not dressed in his gorgeous cardinal's robes, as he was the day before, when he was burning the enemies of the Roman Church—at this moment he is wearing his coarse, old, monk's cassock. At a distance behind him come his gloomy assistants and slaves and the ‘holy guard.’ He stops at the sight of the crowd and watches it from a distance. He sees everything; he sees them set the coffin down at His feet, sees the child rise up, and his face darkens. He knits his thick gray brows and his eyes gleam with a sinister fire. He holds out his finger and bids the guards take Him. And such is his power, so completely are the people cowed into submission and trembling obedience to him, that the crowd immediately makes way for the guards, and in the midst of deathlike silence they lay hands on Him and lead Him away. The crowd instantly bows down to the earth, like one man, before the old Inquisitor. He blesses the people in silence and passes on.
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The Brothers Karamazov (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
- Highlight Loc. 5057-63  | Added on Wednesday, November 19, 2014, 02:42 PM

“ ‘Is it Thou? Thou?’ but receiving no answer, he adds at once, ‘Don't answer, be silent. What canst Thou say, indeed? I know too well what Thou wouldst say. And Thou hast no right to add anything to what Thou hadst said of old. Why, then, art Thou come to hinder us? For Thou hast come to hinder us, and Thou knowest that. But dost Thou know what will be to-morrow? I know not who Thou art and care not to know whether it is Thou or only a semblance of Him, but to-morrow I shall condemn Thee and burn Thee at the stake as the worst of heretics. And the very people who have to-day kissed Thy feet, to-morrow at the faintest sign from me will rush to heap up the embers of Thy fire. Knowest Thou that? Yes, maybe Thou knowest it,’ he added with thoughtful [pg 275] penetration, never for a moment taking his eyes off the Prisoner.”
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The Brothers Karamazov (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
- Highlight Loc. 5073-75  | Added on Wednesday, November 19, 2014, 02:43 PM

One may say it is the most fundamental feature of Roman Catholicism, in my opinion at least. ‘All has been given by Thee to the Pope,’ they say, ‘and all, therefore, is still in the Pope's hands, and there is no need for Thee to come now at all. Thou must not meddle for the time, at least.’ That's how they speak and write too—the Jesuits, at any rate.
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The Brothers Karamazov (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
- Highlight Loc. 5112-19  | Added on Wednesday, November 19, 2014, 02:47 PM

But seest Thou these stones in this parched and barren wilderness? Turn them into bread, and mankind will run after Thee like a flock of sheep, grateful and obedient, though for ever trembling, lest Thou withdraw Thy hand and deny them Thy bread.” But Thou wouldst not deprive man of freedom and didst reject the offer, thinking, what is that freedom worth, if obedience is bought with bread? Thou didst reply that man lives not by bread alone. But dost Thou know that for the sake of that earthly bread the spirit of the earth will rise up against Thee and will strive with Thee and overcome Thee, and all will follow him, crying, “Who can compare with this beast? He has given us fire from heaven!” Dost Thou know that the ages will pass, and humanity will proclaim by the lips of their [pg 278] sages that there is no crime, and therefore no sin; there is only hunger? “Feed men, and then ask of them virtue!” that's what they'll write on the banner, which they will raise against Thee, and with which they will destroy Thy temple.
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The Brothers Karamazov (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
- Highlight Loc. 5121-27  | Added on Wednesday, November 19, 2014, 02:48 PM

for they will come back to us after a thousand years of agony with their tower. They will seek us again, hidden underground in the catacombs, for we shall be again persecuted and tortured. They will find us and cry to us, “Feed us, for those who have promised us fire from heaven haven't given it!” And then we shall finish building their tower, for he finishes the building who feeds them. And we alone shall feed them in Thy name, declaring falsely that it is in Thy name. Oh, never, never can they feed themselves without us! No science will give them bread so long as they remain free. In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet, and say to us, “Make us your slaves, but feed us.” They will understand themselves, at last, that freedom and bread enough for all are inconceivable together, for never, never will they be able to share between them!
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The Brothers Karamazov (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
- Highlight Loc. 5133-36  | Added on Wednesday, November 19, 2014, 02:49 PM

They will marvel at us and look on us as gods, because we are ready to endure the freedom which they have found so dreadful and to rule over them—so awful it will seem to them to be free. But we shall tell them that we are Thy servants and rule them in Thy name. We shall deceive them again, for we will not let [pg 279] Thee come to us again. That deception will be our suffering, for we shall be forced to lie.
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The Brothers Karamazov (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
- Highlight Loc. 5137-40  | Added on Wednesday, November 19, 2014, 02:49 PM

Yet in this question lies hid the great secret of this world. Choosing “bread,” Thou wouldst have satisfied the universal and everlasting craving of humanity—to find some one to worship. So long as man remains free he strives for nothing so incessantly and so painfully as to find some one to worship.
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The Brothers Karamazov (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
- Highlight Loc. 5151-54  | Added on Wednesday, November 19, 2014, 02:51 PM

For the secret of man's being is not only to live but to have something to live for. Without a stable conception of the object of life, man would not consent to go [pg 280] on living, and would rather destroy himself than remain on earth, though he had bread in abundance.
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The Brothers Karamazov (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
- Highlight Loc. 5165-66  | Added on Wednesday, November 19, 2014, 02:53 PM

There are three powers, three powers alone, able to conquer and to hold captive for ever the conscience of these impotent rebels for their happiness—those forces are miracle, mystery and authority.
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The Brothers Karamazov (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
- Highlight Loc. 5178-82  | Added on Wednesday, November 19, 2014, 02:55 PM

Thou didst not come down from the Cross when they shouted to Thee, mocking and reviling Thee, “Come down from the cross and we will believe that Thou art He.” Thou didst not come down, for again Thou wouldst not enslave man by a miracle, and didst crave faith given freely, not based on miracle. Thou didst crave for free love and not the base raptures of the slave before the might that has overawed him for ever. But Thou didst think too highly of men therein, for they are slaves, of course, though rebellious by nature.
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The Brothers Karamazov (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
- Highlight Loc. 5206-10  | Added on Wednesday, November 19, 2014, 02:57 PM

Listen, then. We are not working with Thee, but with him —that is our mystery. It's long—eight centuries—since we have been on his side and not on Thine. Just eight centuries ago, we took from him what Thou didst reject with scorn, that last gift he offered Thee, showing Thee all the kingdoms of the earth. We took from him Rome and the sword of Cæsar, and proclaimed ourselves sole rulers of the earth, though hitherto we have not been able to complete our work. But whose fault is that? Oh, the work is only beginning, but it has begun.
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The Brothers Karamazov (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
- Highlight Loc. 5211-14  | Added on Wednesday, November 19, 2014, 02:58 PM

Why didst Thou reject that last gift? Hadst Thou accepted that last counsel of the mighty spirit, Thou wouldst have accomplished all that man seeks on earth—that is, some one to worship, some one to keep his conscience, and some means of uniting all in one unanimous and harmonious ant-heap, for the craving for universal unity is the third and last anguish of men.
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The Brothers Karamazov (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
- Highlight Loc. 5219-23  | Added on Wednesday, November 19, 2014, 02:59 PM

Oh, ages are yet to come of the confusion of free thought, of their science and cannibalism. For having begun to build their tower of Babel without us, they will end, of course, with cannibalism. But then the beast will crawl to us and lick our [pg 284] feet and spatter them with tears of blood. And we shall sit upon the beast and raise the cup, and on it will be written, “Mystery.” But then, and only then, the reign of peace and happiness will come for men.
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The Brothers Karamazov (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
- Highlight Loc. 5227-31  | Added on Wednesday, November 19, 2014, 05:30 PM

They will be convinced that we are right, for they will remember the horrors of slavery and confusion to which Thy freedom brought them. Freedom, free thought and science, will lead them into such straits and will bring them face to face with such marvels and insoluble mysteries, that some of them, the fierce and rebellious, will destroy themselves, others, rebellious but weak, will destroy one another, while the rest, weak and unhappy, will crawl fawning to our feet and whine to us: “Yes, you were right, you alone possess His mystery, and we come back to you, save us from ourselves!”
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The Brothers Karamazov (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
- Highlight Loc. 5252-55  | Added on Wednesday, November 19, 2014, 05:33 PM

For only we, we who guard the mystery, shall be unhappy. There will be thousands of millions of happy babes, and a hundred thousand sufferers who have taken upon themselves the curse of the knowledge of good and evil. Peacefully they will die, peacefully they will expire in Thy name, and beyond the grave they will find nothing but death. But we shall keep the secret, and for their happiness we shall allure them with the reward of heaven and eternity.
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The Brothers Karamazov (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
- Highlight Loc. 5322-25  | Added on Wednesday, November 19, 2014, 05:39 PM

Good Lord, it's no business of mine. I told you, all I want is to live on to thirty, and then ... dash the cup to the ground!” “But the little sticky leaves, and the precious tombs, and the blue sky, and the woman you love! How will you live, how will you love them?” Alyosha cried sorrowfully. “With such a hell in your heart and your head, how can you? No, that's just what you are going away for, to join them ... if not, you will kill yourself, you can't endure it!”
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The Brothers Karamazov (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
- Highlight Loc. 5363-69  | Added on Wednesday, November 19, 2014, 05:42 PM

And Ivan, on parting from Alyosha, went home to Fyodor Pavlovitch's house. But, strange to say, he was overcome by insufferable depression, which grew greater at every step he took [pg 292] towards the house. There was nothing strange in his being depressed; what was strange was that Ivan could not have said what was the cause of it. He had often been depressed before, and there was nothing surprising at his feeling so at such a moment, when he had broken off with everything that had brought him here, and was preparing that day to make a new start and enter upon a new, unknown future. He would again be as solitary as ever, and though he had great hopes, and great—too great—expectations from life, he could not have given any definite account of his hopes, his expectations, or even his desires.
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The Brothers Karamazov (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
- Highlight Loc. 5376-82  | Added on Wednesday, November 19, 2014, 05:42 PM

Ivan tried “not to think,” but that, too, was no use. What made his depression so vexatious and irritating was that it had a kind of casual, external character—he felt that. Some person or thing seemed to be standing out somewhere, just as something will sometimes obtrude itself upon the eye, and though one may be so busy with work or conversation that for a long time one does not notice it, yet it irritates and almost torments one till at last one realizes, and removes the offending object, often quite a trifling and ridiculous one—some article left about in the wrong place, a handkerchief on the floor, a book not replaced on the shelf, and so on. At last, feeling very cross and ill-humored, Ivan arrived home, and suddenly, about fifteen paces from the garden gate, he guessed what was fretting and worrying him.
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The Brothers Karamazov (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
- Highlight Loc. 5412-16  | Added on Wednesday, November 19, 2014, 05:44 PM

Ivan shook. “Get away, miserable idiot. What have I to do with you?” was on the tip of his tongue, but to his profound astonishment he heard himself say, “Is my father still asleep, or has he waked?” He asked the question softly and meekly, to his own surprise, and at once, again to his own surprise, sat down on the bench. For an instant he felt almost frightened; he remembered it afterwards. Smerdyakov stood facing him, his hands behind his back, looking at him with assurance and almost severity.
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