Douglas Caddy

Poster's note: This is the most pitiful, stupid and irresponsible example of what passes for journalism today that I have even seen. --------------------------------------------------- The Bartender’s Tale: How the Watergate Burglars Got Caught | Published June 20, 2012 Washingtonian Magazine http://www.washingtonian.com/articles/people/the-bartenders-tale-how-the-watergate-burglars-got-caught/indexp2.php Squad car 80 operated out of the Second District station at 2301 L Street, Northwest, covering a relatively small portion of the city, and was only minutes away from any location in its patrol area. The station recently had installed its own gas tanks so police cruisers could fill up on site. The uniformed officer driving car 80—a “black-and-white”—had pulled up earlier that evening in front of PW’s, a new bar in downtown DC. PW stood for the Prince and the Walrus, nicknames for Rick Stewart and Rich Lacey, who owned the bar with Rich’s brother, Bill. Try as we might, my research assistant, Borko Komnenovic, and I were unable to find the police officer who drove car 80 that evening. A retired officer told us that in that era cars came and went without a lot of paperwork. Despite extensive interviews, we never found our man. A place where young professionals gathered after work, PW’s was politely known as a “swinging singles” establishment, more bluntly as a “meat market.” The bar was a favorite of Washington’s Finest. Officers would stop by for free meals, Cokes, and alcoholic beverages—even while in uniform and on duty. “We were friendly with the local police that had that beat,” Bill Lacey recalls. Captain William Lacey had been a career Army officer, but after he and his brother slogged through the jungles of Vietnam, the two were reassigned to Fort Belvoir, a sleepy Army base some 20 miles south of DC. “We’ve always wanted to be Irishmen and own a saloon,” Bill, then 33, told his younger brother. Rich was eager, resourceful, and more than a tad mischievous. One evening in Vietnam, Bill had been startled to find that his brother had somehow procured a dining table, linens, crystal, fine wine, and steaks for a formal sit-down dinner in the middle of a firebase. In DC, the Laceys and Stewart searched for an appropriate location and finally leased a place at 1136 19th Street, Northwest, where the bar Science Club is today. They worked for months getting it ready for a spring 1971 opening. Lacey used his Northern Virginia home as collateral for a loan. The three men worked with legitimate contractors, organized-crime shakedown artists, and representatives of the DC government. “Can you put a little something in my hand?” was a query the brothers say they often heard. Finally, Bill recalls, they told both the inspectors and the man who represented a Mob protection racket to go to hell, flashing a Walther PPK pistol for emphasis. It worked—both the legal and illegal crooks vamoosed, and the La-ceys went about gutting and rebuilding PW’s for a town that was a mixture of white-collar workers and white-collar criminals, street hoods, protesters, and other people from all walks of life. PW’s quickly became a hot spot. The walls were barnwood, the standard fare was steak and burgers, and the place reeked of bourgeois charm. Rich served as bartender and liked to mix especially strong drinks. One day, Bill was at the bar drinking a Bloody Mary that, unknown to him, was mostly vodka with just enough tomato juice to give it color. When he finished a glass, his brother had a fresh one ready. Hours later, Bill was driving home with one eye closed. After midnight on June 17, a policeman came in, Bill recalls, “and my brother poured him a glass of bourbon with a little Coke on top. Then he poured him another one, and another one. The policeman is sitting there, and his walkie-talkie, which was on the bar, squawked—they wanted him to investigate a burglary. He got up from the stool and could barely walk. He said, ‘How the hell am I going to investigate a burglary? I can’t even stand.’ “ ‘Piece of cake,’ my brother said. ‘Go out and get on your car radio and tell them that you’re out of fuel and you got to go back and refuel before you can respond, and somebody else will take the call.’ ” The policeman went out, got on the radio, and said, “I’m out of fuel and I can’t respond.” The dispatcher then contacted Sergeant Leeper’s undercover car. • • • Leeper and his men began their search in the basement and made their way up to the sixth floor—where the Democratic National Committee office was located. There they literally stumbled onto the Watergate Five. Having checked each office, they were down to the final one. “Our adrenaline was starting to pump now,” Leeper recalls. Officer Barrett puts it more bluntly. When he saw a hand move toward him, Barrett says, “it scared the xxxx out of me.” The cops yelled, “Hold it! You’re under arrest!” and five pairs of hands went up. One arrestee simply said, “You got us.” The presence of five men—McCord, Frank A. Sturgis, Virgilio R. Gonzalez, Eugenio R. Martinez, and Bernard L. Barker—wearing business suits and surgical gloves and carrying electronic surveillance equipment as well as rolls of crisp, new $100 bills struck Leeper and Barrett as, well, weird. Also odd was that the burglars were all older men—in their late forties and early fifties. The officers had only two pairs of handcuffs, so four of the burglars were cuffed together and the other, Martinez, was simply escorted out. In the process, Officer Shoffler discovered a small spiral notebook in Martinez’s jacket that had “White House” written in it. It was 2:10 am by the time the arrest eventually heard ’round the world was made. For quite a while, police reports noted it as “the burglary at Democratic National Committee, Sixth Floor, 2600 Virginia Ave., NW.” It was some time before it was shortened to its infamous moniker, “Watergate.” Borko Komnenovic assisted with research for this article. This article appears in the July 2012 issue of The Washingtonian.

I wish to make one clarifying comment about the above. It is concerned with the statement, "On 30th January, 1973, James W. McCord, Gordon Liddy, Frank Sturgis, E. Howard Hunt, Virgilio Gonzalez, Eugenio Martinez, and Bernard L. Barker were convicted of conspiracy, burglary and wiretapping. However, on 19th March, 1973, McCord wrote a letter to Judge John J. Sirica claiming that the defendants had pleaded guilty under pressure (from John Dean and John N. Mitchell) and that perjury had been committed." While five of the seven defendants did plead guilty, two did not and stood trial. The five were Hunt and the four Cuban-Americans. Hunt's wife had died in a mysterious plane crash the previous month and Hunt, to whom the Cuban-Americans looked for leadership, took the advice of his attorney, William Bittman, and entered a guilty plea, as did the Cuban-Americans. Liddy and McCord stood trial. I was a witness at their trial -- a witness for the defense and an involuntary witness for the prosecution, as was made clear in the court's transcript. The day that I testified was the day the LBJ died, which became the lead media story so there was no subsequent press coverage of my testimony. The jury a few days later found Liddy and McCord to be guilty. I have always believed that the primary reason that Hunt took the advice of his attorney, Bittman, and pleaded guilty was that Bittman had accepted $25,000 in hush money funds left by Ulasewiez in the telephone booth in the lobby of his office building. He did this after I had refused the overtures of a person who I later learned was Ulasewiez to take the hush money and distribute it to the defendants. Bittman had surmised based on a brief conversation he had with me and my own attorneys that I had turned down the hush money that he subsequently took and concluded that the best way to keep the hush money from being revealed and to protect his own role in the criminal scheme was to persuade Hunt not to stand trial but to plead guilty. After the coverup broke open, Bittman, a former prominent Justice Department prosecutor, was later named an unindicted co-conspirator in the indictment of the higher-ups who were prosecuted in the second Watergate trial. I should add that in July 1972, about a month after the Watergate case broke with the arrests of the five defendants, I attempted to tell the federal grand jury investigating the case about the mysterious hush money phone calls that I had received from the person who later turned out to be Ulasewiez. However, my testimony about this was suddenly cut short by one of the three prosecutors, which I took to mean that the prosecutors did not want the subject to be discussed. This was after I had been forced to testify before the grand jury when Judge Sirica held me in contempt of court for asserting the attorney-client privilege and his decision was upheld by the U.S.Court of Appeals, a matter discussed by Nixon in his Oval Office tapes who believed the courts' decisions about my testifying were wrong.

Mystery of vital iPhone 'lost' by News International by Cahal Milmo and James Cusick The Independent Saturday, 23 June 2012 Rupert Murdoch's News International has failed to recover one of four Apple iPhones issued to company executives and which are now being investigated by Scotland Yard's phone-hacking investigators. The smartphones, whose existence was only publicly acknowledged by the company this month despite their being given to four senior figures – including the former executive chairman James Murdoch – in the summer of 2009, are the subject of an order from a High Court judge that the phones and their contents, including emails and text messages, must be preserved. But News International has only managed to locate three of the phones, opening the possibility that emails and, in particular, text messages archived on the missing handset have been lost and cannot be scrutinised. The phones were "heavily used" by the executives, who ran up a bill of nearly £12,000 between them in the 11 months to this May. The failure of NI to take possession of one of the phones was confirmed at the High Court in London by Hugh Tomlinson QC, the barrister representing victims of phone hacking by the News of the World in civil damages claims. Mr Tomlinson said three of the four phones had been located. The loss of one of the devices would be embarrassing to Mr Murdoch's News Corp, which has pledged full transparency in the investigations. The existence of the phones was not disclosed to the Leveson Inquiry but NI has insisted the handsets were not "secret". The company yesterday declined to comment in detail on its investigations into the iPhones. A spokeswoman said: "News International has complied fully with its disclosure obligations." The Labour MP Tom Watson, a leading campaigner on the hacking scandal, said: "In line with News Corp's promise to be transparent on this issue, I call on them to reveal which of the four iPhones that were issued to senior executives in 2009 they appear unable to locate." Two of the phones, which were on a single contract with O2 rather than NI's normal provider, Vodafone, were issued to Mr Murdoch and Katie Vanneck-Smith, NI's chief marketing officer. Mr Murdoch, who oversaw the phone-hacking settlement with the footballers' union boss Gordon Taylor in 2008 and spearheaded News Corp's ill-fated 2011 bid for BSkyB, specified that he wanted a "white iPhone". When The Independent called the number of the handset issued to Mr Murdoch it was still active and gave a message asking callers to contact his personal office at NI. But the phones issued to two other executives, including one individual who has since left the company, have been disconnected. Operation Weeting, the Yard's investigation into phone hacking, is examining call records from the phones. Text messages and emails sent and received by Murdoch executives and advisers from their BlackBerry devices have provided some of the most revealing evidence heard by the Leveson Inquiry. The period in which the iPhones were in use – and running up bills that reached up to £3,000 per month – covered climactic events for the company, including the closure of the NOTW last July. NI has strongly denied that the existence of the phones, in particular that of Mr Murdoch, was shrouded in secrecy. In a separate development, the High Court heard that 20 further civil damage claims are expected to be lodged shortly by phone-hacking victims, taking the total in the latest round of lawsuits to 70.

Jack Caulfield, Bearer of a Watergate Message, Dies at 83 By DOUGLAS MARTIN June 21, 2012 The New York Times Jack Caulfield, a former New York City police detective who died on Sunday in Vero Beach, Fla., at 83, was once a master of dirty tricks for the Nixon White House who had his biggest brush with history in the role of a messenger. By all accounts, in January 1973, Mr. Caulfield met with James McCord Jr., a former C.I.A. officer and one of the burglars in the Watergate break-in, to tell him that the White House was prepared to grant him clemency, money and a job in return for not testifying against members of the administration and accepting a prison sentence. Mr. Caulfield further told Mr. McCord that the president knew about their meeting and that its outcome would be transmitted to him. Testifying before the Senate Watergate committee in 1973, Mr. McCord said he was told that the clemency offer had come from “the highest levels of the White House.” Mr. Caulfield also appeared before the panel. The account appeared to link Nixon directly to efforts to cover up the White House’s involvement in the break-in at Democratic National Committee headquarters in June 1972, the event that would lead to Nixon’s downfall. But Nixon denied the allegation, and transcripts of White House tapes did not show that he had been behind the offer. John W. Dean III, the White House counsel, told investigators that it was he who had authorized Mr. Caulfield to broach the matter with Mr. McCord, though Mr. Dean insisted that he had done so with the president’s knowledge. Mr. McCord was one of the first to be convicted in the Watergate affair, on conspiracy, burglary and wiretapping charges. Mr. Caulfield was not charged. Mr. Caulfield, whose death was confirmed by his son John, the cause not yet determined, left other marks in Washington. He was performing dirty tricks for the White House well before it assembled the “plumbers,” as the perpetrators of the Watergate break-in were known. He sent an anonymous letter to the tax authorities, prompting an audit of a reporter who had written an article that Nixon disliked. He arranged a tax investigation of the liberal Brookings Institution after considering firebombing it. He wiretapped the phone of a syndicated columnist. He investigated rumors about the sex lives, drinking habits and family problems of Nixon’s political opponents. In the book “Breach in Faith: The Fall of Richard Nixon” (1975), Theodore H. White said Mr. Caulfield had typified the “writhing upward ambition” of many in the Nixon administration. Having risen from foot patrol to detective in two years in the New York Police Department, he became part of an elite unit that protected visiting dignitaries and gathered intelligence information. He joined the Nixon circle when Nixon’s 1968 presidential campaign hired him to help it with security. After the election, Nixon’s aides suggested that he set up a private security agency to provide “investigative support” for the White House, Mr. Caulfield said. But he demurred, and the White House took him on as an assistant for security and liaison with law enforcement agencies. One of his first acts was to recruit another New York City detective, Anthony Ulasewicz, whose streetwise manner would later be on display in the nationally televised Senate Watergate hearings. Mr. Ulasewicz was brought on as a private agent, paid with political funds, his main function being to spy on political opponents. As a first assignment, Mr. Caulfield sent Mr. Ulasewicz to Chappaquiddick, Mass., to find out exactly what Senator Edward M. Kennedy had been doing on the night in 1969 when Mary Jo Kopechne, a former campaign aide, drowned after the car in which they were riding plunged off a bridge. In 1971, H. R. Haldeman, Nixon’s chief of staff, wanted to set up a covert political intelligence unit that could not be traced to the White House. In a 12-page memo, Mr. Caulfield proposed setting up a private security arm for the task, but it was rejected. In his 1976 book “Blind Ambition,” Mr. Dean wrote that the proposal “read like a grade-B detective story.” An alternative plan became the basis for the Watergate break-in. Mr. Caulfield’s only other involvement in the affair was to pass on orders to Mr. Ulasewicz to pay the burglars hush money. Ruthlessness, or at least its appearance, was part of Mr. Caulfield’s approach. When he passed the clemency proposal on to Mr. McCord, he added a word of advice. “I have worked with these people, and I know them to be as tough-minded as you,” he said. “Don’t underestimate them.” By then Mr. Caulfield was out of the White House, having been transferred to the Treasury Department. Mr. Dean wrote that John Ehrlichman, one of Nixon’s top aides, had hoped Mr. Caulfield could use the post to influence how both friends and enemies of the White House were treated by the Internal Revenue Service. But his actual job was as a criminal enforcement official for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, where he oversaw 1,500 agents. Mr. Dean apparently chose Mr. Caulfield to talk to Mr. McCord because of his experience in handling delicate issues and because Mr. McCord had long trusted him. Just nine months after accepting his Treasury post, which he called “my dream job,” Mr. Caulfield was forced to resign because of the clemency controversy. He was later an executive at an aerosol valve plant in Yonkers owned by Robert H. Abplanalp, one of Nixon’s closest friends. John James Caulfield was born in the Bronx on March 12, 1929. He attended parochial schools in the Bronx, and Wake Forest College (now University), John Jay College of Criminal Justice and Fordham University. He served in the Army in the Korean War and became a New York City police officer in 1953. Mr. Caulfield’s first marriage ended in divorce. In addition to his son John, he is survived by his wife, Nancy; sons Christopher and Richard; his sister, Frances Kelly; and nine grandchildren. Mr. Caulfield said he sometimes thought about how different things might have been if his dirty tricks team had been asked to commit the Watergate break-in. He said he had conceived just such an operation years earlier, but in the end dismissed it as “too dangerous.”

In my mind’s eye I see Jack White is now surrounded and being greeted by family, relatives and friends who preceded him to the Other Side. Suddenly he catches glimpse of a figure striding towards him and recognizes it to be JFK who says, “Jack, few did more than you to bring to light the evil conspiracy that caused me to be assassinated and to so sorely wound our nation. I am deeply appreciative of what you did for so many years and for the work done by your colleagues and others like you who unceasingly sought that ultimately truth would prevail and justice be administered.”

Watergate Lies Multiplied The Fiction of Frost/Nixon by David Martin DCDave.com Published on www.lewrockwell.com June 22, 2012 We are now in the midst of a grand celebration of itself by the mainstream media. Forty years ago this summer, through their great investigative reporting, they began the process that drove a president from office for the crime of lying about his participation in the cover-up of a political “black bag” operation. To the more perspicacious young people among us who just became aware of their political surroundings in the 21st century, this so-called Watergate story, this morality play, must have them greatly confused. Isn’t this the same mainstream press that shows not the slightest interest in big-time hush-ups like, say, the omission of any mention at all in the official 9/11 report of the collapse, demolition-style, of World Trade Center Building 7 or of who might have been behind the forgeries of documents purporting to show that Saddam Hussein was attempting to obtain raw material from Niger for building nuclear weapons? Could our mainstream press really have come down so far so fast? The answer, of course, is no. As you might expect, our press in the Watergate episode was not the great knight in shining armor that they would have us believe they were, rather, they were the same old blackguards that are currently covering our current presidential race as if the American people have actually been presented with legitimate choices. As it turns out, almost everything they have told us about Watergate is about 180 degrees from what actually happened. For a good introduction to the real story, I recommend two recent contributions by Charles A. Burris on LewRockwell.com, his article “Watergate Plus Forty” and his LRC Blog entry “Russ Baker and Jim Hougan on Watergate.” Watergate might have been a small time burglary, but the entire episode was a big time spook operation. And that brings us to the title of this article. If the official Watergate story itself is phony, what is one to make of the 2008 fictionalized movie that is based upon a 2006 fictionalized play about a set of carefully edited interviews that essentially retell the outlines of a phony story? It’s like a fake of a fake of a fake of a fake; like raising a lie to the fourth power. Actually, as it turns out, we are missing one of the links in the chain. The following is from the dust jacket of James Reston, Jr.’s 2007 book, The Conviction of Richard Nixon: The Untold Story of the Frost/Nixon Interviews: “Originally written in 1977 and published now for the first time, this book helped inspire Peter Morgan’s hit play Frost/Nixon.” How about that? A prize-winning playwright somehow got his hands on an unpublished manuscript by one of David Frost’s researchers and saw enough in it that he was moved to turn it into a compelling play. One has to wonder how, exactly, that came about, but the dust jacket says no more, nor is there any explanation in the book. As it turns out, the playwright apparently didn’t see quite enough in the book for his dramatic purpose. In the movie, his Nixon interview is one big desperate and frightfully expensive entrepreneurial venture by Frost and his young producer, John Birt. The advance financing that he had hoped to get from one of the major U.S. networks did not materialize and Frost is forced to resort to his own rather shallow pockets and to do the interviews as an independent production. If he can’t squeeze enough drama out of the Nixon exchanges to attract viewers, he could be ruined. If this were actually true, one would think that this would be of some matter of concern to Frost employee Reston and of interest to readers of his book. Since he makes no mention of this matter, we may draw our own conclusions about its veracity. Reston also fails to mention the drunken, self-incriminating telephone call that the movie has Nixon making to Frost in the middle of the night. As for the truth of that episode, we need make no surmises, director Ron Howard admitted in his commentary on the DVD release that the phone call was, “from start to finish, an artistic invention by the scriptwriter Peter Morgan.” What is in Reston’s book that is central to the movie is Reston, himself, and his great research success in finding “obscure” court documents that, almost at the last minute, sufficiently arm the “lightweight” Frost that he is able to bring down the haughty and “heavyweight” Nixon to the point that the latter is forced, in essence, to admit his guilt before the world. That’s all balderdash, too, but, at least, there is a James Reston, Jr., and he did work as a researcher for Frost, but are he and the Frost team really who the movie purports them to be? There is some reason for skepticism. Reston’s father, after all, was the famous New York Times reporter and columnist, but he was more than that. He was also a high profile member of the “Georgetown Set.” After the Second World War a small group of people began meeting on a regular basis. The group. living in Washington, became known as the Georgetown Set or the Wisner Gang. At the [sic] first the key members of the group were former members of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). This included Frank Wisner, Philip Graham, David Bruce, Tom Braden, Stewart Alsop and Walt Rostow. Over the next few years others like George Kennan, Dean Acheson, Richard Bissell, Joseph Alsop, Eugene Rostow, Chip Bohlen, Desmond FitzGerald, Tracy Barnes, Cord Meyer, James Angleton, William Averill Harriman, John McCloy, Felix Frankfurter, John Sherman Cooper, James Reston, Allen W. Dulles and Paul Nitze joined their regular parties. Some like Bruce, Braden, Bohlen, McCloy, Meyer and Harriman spent a lot of their time working in other countries. However, they would always attend these parties when in Georgetown. This, folks, is the very heart of the US secret government/establishment. Notice the “journalists” like Reston, Phillip Graham, and the Alsop brothers keeping close company with a lot of known high-level spooks. Wisner, in fact, is the CIA man who coined the term, “mighty Wurlitzer,” to describe their propaganda apparatus for “influencing” the news media. Reston, Sr., is alleged to have been a part of it. (See Operation Mockingbird.) How far did the apple fall from the tree? Before addressing that question, let’s have a look at some of the other characters involved with the Frost interviews of Nixon. How about that fresh-faced, idealistic young producer, Birt? We learn this from p. 179 of Reston’s book: John Birt went on to the daunting post as director general of the BBC, to become a well-known public figure in Britain in his own right, and to become Prime Minister Tony Blair’s alter ego during Britain’s entry into the Iraq war. He [like Frost] got his peerage and is now known in the House of Lords as Baron Birt of Liverpool. “Once I challenged [birt] to a chess game. ‘I never play chess,’ he replied. ‘My whole professional career is a chess game.’” (p. 30) The executive editor of the Frost/Nixon interviews, Robert Zelnick, who came from National Public Radio, became a household name in America as a 20-year ABC correspondent covering the Pentagon, Moscow, and Israel. My recollection is that these interviews of Nixon by Frost hardly made any splash at all at the time – certainly not the dramatic encounter that they are represented in the movie – but working on them, like working on the Watergate investigative staff (e.g. Hillary Clinton) surely looks like it was a good career move. Speaking of the Watergate staff, Reston tells us that one of his mentors in his research job for Frost, a person with whom he developed a “friendly working relationship” (p. 48) was Richard Ben-Veniste. Ben-Veniste was in charge of Special Prosecutor Leon Jaworski’s Watergate Task Force and was the chief prosecutor in the cover-up trial of several Watergate figures. We encounter Ben-Veniste again playing a major cover-up role (along with the mainstream press, led by The Washington Post) in the case of the death of Deputy White House Counsel Vincent Foster during the Bill Clinton administration. Most recently he has turned up as a member of the government’s 9-11 Commission. Along the way he was defense counsel for CIA-connected drug smuggler Barry Seal. Who is James Reston, Jr.? So what do we know about Reston other than who his father was? When he got the call to join the Frost project, he was, perhaps quite appropriately, a lecturer in “creative writing” at his alma mater, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. We’ll have to take his word for it that the opportunity came about through a chance conversation that his mother had at a party in Washington, DC. Although he has gone on to a successful career as an author and journalist, his credentials look rather thin for a job on the faculty of a major public university. With just a bachelor’s degree, it would appear that he had somehow managed to leverage his just-published first novel into the cushy teaching job, a job that afforded him the time to work on his first non-fiction book, The Amnesty of John David Herndon. What he had been doing in the form of actual employment before he got the UNC job is not clear. On his Wikipedia page there’s a three-year gap between his U.S. Army tour and his college teaching job. The résumé gap is intriguing, but so, too, is news of the Army tour. He mentions it a couple of times in his book, once to one-up Zelnick who flaunted his Marine background, when he had only been in the Marine reserves while Reston had served a full three years of Army active duty. What is odd here is that, to the very best of my memory, when we knew one another in Chapel Hill, he never mentioned the fact to me. It is particularly odd because it is on account of my work as a principal organizer of the North Carolina Veterans for Peace that he sought me out in the first place. (See “Spooks on the Hill” for another future Washington figure, Frances Zwenig, whom I first encountered through my NC antiwar activism.) He was working on his Herndon book and making contact with assorted veterans, particularly those who were opposed to the Vietnam War, which was just about all of us in Chapel Hill at the time. In Frost/Nixon Reston is portrayed as something of a Nixon-hating anti-Vietnam War firebrand. But by that time, the war was over. The time to agitate against the war was when we were at Chapel Hill together, and the most effective way to do it was openly as a veteran. In fact, after Nixon instituted the draft lottery, most of the undergraduates seemed to lose interest in the war. Veterans’ agitation was the only antiwar game in town, and it is my recollection that Reston took no part in it. Rather, he was busily working on his book that seemed to advocate leniency toward the least sympathetic of the war’s presumed opponents, military deserters, which is what John David Herndon was. Reston, frankly, struck me as just a careerist and an opportunist, not as a sincere Vietnam War opponent. Speaking of strange résumé gaps, upon reflection the Army tour looks a bit like one as well. Straight out of college he got a good job as assistant to the U.S. Secretary of the Interior. Then, with the Vietnam War raging most dangerously, he went into the Army for three years. We know that he didn’t serve in Vietnam, or he would have told us. Did he know that there was no chance that he would be sent to Vietnam before he signed up? Was he drafted? That’s not likely given his connections, and draftees were obligated to serve only two years of active duty. Had he been in ROTC, with his active duty obligation deferred while he worked in his government job? Again, an ROTC commission had only a two-year active duty requirement. Maybe he went to Officers’ Candidate School, but why, and what did he do in the Army? Maybe he didn’t tell us about his Army background because he was afraid we might ask him questions like that. Professional Wrestling Elizabeth Drew, writing in the Huffington Post, gets almost to the heart of the phoniness of the Nixon interviews by Frost. She and others have told us that Nixon was paid $600,000 for it (Reston says it was a cool $1 million.), but, most importantly, what we don’t learn from Reston or the movie is that Nixon was also promised 20 percent of the television revenues. That revelation completely undercuts the central premise of the movie that Frost and Nixon were great adversaries. If Frost wanted the program to be interesting and “edgy” enough that it could make money, so, too, did Nixon. Drew also throws cold water on the great Reston findings that supposedly gave the interviews, just in the nick of time, their edginess: There are other distortions in the movie. One of them makes a very big thing of the "discovery" by James Reston, Frost's chief researcher, of a taped conversation between Nixon and his political henchman Charles Colson, supposedly the first one about the cover-up. (Reston, is depicted as the moral conscience of the story, the one who is determined to hold Nixon to account, but he is made less of a noodge in the movie than in the play, where he became an irritating presence.) Much is made of the fact that this bit of conversation was theretofore unknown. But after I saw the play I checked with one of the Watergate prosecutors, who told me that that particular piece of tape was unknown because "we were awash in far more incriminating evidence" against Nixon, and the prosecutors didn't consider it worth using. So much for Reston’s crucial last minute “discovery.” Where I part company with Ms. Drew is at her conclusion: It doesn't matter that Frost/Nixon moves some scenes around (though it's not always clear why), and engages in some invention. But such a gross misrepresentation of such important events – roughly seventy percent of the population is too young to have been aware of Watergate – about a figure over whom there is still serious debate, in the name of entertainment and profits, to my mind, crosses the line of dramatic integrity and is dishonorable. I believe that the evidence is far stronger that the movie and the play, like the interviews themselves, were not done primarily for entertainment and profits. They were done as propaganda. David Martin writes at DCDave.com.

Rebekah Brooks should hear in August whether she faces further charges Former News International boss awaits decision on charges relating to allegations of phone hacking and illegal payments By Lisa O'Carroll guardian.co.uk, Friday 22 June 2012 07.22 EDT Rebekah Brooks and her husband Charlie arrive at Southwark crown court. Photograph: Neil Hall/Reuters Rebekah Brooks, the former News International chief executive, should know by the end of the summer whether she is to face further charges in relation to allegations of phone hacking and illegal payments to public officials. Southwark crown court heard on Friday morning that Brooks is on bail until the end of July and a date in early August in relation to Scotland Yard investigations into alleged phone hacking and police corruption, respectively. Brooks, 44, her husband Charlie Brooks, 49, and four others have also been charged with perverting the course of justice. They were bailed on these charges until 26 September, the date set by Justice Fulford for a plea hearing. Andrew Edis, prosecuting QC, said that in relation to the phone hacking and police corruption allegations, although there were no "definitive charging decisions" he was "reasonably confident" that the Crown Prosecution Service would know which way it would proceed by the middle of August. Hugo Keith, QC for Brooks, said: "It is a matter of public record that charges dates and bail dates loom." But Keith added that all that is known so far is that files relating to unidentified people have been sent to the CPS. He also expressed concern about the amount of material on the internet in relation to his client. Brooks was the first defendant to arrive at court, greeted by a wall of about 50 photographers and camera crews at around 8.30am on Friday. Brooks emerged from the court two hours later to shouts from the photographers of "Rebekah, Rebekah". An ITN camerman was knocked to the ground and left with a bleeding head in the melee. The former News International executive and confidant of Rupert Murdoch sat along with the five others in the glass-encased dock of court number 4 at Southwark crown court in central London throughout the 35 minute hearing, Court no 4 was packed with barristers and journalists who filled the press, jury benches and the public gallery. She spoke just once to confirm her name and barely made eye contact with anyone in the court, flashing an occasional glance at her husband, a race horse trainer and friend of the prime minister. Brooks faces three charges of conspiring to pervert the course of justice in relation to the Metropolitan police's investigation into allegations of phone hacking and corruption of public officials in relation to the News of the World. She is accused of conspiring to conceal documents, computers and electronic equipment from police and conspiring to remove seven boxes of material from the archive of News International. Her husband and her former personal assistant Cheryl Carter, 48, of Mildmay Road, Chelmsford, Essex; head of security at News International Mark Hanna, 49, of Glynswood Road, Buckingham, Buckinghamshire; Mrs Brooks' chauffeur Paul Edwards, 47, of Victoria Park Square, Bethnal Green, east London; and security consultant Daryl Jorsling, 39, of Vale Road, Aldershot, Hampshire, all face a single charge of conspiring to pervert the course of justice.

Douglas, it's impossible to read every post of every member, but from what I have observed of your posts, you seem to provide a lot of links to anti-Kennedy articles, without personal commentary as to where you stand on what you are inviting others to peruse. Is there a reason why you concentrate on anti-Kennedy material? Is there a reason why, even in your response to me here, you carefully avoid providing any personal position? Do you in fact agree with Ms Flanagan? Greg: I am attorney. Attorneys learn from experience that knowledge is power. To ignore what is being said or done by an adversary party is to put oneself at peril. I agree, Douglas. That's why most here do keep an eye on what's being reported, and how it is. Where we digress is in the disseminating of the material. If I chose to provide a link to the same type of material you send readers to, I would flag the issues, and the possible motives for the piece - whereas you seem to be just helping to spread propaganda by your failure to flag the probable purpose of the material, its lack of objectivity, and etc. Every member here may know the Atlantic is anti-Kennedy, but not everyone reading your post knows it. Knowledge is power, but propaganda is subjugating. Are you really trying to empower here, or enslave? I occasionally post articles that you and others in the forum may construe at being critical "May construe" of Kennedy because these adversary articles appear in mainstream and influential publications, such as The Atlantic. They provide necessary information and are helpful in gauging current public opinion. What "necessary information" do they provide? That Kennedy was a sex fiend? "helpful in gauging public opinion"? No, Douglas. I think you mean "helpful in molding public opinion" as in "Kennedy was a sex fiend". I seldom express my personal opinion. But I note you did by when you declared you believed Mimi Alford was telling the truth. Yet you can't express an opinion to say a particular story on Kennedy is no more than a character assassination? Though that would be fair enough if you do not actually take such stories as Dear little Caitlin's to be character assassination pieces. For example, if you read my last 12 postings in the Watergate Topic, all of these constitute important and vital information that anyone interested in that topic would want to know. In none of these postings did I express my personal opinion. Of course, I have a personal opinion about Watergate but why should I pontificate when the essential information appears in the article as posted. What "vital information" was contained in the Cynthia Fagen story at the start of the thread? That JFK tried to pimp Mimi? Please. What evidence convinces you that anything Ms Alford said is true - and more importantly, how would you present that evidence in a court of law to convince anyone of her story? She would be excoriated under cross examination by anyone who cared to do some fact checking, and you surely must now it. I have posted hundreds of articles on Murdoch's hacking scandal in the Political Conspiracies Topic. I have almost never expressed a personal opinion about what I posted. John Simkin has written that more non-forum readers around the world are reading these postings than are forum members. Exactly my point with your links to material which are JFK character assassination pieces. You are sending non-members to read that trash and it will be assumed by most, you endorse and recommend the material. That is unless you think those non-members are mind readers and therefore will know you are trying to empower them and not propagandize them. Murdoch's hacking scandal is one of the great stories of our times and how it ends will shape future history. He's our gift to you in return for your gifts of McDonald's, Pine Gap and the Brady Bunch. Suck it up. My view of the JFK Assassination Topic is that it is a forum for exchange of information on the subject, not for JFK cult worshipping. Because it is a source of information, it is widely used by forum members and non-forum readers for research. If it were solely postings of cult worshipping, it would have zero credibility and not be the major force that it is. I see. A simple call that we should be debating the quality of evidence being accepted for his alleged philandering is akin to "cult worship". Well, Douglas, I'm more than prepared to believe JFK is a baby-eating Nazi lizard-man if the evidence is convincing enough. Call me old fashioned, but faith, and a willingness to suspend disbelief are no substitutes for acceptable standards of evidence and fact-checking. Please review of my posting above #237 that answered your previous inquiry. I think in that posting I made it clear that in my opinion The Atlantic in the essay by Flanagan is living up to its prior reputation of being biased against JFK in the articles it has published. Yes, you did, and I thank you for that. Numerous postings have been made by members about Robert Caro's new book that generally is considered to be critical of JFK. Should Caro's book be ignored and not mentioned in the forum because it is not laudatory about JFK? Of course not. Not at all. And that is not what I have been suggesting should happen. I hope that the above answers your inquiry. Doug Yes. But it's mostly written between the lines. Greg, the solution to your discomfort with what I post is quite simple. Don't read anything I post. If you see my name attached to anything posted in the EF, skip over it. This will keep your stress level from rising and give you time to devote to more imporant things. Doug

Poster's note: I hope that Caro's final volume on LBJ will refer to the 1965 crucial meeting described below between LBJ and the Joint Chiefs of Staff that set the stage for the Vietnam War being a long drawn out disaster. The readers' comments are well worth reading also. ----------------------------------------- The Day It Became the Longest War Lt. Gen. Charles Cooper, USMC (Ret.) 1-20-07 History News Network http://hnn.us/articles/34024.html Lt. Gen. Charles Cooper, USMC (Ret.) is the author of "Cheers and Tears: A Marine's Story of Combat in Peace and War" (2002), from which this article is excerpted. The article recently drew national attention after it was posted on MILINET. It is reprinted with the author's permission. "The President will see you at two o'clock." It was a beautiful fall day in November of 1965; early in the Vietnam War-too beautiful a day to be what many of us, anticipating it, had been calling "the day of reckoning." We didn't know how accurate that label would be. The Pentagon is a busy place. Its workday starts early-especially if, as the expression goes, "there's a war on." By seven o'clock, the staff of Admiral David L. McDonald, the Navy's senior admiral and Chief of Naval Operations, had started to work. Shortly after seven, Admiral McDonald arrived and began making final preparations for a meeting with President Lyndon Baines Johnson. The Vietnam War was in its first year, and its uncertain direction troubled Admiral McDonald and the other service chiefs. They'd had a number of disagreements with Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara about strategy, and had finally requested a private meeting with the Commander in Chief-a perfectly legitimate procedure. Now, after many delays, the Joint Chiefs were finally to have that meeting. They hoped it would determine whether the US military would continue its seemingly directionless buildup to fight a protracted ground war, or take bold measures that would bring the war to an early and victorious end. The bold measures they would propose were to apply massive air power to the head of the enemy, Hanoi, and to close North Vietnam's harbors by mining them. The situation was not a simple one, and for several reasons. The most important reason was that North Vietnam's neighbor to the north was communist China. Only 12 years had passed since the Korean War had ended in stalemate. The aggressors in that war had been the North Koreans. When the North Koreans' defeat had appeared to be inevitable, communist China had sent hundreds of thousands of its Peoples' Liberation Army "volunteers" to the rescue. Now, in this new war, the North Vietnamese aggressor had the logistic support of the Soviet Union and, more to the point, of neighboring communist China. Although we had the air and naval forces with which to paralyze North Vietnam, we had to consider the possible reactions of the Chinese and the Russians. Both China and the Soviet Union had pledged to support North Vietnam in the "war of national liberation" it was fighting to reunite the divided country, and both had the wherewithal to cause major problems. An important unknown was what the Russians would do if prevented from delivering goods to their communist protege in Hanoi. A more important question concerned communist China, next-door neighbor to North Vietnam. How would the Chinese react to a massive pummeling of their ally? More specifically, would they enter the war as they had done in North Korea? Or would they let the Vietnamese, for centuries a traditional enemy, fend for themselves? The service chiefs had considered these and similar questions, and had also asked the Central Intelligence Agency for answers and estimates. The CIA was of little help, though it produced reams of text, executive summaries of the texts, and briefs of the executive summaries-all top secret, all extremely sensitive, and all of little use. The principal conclusion was that it was impossible to predict with any accuracy what the Chinese or Russians might do. Despite the lack of a clear-cut intelligence estimate, Admiral McDonald and the other Joint Chiefs did what they were paid to do and reached a conclusion. They decided unanimously that the risk of the Chinese or Soviets reacting to massive US measures taken in North Vietnam was acceptably low, but only if we acted without delay. Unfortunately, the Secretary of Defense and his coterie of civilian "whiz kids" did not agree with the Joint Chiefs, and McNamara and his people were the ones who were actually steering military strategy. In the view of the Joint Chiefs, the United States was piling on forces in Vietnam without understanding the consequences. In the view of McNamara and his civilian team, we were doing the right thing. This was the fundamental dispute that had caused the Chiefs to request the seldom-used private audience with the Commander in Chief in order to present their military recommendations directly to him. McNamara had finally granted their request. The 1965 Joint Chiefs of Staff had ample combat experience. Each was serving in his third war. The Chairman was General Earle Wheeler, US Army, highly regarded by the other members. General Harold Johnson was the Army Chief of Staff. A World War II prisoner of the Japanese, he was a soft-spoken, even-tempered, deeply religious man. General John P. McConnell, Air Force Chief of Staff, was a native of Arkansas and a 1932 graduate of West Point. The Commandant of the Marine Corps was General Wallace M. Greene, Jr., a slim, short, all-business Marine. General Greene was a Naval Academy graduate and a zealous protector of the Marine Corps concept of controlling its own air resources as part of an integrated air-ground team. Last and by no means least was Admiral McDonald, a Georgia minister's son, also a Naval Academy graduate, and a naval aviator. While Admiral McDonald was a most capable leader, he was also a reluctant warrior. He did not like what he saw emerging as a national commitment. He did not really want the US to get involved with land warfare, believing as he did that the Navy could apply sea power against North Vietnam very effectively by mining, blockading, and assisting in a bombing campaign, and in this way help to bring the war to a swift and satisfactory conclusion. The Joint Chiefs intended that the prime topics of the meeting with the President would be naval matters-the mining and blockading of the port of Haiphong and naval support of a bombing campaign aimed at Hanoi. For that reason, the Navy was to furnish a briefing map, and that became my responsibility. We mounted a suitable map on a large piece of plywood, then coated it with clear acetate so that the chiefs could mark on it with grease pencils during the discussion. The whole thing weighed about 30 pounds. The Military Office at the White House agreed to set up an easel in the Oval Office to hold the map. I would accompany Admiral McDonald to the White House with the map, put the map in place when the meeting started, then get out. There would be no strap-hangers at the military summit meeting with Lyndon Johnson. The map and I joined Admiral McDonald in his staff car for the short drive to the White House, a drive that was memorable only because of the silence. My admiral was totally preoccupied. The chiefs' appointment with the President was for two o'clock, and Admiral McDonald and I arrived about 20 minutes early. The chiefs were ushered into a fairly large room across the hall from the Oval Office. I propped the map board on the arms of a fancy chair where all could view it, left two of the grease pencils in the tray attached to the bottom of the board, and stepped out into the corridor. One of the chiefs shut the door, and they conferred in private until someone on the White House staff interrupted them about fifteen minutes later. As they came out, I retrieved the map, and then joined them in the corridor outside the President's office. Precisely at two o'clock President Johnson emerged from the Oval Office and greeted the chiefs. He was all charm. He was also big: at three or more inches over six feet tall and something on the order of 250 pounds, he was bigger than any of the chiefs. He personally ushered them into his office, all the while delivering gracious and solicitous comments with a Texas accent far more pronounced than the one that came through when he spoke on television. Holding the map board as the chiefs entered, I peered between them, trying to find the easel. There was none. The President looked at me, grasped the situation at once, and invited me in, adding, "You can stand right over here." I had become an easel-one with eyes and ears. To the right of the door, not far inside the office, large windows framed evergreen bushes growing in a nearby garden. The President's desk and several chairs were farther in, diagonally across the room from the windows. The President positioned me near the windows, then arranged the chiefs in a semicircle in front of the map and its human easel. He did not offer them seats: they stood, with those who were to speak-Wheeler, McDonald, and McConnell-standing nearest the President. Paradoxically, the two whose services were most affected by a continuation of the ground buildup in Vietnam-Generals Johnson and Greene-stood farthest from the President. President Johnson stood nearest the door, about five feet from the map. In retrospect, the setup-the failure to have an easel in place, the positioning of the chiefs on the outer fringe of the office, the lack of seating-did not augur well. The chiefs had expected the meeting to be a short one, and it met that expectation. They also expected it to be of momentous import, and it met that expectation, too. Unfortunately, it also proved to be a meeting that was critical to the proper pursuit of what was to become the longest, most divisive, and least conclusive war in our nation's history-a war that almost tore the nation apart. As General Wheeler started talking, President Johnson peered at the map. In five minutes or so, the general summarized our entry into Vietnam, the current status of forces, and the purpose of the meeting. Then he thanked the President for having given his senior military advisers the opportunity to present their opinions and recommendations. Finally, he noted that although Secretary McNamara did not subscribe to their views, he did agree that a presidential-level decision was required. President Johnson, arms crossed, seemed to be listening carefully. The essence of General Wheeler's presentation was that we had come to an early moment of truth in our ever-increasing Vietnam involvement. We had to start using our principal strengths-air and naval power-to punish the North Vietnamese, or we would risk becoming involved in another protracted Asian ground war with no prospects of a satisfactory solution. Speaking for the chiefs, General Wheeler offered a bold course of action that would avoid protracted land warfare. He proposed that we isolate the major port of Haiphong through naval mining, blockade the rest of the North Vietnamese coastline, and simultaneously start bombing Hanoi with B-52's. General Wheeler then asked Admiral McDonald to describe how the Navy and Air Force would combine forces to mine the waters off Haiphong and establish a naval blockade. When Admiral McDonald finished, General McConnell added that speed of execution would be essential, and that we would have to make the North Vietnamese believe that we would increase the level of punishment if they did not sue for peace. Normally, time dims our memories-but it hasn't dimmed this one. My memory of Lyndon Johnson on that day remains crystal clear. While General Wheeler, Admiral McDonald, and General McConnell spoke, he seemed to be listening closely, communicating only with an occasional nod. When General McConnell finished, General Wheeler asked the President if he had any questions. Johnson waited a moment or so, then turned to Generals Johnson and Greene, who had remained silent during the briefing, and asked, "Do you fully support these ideas?" He followed with the thought that it was they who were providing the ground troops, in effect acknowledging that the Army and the Marines were the services that had most to gain or lose as a result of this discussion. Both generals indicated their agreement with the proposal. Seemingly deep in thought, President Johnson turned his back on them for a minute or so, then suddenly discarding the calm, patient demeanor he had maintained throughout the meeting, whirled to face them and exploded. I almost dropped the map. He screamed obscenities, he cursed them personally, he ridiculed them for coming to his office with their "military advice." Noting that it was he who was carrying the weight of the free world on his shoulders, he called them filthy names-xxxxheads, dumb xxxxs, pompous assholes-and used "the F-word" as an adjective more freely than a Marine in boot camp would use it. He then accused them of trying to pass the buck for World War III to him. It was unnerving, degrading. After the tantrum, he resumed the calm, relaxed manner he had displayed earlier and again folded his arms. It was as though he had punished them, cowed them, and would now control them. Using soft-spoken profanities, he said something to the effect that they all knew now that he did not care about their military advice. After disparaging their abilities, he added that he did expect their help. He suggested that each one of them change places with him and assume that five incompetents had just made these "military recommendations." He told them that he was going to let them go through what he had to go through when idiots gave him stupid advice, adding that he had the whole damn world to worry about, and it was time to "see what kind of guts you have." He paused, as if to let it sink in. The silence was like a palpable solid, the tension like that in a drumhead. After thirty or forty seconds of this, he turned to General Wheeler and demanded that Wheeler say what he would do if he were the President of the United States. General Wheeler took a deep breath before answering. He was not an easy man to shake: his calm response set the tone for the others. He had known coming in, as had the others that Lyndon Johnson was an exceptionally strong personality and a venal and vindictive man as well. He had known that the stakes were high, and now realized that McNamara had prepared Johnson carefully for this meeting, which had been a charade. Looking President Johnson squarely in the eye, General Wheeler told him that he understood the tremendous pressure and sense of responsibility Johnson felt. He added that probably no other President in history had had to make a decision of this importance, and further cushioned his remarks by saying that no matter how much about the presidency he did understand, there were many things about it that only one human being could ever understand. General Wheeler closed his remarks by saying something very close to this: "You, Mr. President, are that one human being. I cannot take your place, think your thoughts, know all you know, and tell you what I would do if I were you. I can't do it, Mr. President. No man can honestly do it. Respectfully, sir, it is your decision and yours alone." Apparently unmoved, Johnson asked each of the other Chiefs the same question. One at a time, they supported General Wheeler and his rationale. By now, my arms felt as though they were about to break. The map seemed to weigh a ton, but the end appeared to be near. General Greene was the last to speak. When General Greene finished, President Johnson, who was nothing if not a skilled actor, looked sad for a moment, then suddenly erupted again, yelling and cursing, again using language that even a Marine seldom hears. He told them he was disgusted with their naive approach, and that he was not going to let some military idiots talk him into World War III. He ended the conference by shouting "Get the hell out of my office!" The Joint Chiefs of Staff had done their duty. They knew that the nation was making a strategic military error, and despite the rebuffs of their civilian masters in the Pentagon, they had insisted on presenting the problem as they saw it to the highest authority and recommending solutions. They had done so, and they had been rebuffed. That authority had not only rejected their solutions, but had also insulted and demeaned them. As Admiral McDonald and I drove back to the Pentagon, he turned to me and said that he had known tough days in his life, and sad ones as well, but ". . . this has got to have been the worst experience I could ever imagine." The US involvement in Vietnam lasted another ten years. The irony is that it began to end only when President Richard Nixon, after some backstage maneuvering on the international scene, did precisely what the Joint Chiefs of Staff had recommended to President Johnson in 1965. Why had Johnson not only dismissed their recommendations, but also ridiculed them? It must have been that Johnson had lacked something. Maybe it was foresight or boldness. Maybe it was the sophistication and understanding it took to deal with complex international issues. Or, since he was clearly a bully, maybe what he lacked was courage. We will never know. But had General Wheeler and the others received a fair hearing, and had their recommendations received serious study, the United States may well have saved the lives of most of its more than 55,000 sons who died in a war that its major architect, Robert Strange McNamara, now considers to have been a tragic mistake. Custom text:

Douglas, it's impossible to read every post of every member, but from what I have observed of your posts, you seem to provide a lot of links to anti-Kennedy articles, without personal commentary as to where you stand on what you are inviting others to peruse. Is there a reason why you concentrate on anti-Kennedy material? Is there a reason why, even in your response to me here, you carefully avoid providing any personal position? Do you in fact agree with Ms Flanagan? Greg: I am attorney. Attorneys learn from experience that knowledge is power. To ignore what is being said or done by an adversary party is to put oneself at peril. I occasionally post articles that you and others in the forum may construe at being critical of Kennedy because these adversary articles appear in mainstream and influential publications, such as The Atlantic. They provide necessary information and are helpful in gauging current public opinion. I seldom express my personal opinion. For example, if you read my last 12 postings in the Watergate Topic, all of these constitute important and vital information that anyone interested in that topic would want to know. In none of these postings did I express my personal opinion. Of course, I have a personal opinion about Watergate but why should I pontificate when the essential information appears in the article as posted. I have posted hundreds of articles on Murdoch's hacking scandal in the Political Conspiracies Topic. I have almost never expressed a personal opinion about what I posted. John Simkin has written that more non-forum readers around the world are reading these postings than are forum members. Murdoch's hacking scandal is one of the great stories of our times and how it ends will shape future history. My view of the JFK Assassination Topic is that it is a forum for exchange of information on the subject, not for JFK cult worshipping. Because it is a source of information, it is widely used by forum members and non-forum readers for research. If it were solely postings of cult worshipping, it would have zero credibility and not be the major force that it is. Please review of my posting above #237 that answered your previous inquiry. I think in that posting I made it clear that in my opinion The Atlantic in the essay by Flanagan is living up to its prior reputation of being biased against JFK in the articles it has published. Numerous postings have been made by members about Robert Caro's new book that generally is considered to be critical of JFK. Should Caro's book be ignored and not mentioned in the forum because it is not laudatory about JFK? Of course not. I hope that the above answers your inquiry. Doug

http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&aq=0&oq=Jack+White+in+Ft.+Worth%2c+Te&ie=UTF-8&rlz=1T4ADRA_enUS409US409&q=jack+white+in+ft.+worth+texas+&gs_upl=0l0l0l16052lllllllllll0&aqi=g1&pbx=1

From: The Second Term What would Obama do if reëlected? by Ryan Lizza June 18, 2012 The New Yorker Read more http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/06/18/120618fa_fact_lizza#ixzz1yHzlHKEX Nixon and his aides were obsessed with using a second term to take command of a federal government that they believed was hostile to the President and his agenda. “Faced with a bureaucracy we did not control, was not staffed with our people, and with which we did not know how to communicate, we created our own bureaucracy,” White House aides wrote in a 1972 memo found in the files of H. R. Haldeman, who later went to prison for covering up Watergate crimes. Nixon gave his aides detailed directions about how to flush unsympathetic bureaucrats from the government after he won reëlection. Early in the 1972 campaign, he wrote his aides with instructions for a “housecleaning” at the C.I.A.: I want a study made immediately as to how many people in CIA could be removed by presidential action. . . . Of course, the reduction in force should be accomplished solely on the ground of its being necessary for budget reasons, but you will both know the real reason. . . . I want you to quit recruiting from any of the Ivy League schools or any other universities where either the university president or the university faculties have taken action condemning our efforts to bring the war in Vietnam to an end.

Contrary to Popular Belief, the Washington Post Did Not Crack the Case Notes on Watergate at 40 by JOHN DEAN June 19, 2012 www.counterpunch.org On Monday, June 11, 2012,The Washington Post held an event on the 11th floor of the Watergate Office Complex (the building is currently being renovated, with a change in ownership) to mark the 40th anniversary of the break-in at the Democratic National Committee (DNC), which occupied offices on the 6th floor of the Complex in 1972, when the DNC was targeted by Gordon Liddy and Howard Hunt’s team of burglars. The Editor of The Washington Post Live website, Mary Jordan, who regularly sponsors forums on diverse topics, thought it an appropriate occasion to note the role of the Post, and its Executive Editor Ben Bradlee (who is 91), in unraveling the Watergate scandal. So Mary invited about 450 people, built a stage on the vacant top floor, and put on a forum with three panels. The proceedings were all live streamed and recorded The audience at the event was Washington’s political cognoscenti, both the young (some of whom were not born or were in their pre-teens at the time of the events) and the old (those who recalled well the unfolding scandal that riveted Washington beginning on June 17, 1972 with arrests inside the DNC, and continuing until President Richard Nixon’s resignation on August 9, 1974). Mary invited many people from the news media, ranging from retired print reporters to current network and cable news anchors, to journalists who now tweet or blog. Recalling More Than Watergate Today, the Watergate scandal is history, a symbol of the abuse of presidential power and of Richard Nixon’s sorry legacy. To refresh recollections, and provide a brief hint of what this history had entailed, the program had three panels composed of people who had been involved in the unraveling of Watergate. “Panel One: The Investigation and Cover-up” was composed of yours truly, White House Counsel to President Nixon; Fred Thompson, Chief Minority Counsel, Senate Watergate Committee; Richard Ben-Veniste, a Watergate Special Prosecutor; and moderator Timothy Naftali, former Director of Richard Nixon’s Presidential Library and Museum. “Panel Two: The Legacy” brought together William Cohen, a member of House Judiciary Committee’s Impeachment Inquiry; William F. Weld, Associate Minority Counsel of House Impeachment Inquiry; and Egil “Bud” Krogh, a co-director of the White House Special Investigations Unit (or The Plumbers), which was moderated by Mary Jordan. “Panel Three: The Reporters” from The Washington Post was composed, as its title suggested, of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. Charlie Rose was the moderator. Needless to say, the three panels could have spent three weeks on each of the topics they each covered in thirty minutes, and still have only scratched the surface. Yet after the event, in talking with both people who lived it and those who knew nothing of it, I heard a repeated refrain. One message came through very clearly: People of all political persuasions and views had reached the conclusion that Nixon’s abuses of power were absolutely unacceptable. The forum had recalled that honesty is the only policy that really works in Washington, and on stage were a few of the people who had sought to uncover the truth of Watergate. An Appropriate Tribute to Ben Bradlee The formal events of the evening ended with a brief video tribute to Ben Bradlee, who had been the Executive Editor of The Washington Post during Watergate. That job, I now understand better than ever, was no small task at that time. Currently, I am working on a book that draws on the recorded Nixon conversations about Watergate, most of which have never been transcribed. In fact, because it is possible today to digitize those recordings, and make marginal improvements in the very poor sound quality, I am also re-transcribing the some 400 recorded conversations that had been previously transcribed. I am focusing on about 900 conversations. To say that I know more today about what happened during Watergate than when I lived through it, is an understatement. I appreciate the impact of Ben Bradlee’s almost daily coverage of Watergate. He had his reporters on the story from the time of the arrests at the Democratic National Committee through the cover-up trial of former Attorney General John Mitchell, former White House Chief of Staff Bob Haldeman, and former Assistant to the President for Domestic Affairs John Ehrlichman in January 1975. Nixon, plotting with aides Haldeman and Chuck Colson, were determine to destroy The Washington Post, once they put Watergate behind them. That, of course, never happened. Contrary to popular belief, The Washington Post did not crack the case, so to speak. Rather, that was done by government investigators with subpoena power, backed up by the federal courts, who kept the story in the news, day after day. However, Bradlee made Watergate a major story within the Washington Beltway, important to members of the House and Senate, to federal judges, and to federal investigators. For this reason, the story did not disappear, as Nixon and his White House colleagues believed it would, after his overwhelming reelection victory. Had Ben Bradlee not been determined to press the Watergate story, it would have disappeared, for no other news organization was really covering it. Nixon’s abuses of the processes of government would have remained buried, and I shudder to think of the consequences. For me, Ben Bradlee has always been THE hero of Watergate, so I was delighted to see him receive another well-deserved tribute, not to mention to have the chance to visit with him at a dinner that he and wife Sally Quinn held for the panelists, after the event, at their home. Here’s to hoping there are many more tributes for Ben. This one was certainly nicely done. I even enjoyed my moment of panic before the event. My Panicked Excursion Before the Event This was my first visit to the Watergate Office Complex. Panelists were asked arrive early for a briefing, because the event was being covered on camera, and thus everything was cued and timed. Not everyone arrived early, however, and with a little time to kill, I decided to go down to the 6th floor, the former location of the Democratic Party headquarters, the very scene of the crime. The location, I’d been told, was vacant, and the portraits by artist Laurie Munn of the Watergate players were on display. (Her website has but a few of the some eighty portraits she had on display.) After admiring the collection, I returned by elevator to the 11th floor. But I had noticed, both on the 6th and 11th floors, the doors to the stairwell that had been used by the Watergate burglars to enter the DNC on June 17, 1972. Curiosity caused me to take a closer look. I recalled reading in various accounts of the reason that the burglars had turned off their Walkie-Talkies. Their doing so prevented anyone from warning them the police had been called to the scene. The reason, it has been reported, was that keeping the Walkie-Talkies on would have resulted in noise echoing through the stairwells. And sure enough, as I quickly walked down the cavernous stairs, I understood why the burglars had been concerned enough about the noise of the stairwells’ echoes to effectively shut down their only system of communication with the outside world. Reaching the sixth floor, I took a picture of the doorway (the actual door was damaged, taken to the FBI laboratory, and replaced). It was here that I paused to think how a team of bungling burglars’ illegally opening that door had changed history, not to mention my life. To my surprise, the door was locked. So were the corresponding doors on the 5thfloor, 7th floor, 8th floor, and 9th floor—and as I made my way back up I had an awful thought. I experienced a flash of panic, and thought to myself, “I’m locked in the stairwell of the Watergate office complex. The Watergate conspiracy nutcases who have tried to connect me to the bungled break-in forty years ago are going to have a field day if I have to use my cell phone to get out of here.” But fortunately, the door on the 11th floor, through which I’d entered, was still ajar. Thus, I returned from my excursion with my pictures, and unnoticed. My excursion had proven valuable, as I now have an even better understanding of the foolish risk the burglars had taken by breaking into the DNC from that stairwell, which amplifies even the slightest noise, something the other visitors had missed. John Dean served as Counsel to the President of the United States from July 1970 to April 1973. This column originally appeared in Justia‘s Verdict.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-18463836

Greg: Yes, the extremely caustic review is written by Caitlin Flanagan. The table of contents of The Atlantic’s issue of July-August 2012 contains the following: “p. 133…Caitlin Flanagan in a live chat with readers about the Kennedys.” On page 133, the lengthy article is titled: “Essay – Jackie and the Girls. Mrs. Kennedy’s JFK problem – and ours” by Caitlin Flanagan. The following appears at the end of the article: "Caitlin Flanagan's most recent book is 'Girl Land.'" I have read in this forum in the past that The Atlantic has a reputation of being extremely critical of JFK. This particular article is proof that this is so.

Two excerpts from a review in the July-August 2012 issue of The Atlantic magazine by Caitlin Flanagan of two books: “Jacqueline Kennedy: Historic Conversations on Life with John F. Kennedy” – interviews with Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. and “Once Upon A Secret: My Affair with President John F. Kennedy and Its Aftermath” by Mimi Alford: “JFK was a man who sexual life remained a central life of his existence, who did not allow it to be diminished by anything – not by his political ambitions, not issues of national security, not his Catholicism, not loyalty to his friends and his male relatives, not physical limitation or pain; not the risk of infecting any of his partners with the venereal disease that regularly plagued him, not fear of impregnating someone, not the potential for personal embarrassment, and certainly, certainly not his marriage…. “John F. Kennedy was the kind of guy who could get his PT boat rammed in half by a Japanese destroyer, losing two of his men, and end up not with a court martial but with a medal. He was a winner and we like winners. He’ll get out of every scrape history can serve up. All the aging hookers and cast-aside girlfriends with book contracts had better take notice: We don’t care about you. JFK is more important to us than you can ever be, so you might as well keep quiet. The cause endures, sweetheart. The hope still lives. And the dream with never die.”

http://gizadeathstar.com/2012/06/almost-half-a-century-and-still-the-documents-are-classified-jfk/

How a dead dog came back to bite Richard Nixon's Watergate conspirators Nixon operatives Bob Haldeman and John Ehrlichman pioneered their dirty tricks on the UCLA campus – baiting reds like me By Clancy Sigal guardian.co.uk, Sunday 17 June 2012 08.47 EDT http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/jun/17/richard-nixon-watergate-conspirators-40-anniversary Copa de Oro, just off Sunset Boulevard, in LA, is a lovely evening's drive in a Kappa Alpha Theta's ragtop Buick convertible just around a leafy curve from the luxurious Bel Air hotel. It's a mile or so up from the swanky East Gate, a few minutes from UCLA, where I was a GI Bill student at the start of the cold war. This rebel sorority girl would park us behind tall dense hedges that hid the homes of America's best paid executive, MGM's Louis B Mayer, and lots of movie stars. And under the dark ficus trees, I'd bring out a copy of Lenin's What is to be Done? or Marx's Communist Manifesto – why else date a sorority princess if not to enlighten her? And Connie, Tracy or Carolyn would scoff and push my hand away, and we'd both reach for the safety pin of the Scotch plaid skirt she and many of her sorority sisters wore that year's fashion. Then she'd drive us back down to sorority row on Hilgard Avenue, and we'd quietly sneak her through a window back into her KAT house so the house mother wouldn't wake up and fine her for breaking curfew. And if a side door to nearby Kerckhoff Hall, the student activities building, was still open, I'd run upstairs to the campus newspaper office of the UCLA Daily Bruin, where as the managing editor, I'd prepare a "hell sheet", marking up reporter errors, for the next morning's issue. I didn't know which I enjoyed more, playing barking-mad drill instructor to cub reporters or those stolen moments up at Copa de Oro. Sorority girls, mostly from Gentile houses, weren't supposed to date Jews or communists, or "non-orgs" unaffiliated with Greek Row. I was all three, a non-org Jewish red. And loud. My bully pulpit was the Daily Bruin columns, where I fulminated against the proto-McCarthyism that was sweeping the nation – and hitting UCLA, the "little red schoolhouse", especially hard. Alumni, many students, their nervous parents, University of California regents, the newspapers and the cops worried that the 200 or so campus radicals in a student population of 15,000 would devalue the worth of a college education. They ganged up on us at the Daily Bruin, a slightly bohemian democracy unsupervised except by its own reporters. Greek Row and the administration obsessively hated the free and easy Daily Bruin, which campus conservatives hysterically saw as the spearhead of a Soviet armed invasion of America. No sense of humor in these clean-scrubbed, frightened people in their saddle shoes, cashmere sweaters and Pepsodent-brite smiles. Always those smiles. My drinking buddy and nemesis, John Ehrlichman, kingmaker-svengali of Greek Row politics and full-time spy on student protestors, was fixated, as he later wrote, with "shutting up Sigal" and "chopping the Bruin". His best friend Bob Haldeman let John do all the heavy espionage lifting, while he and his fraternity brothers and football jocks harassed a lonely band of student activists picketing a local barbershop that refused to cut the hair of African Americans. Both Bob Haldeman (Beta Theta Pi) and John Ehrlichman (Kappa Sigma) were Christian Science frat boys who drank. Their other bar buddy, and mine, Alex Butterfield (Sigma Nu), was a genial, non-political lost soul who was into having good times. That's where the dead dog comes in. Nobody remembers the name of the poor cocker spaniel puppy killed during a Beta fraternity hazing led by its pledge master Bob Haldeman – later a co-conspirator, with his friend John Ehrlichman, in Richard Nixon's Watergate scandal whose 40th anniversary we're celebrating. The DNC offices in the Watergate complex, seen in 1973. 17 June 2012 marks the 40th anniversary of the 'plumbers' break-in', that sparked the Watergate scandal. Photograph: AP The poor dog is gone. But Alex Butterfield, who rose to be President Nixon's military aide and is the forgotten "third man" in the Watergate fiasco, and who (by pre-arrangement or not) spilled the beans in front of a congressional committee about those incriminating Oval Office tapes, is still with us. After his sensational testimony delivered our college pals to jail, one afternoon, I collared Alex at LAX on his way through Los Angeles. I asked him if the rumors were true, that he was a CIA plant in the White House whose mission was to destroy Nixon before the president's recklesness destroyed the agency. Just nod if true, I said. (Just as Robert Redford, playing Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward, in the underground garage, tells shadowy Deep Throat in the film All the President's Men. In reality, Deep Throat was FBI assistant director Mark Felt, perhaps by no coincidence a Beta Theta fraternity brother of Haldeman's.) Tall, handsome and bronzed, Alex gave me that old Sigma Nu smile while refusing to deny, "Write it the way you see it, Clancy. Remember, there was nothing personal." Meaning, he played the game and Bob and John simply were collateral damage to a larger scheme. Nothing personal was the mantra among the campus Big Men. They'd hate your guts, kick you in the nuts, smiling all the while. That mortal enemies like us should backslap and drink with one another at local bars like the Glen and Mint was part of the prevailing Christian-spirit, good-sport atmosphere at Kerckhoff Hall, hive of student politics. We pretended it was all cordial even when everyone knew that Ehrlichman, as an inter-fraternity secretary, spied on me all through my college career, giving me up to the FBI and LAPD "red squad". I caught him at it once, in the dean's office, marking in red crayon snapshots of campus protesters, including me. He simply flashed his lopsided, guiltless Kappa Sig smile and said, "Nothing personal, Clancy." Of course, it was personal. Why else did their frat brothers beat the crap out of me at the top of Janss Steps – with a cricket bat no less! – except that I'd committed the crime of dating "their" women. They might have forgiven that, but not when I wrote a column exposing the dirty little secret everyone else knew: during lunch hour, the campus segregated itself in the quad, with Jews sitting on the steps of Powell Library and gentiles at Royce Hall. That, it turned out, was a taboo too far, and I was out on my ear. When I went to see Bob Haldeman at his country-club prison at Lompoc, California, he too smiled in that chilling Don Draper way, and said, "It was nothing personal. A game. We won the first round. Watergate, it's the second round to you; we lost. Not at all personal." The chilling thing is that Bob and John may have meant it sincerely. As Ehrlichman told me when I drove out to Santa Fe, New Mexico, before he entered prison, "It was just process. I'm a process guy. We had nothing against you guys." There was a disconnect between action and consequences, in Ehrlichman's creation of the illegal "plumbers" burglars' unit that broke into Daniel Ellsberg's therapist's office and at the Democratic National Committee suite, and the wire taps on their "enemies list", and Ehrlichman and Nixon's abiding hatred of Vietnam war protesters, whom Haldeman always saw as the illegitimate spawn of the Beta-dog reporters. In my long, pleasant talks at Lompoc with Haldeman – where he was in, like Ehrlichman, for conspiracy, obstruction of justice and perjury – he acknowledged that the roots of Watergate's attempted coup d'etat lay in his, Haldeman's, 30-year old grudge against the "Jewish liberals" at UCLA, who he believed ran the Daily Bruin and who exposed the dog-hazing scandal, causing him a rage he never forgot or forgave. When Reagan appointed Bob a University of California regent, his first act was to investigate campus newspapers like the Bruin. Bob played a long game. We validate our beliefs not on a soapbox but in social relationships. Bob, a Beta, and his sorority fiancee, Jo, double-dated with Jeannie a Delta Gamma, who later married John, a Kappa Sig. Bob's sister was in the same sorority as Alex's wife-to-be. In short, the political relationships of almost all the top Watergate conspirators from UCLA were originally mediated through their sorority dates: the cast of Watergate was a function of Greek Row networking. My personal story has a happy end. I flew from London to attend my 25th UCLA class reunion at Sportsmen's Lodge in San Fernando valley. The reunion coincided with Watergate and the exposure of Bob and John's criminality. Many of their Greek Row friends, who had organized the event, were truly stunned and ashamed because, at a previous emotional session at the LA Country Club, both Bob and John had personally lied to them that no criminal or unethical acts had been committed. My classmates tended to be orthodox, old-style Republicans for whom outright face-to-face lying was unacceptable. In the privacy of the Sportsmen's Lodge men's room, a few of the frat boys who had whacked me on Janss Steps told me, one sobbing in a bear hug, that they were ashamed and asked my forgiveness. Ah, bliss. (On the other hand, their Copa de Oro-recalling sorority wives glared at me coldly all night.) The 1973 Senator Sam Ervin congressional hearings on TV, on which Bob and John, nicknamed Nixon's "Berlin Wall" (possibly for their flat-top haircuts), appeared so arrogant and contemptuous, led us to believe that the Woodward-Bernstein scoop in the Washington Post would permanently improve American political culture. For a short time, it did, with all kinds of freedom of information reforms and serious attempts to rein in the imperial presidency. Now, 40 years later, we've had 13 solid years of more imperial presidencies, one Republican, one Democratic. It seems a habit hard to break.

Forty years after Watergate, many legal reforms rolled back Post-Sept. 11 executive orders claimed back power for the Oval Office, and the Supreme Court struck down campaign contribution limits. By Carol J. Williams, Los Angeles Times 5:00 AM PDT, June 17, 2012 latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-watergate-legal-20120617,0,430130.story On June 17, 1972, a bungled break-in at Democratic National Committee headquarters exposed one of the most notorious abuses of presidential power and led to a wave of reforms of U.S. laws and institutions. Now, on the 40th anniversary of the Watergate scandal, many of those changes have been rolled back or eliminated. Court rulings scrapped limits on campaign contributions. Congress has returned the function of special prosecutors to the Justice Department. Executive orders issued by PresidentGeorge W. Bush in the aftermath of Sept. 11 claimed power for the Oval Office to ignore U.S. laws and international treaties. President Obama has retained some of those extraordinary wartime powers, and his use of drones to attack terrorist suspects has drawn accusations of international law violations. "I don't think Richard Nixon, in his darkest hour, would have authorized torture," said John Dean, the White House lawyer whose testimony at the Watergate hearings linked the break-in to the attorney general and the White House. Dean, a longtime Beverly Hills resident, was disbarred after Watergate and became an investment banker. Today, he makes his living teaching lawyers how to navigate the professional and ethical pitfalls that can end a legal career. He has also been raising the alarm about rollbacks on the political reforms spurred by the Watergate crisis. Within a year of Nixon's 1974 resignation, Congress made it a crime to destroy presidential materials. It also amended federal election campaign laws to make contributions and spending transparent, and to better expose government behavior to public scrutiny through amendments to the Freedom of Information Act. In 1978, the Independent Counsel Act created a special prosecutor independent of the attorney general. Campaign finance reform is largely regarded as having been reversed by theU.S. Supreme Court's decision two years ago in the Citizens United case, which threw out the decades-old ban on corporate contributions to political campaigns. In 1999, the Office of Independent Counsel was abolished and the job restored to the Justice Department. The 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act was among the legislative reforms that followed Watergate, setting up a special court to consider government requests to bug foreign spies or suspected terrorists on U.S. soil. The act was amended during the Bush administration, but even its more lenient standards for clandestine surveillance were often ignored in the quest to thwart terrorism, said Elizabeth Holtzman, a New York Democrat who served on the House Judiciary Committee during the Watergate hearings. Some legal analysts of the Watergate legacy argue that the surviving reform, the American Bar Assn.'s self-policing on ethics, has done little to spare the country from crimes in high places. Bar rules now make clear that the client is the organization rather than the individual, said Cleveland attorney James D. Robenalt, a prominent business litigator. Had that distinction been clear 40 years ago, it might have pushed Nixon's lawyers to protect the nation's highest office, not the politically motivated deeds of the man in it, he said. But Laurel Rigertas, a Northern Illinois University law professor specializing in legal ethics, says broad divergence remains among state and local bar associations on when or whether members are obliged to reveal information about criminal acts disclosed by their clients. "We really shouldn't think Watergate solved anything. Watergate was a problem and it could come up again," said Ronald Rotunda, a Chapman University law professor who served on the investigation team for Watergate prosecutions as well as assisting Special Prosecutor Ken Starr in his case against President Clinton. "We always have to be vigilant." As Chapman law dean and former five-term GOP congressman Tom Campbell recalls, Nixon's resignation was prompted when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled unanimously to uphold a grand jury's subpoena of incriminating tapes Nixon made of his conversations with Watergate conspirators. The high court refused to yield to Nixon's claim of immunity from the subpoena. "It has been very, very rare, very unusual, for the judicial branch to come down so strongly against the executive branch," Campbell said. That was a show of apolitical unity among the justices that many students of the Watergate era say would be hard to imagine coming from the high court today.

James Murdoch should disclose contents of second mobile phone to Leveson inquiry, says Tom Watson James Murdoch is under pressure to disclose text messages from a second previously undisclosed mobile telephone to the Leveson inquiry. MPs are asking whether James Murdoch should have declared the existence of a reported additional phone to the Leveson inquiry By Christopher Hope, Senior Political Correspondent The Telegraph 2:34PM BST 17 Jun 2012 MPs are asking whether the former News International chairman should have declared the existence of a reported additional phone to the Leveson inquiry into press ethics and standards. Until now, there have only been references at the Leveson inquiry to Mr Murdoch’s Blackberry, and not his iPhone. Mr Murdoch was reported to have been given the iPhone when the devices were a new development in the media industry. It was supplied by O2, and not by News Interational’s usual supplier Vodafone. Any second phone could contain information about further contacts with Downing Street and the bid by News Corporation for control of satellite broadcaster BSkyB. Tom Watson, the Labour MP, said: “Now that we know James Murdoch had a secret second iPhone I hope he will disclose the content of text messages an emails to the Leveson inquiry and the police. “I’d like to know whether he used the secret phones to discuss the parliamentary inquiry with the other senior executives who were issued phones.” News International and News Corporation declined to comment on the iPhone. A company source said: "Mr Murdoch fully cooperated with the Leveson inquiry." The news came as it emerged that Lord Justice Leveson had complained to the Government over comments made about his inquiry by a Cabinet minister. The judge complained to Sir Jeremy Heywood, the Cabinet Secretary, after Education secretary Michael Gove told a press lunch that the inquiry had created a “chilling atmosphere” towards journalistic freedom. Lord Justice Leveson made the call last month to enquire whether Mr Gove was speaking on behalf of the Government with his comments. If Mr Gove’s comments did reflect the views of the Cabinet, Lord Justice Leveson said, then it questioned whether his enquiry was a waste of public money. Sources insisted that these remarks did not amount to Lord Justice Leveson threatening to resign, however. Sir Jeremy is reported to have told Prime Minister David Cameron about the conversation. The judge’s intervention apparently resulted in stopping ministers making public remarks about the inquiry, which will report in September. Former Times journalist Mr Gove warned a Parliamentary Press Gallery lunch on Feb 21 of “a chilling atmosphere towards freedom of expression which emanates from the debate around Leveson”. Mr Gove was called to give evidence to the inquiry and warned that recommendations from inquiries were often “applied in a way that the cure is worse than the disease”. Mr Gove also concerns about restraints on the “precious liberty” of freedom of speech, prompting Lord Justice Leveson to reply: “I do not need to be told about the importance of freedom of speech, I really don’t.” A Leveson Inquiry spokesman said: “Lord Justice Leveson is conducting a judicial inquiry and, in that capacity, will not comment on press stories outside the formal proceedings of the inquiry.” A Cabinet Office spokesman said: “We are not commenting on this.”

Follow The Money: On The Trail Of Watergate Lore by Kee Malesky www.npr.org June 16, 2012 http://www.npr.org/2012/06/16/154997482/follow-the-money-on-the-trail-of-watergate-lore?ft=1&f=1001 "Follow the money" – a phrase that's now part of our national lexicon — was supposedly whispered to reporter Bob Woodward by Deep Throat as a way to cut through the lies and deceptions and find the truth about the Watergate scandal. The so-called third-rate burglary that happened 40 years ago this weekend ended the presidency of Richard Nixon. But did Mark Felt, the former associate director of the FBI who admitted to being Deep Throat in 2005, ever really say "follow the money"? He did not. A few years ago, the great NPR news analyst Dan Schorr asked me to find the phrase in Woodward and Carl Bernstein's book All the President's Men. Being a good librarian, I used the index to check all the references to Deep Throat; I didn't find the phrase. Not wanting to disappoint Dan, I looked through the whole book, page by page. Phrase not found. Then I did a newspaper database search for articles that had "follow the money" near "all the president's men," but all the results were about the movie version, not the book. Dan called Woodward and William Goldman, who had written the screenplay. They were baffled, but eventually admitted that the phrase wasn't in the book, so one of them must have made it up. Each man gave credit to the other. The cash that needed following was more than $200,000 paid to Watergate plotters G. Gordon Liddy and Howard Hunt, and the five burglars. The hush money was delivered by Tony Ulasewicz, a rumpled, fedora-wearing former New York police officer who fit the image of the "president's bagman" to a T. Ulasewicz had been hired to conduct secret investigations for the Nixon White House in 1969 and was assigned to dig up derogatory information on Nixon's enemies, including Democratic Sens. Edward Kennedy and Edmund Muskie, and journalist Jack Anderson. He even investigated the president's nephew, whose association with "arty types" in California was a potential embarrassment to the administration. Ulasewicz was convicted of filing false tax returns and served a year's probation. One of the forgotten men of the Watergate saga, he died in 1997.

Was sex the motive for the Watergate break-in? This weekend marks the anniversary of the burglary that toppled U.S. President Richard Nixon. Yet, forty years on, many still think the central mystery remains. Who ordered the break-in and why, asks Robbyn Swan. Robbyn Swan spent five years probing the motive behind Watergate. Most of the “facts” that supposedly supported the more tawdry conspiracy theories evaporated on examination, he says By Robbyn Swan The Telegraph 7:00AM BST 16 Jun 2012 http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/us-politics/9334804/Was-sex-the-motive-for-the-Watergate-break-in.html Thorough analysis, though, leaves no doubt that the orders came from the President himself, and that a key part of the motive was – sex. Nixon’s men hoped to gather politically useful dirt on the Democrats’ sex lives. In the words of one young secretary, there was “pretty wild stuff” going on at the Democrats’ headquarters in the Watergate. The “wild stuff”, research reveals, includes an apparent link between high-ranking Democratic officials and a call-girl ring being run out of a nearby apartment complex. The break-in occurred on the night of June 16, 1972 – an election year – when a five-man team got into the offices of the Democratic National Committee, ransacked files, and searched the office of DNC Chairman Lawrence O’Brien. At 2:10am that night, plainclothes police responded to a call from a guard in the building and caught the burglars in the act – carrying electronic equipment, cameras and dozens of rolls of film. One was James McCord, security director of CREEP, Nixon’s re-election committee. Police work also turned up the White House phone number of E. Howard Hunt, a former CIA officer employed by one of Nixon’s closest aides. The President declared formally that the White House “had no involvement whatever in this particular incident”. It was a lie. The evidence, including the President’s own comments on a secret recording system, was to show that Nixon orchestrated attempts to obstruct the FBI’s investigation, and the payment of hush money to those arrested. He finally resigned in August 1974, as impeachment loomed. On his first known recorded Oval Office conversation after the break-in, the President is heard to exclaim, “My God! The Committee isn’t worth bugging... That’s my public line”. A “public line” it was, for it contradicts everything that is now known about White House plotting. What has not emerged is clear, incontrovertible evidence that Nixon explicitly authorised or knew in advance about the break-in itself. A year earlier, though, he repeatedly ordered staff to “break in” to Washington’s Brookings Institute to steal a possibly incriminating file. The President can actually be heard saying that what he wanted was “thievery”. Then, for the third time: “I really meant it ... crack that safe”. Months later, Nixon discussed the best way to purloin documents from the National Archives. Weeks after Watergate, he plotted a burglary of his own party headquarters – to make the Democrats look as guilty as the Republicans. Nixon pushed for dirt on his political enemies even after the Watergate arrests. “Get everything you possibly can,” he demanded in autumn 1972. “Any little crumb… I don’t care. O’Brien, another senator. Anything that involves a Democrat… Goddamn it.” It was Nixon who set his White House team on their criminal course. In the past forty years, alternative histories have flourished – many of which let the President himself off the hook. One theory suggested the CIA orchestrated the burglary to cover up one of the Agency’s surveillance operations. Another contended that a junior staffer ordered the burglary in search of evidence linking his fiancée to the prostitution outfit close by – so as to cover it up. The far reaches of Watergate conspiracy theory include an allegation that a famous journalist spun his reporting to avoid exposure of his own involvement in the Washington “swingers” scene. The bizarre twists and turns of the story include corrupt military brass, a bent police officer, a homosexual informant, and the circulation of supposed lewd photographs of the President himself. As one of the President’s biographers, I spent five years probing the motive behind Watergate. Most of the “facts” that supposedly supported the more tawdry conspiracy theories evaporated on examination. The madam who ran the prostitution operation near the Watergate, and who supposedly employed the White House staffer’s fiancée, appeared not even to know the woman in question. The homosexual informant kept embroidering his story. The high-ranking Republican official supposedly implicated in the dissemination of a “nude Nixon” photo, credibly denied the story. Intensive research shows there was no single motive for Watergate. “We were really after anything,” said Jeb Magruder, the campaign official who was the burglars’ liaison at CREEP. “We were looking for everything,” one of the burglars said. A skein of evidence indicates, though, that the President himself had pushed for derogatory information on DNC chairman O’Brien, and – as important – whatever O’Brien might have on Nixon. “We knew the Democrats had a file of damaging rumours about Republican leaders,” burglar Frank Sturgis later told a journalist. “We dug for that everywhere.” “One of the things we were looking for,” Sturgis recalled, “was a thick secret memorandum from the Castro government...” The elusive document, Sturgis said, was thought to cover plans for a deal between Castro and the Democrats that – were the Democrats to win the election – would normalise relations between the U.S. and Cuba. It supposedly also contained details of the various past U.S. attempts “to assassinate the Castro brothers”. Three of the Watergate burglars were prominent anti-Castro exiles, and team leader Hunt had during his CIA career been involved in the Eisenhower-era plots to assassinate the Cuban leader, plots in which then Vice President Nixon was implicated. The Senate Watergate Committee’s chief investigator Terry Lenzner speculated that the Cuban angle was the key to Watergate. There was, too, a matter that made both O’Brien and Nixon vulnerable – the links they both had to Howard Hughes. O’Brien, who had worked for Hughes as a consultant, knew Hughes’ aide Robert Maheu. Maheu in turn had been the CIA’s go-between to the mafiosi used in the plots to kill Castro . He had, moreover, been privy to details of illegal donations Hughes had made to Nixon during his 1968 run for the presidency. Time and again, in the months before Watergate, it had seemed that Hughes’ donations were about to be exposed. “As far as I know,” CREEP’s Jeb Magruder said years later, “the primary purpose of the break-in was to deal with information... about Howard Hughes and Larry O’Brien, and what that meant as far as the cash that had supposedly been given to [Nixon’s friend] Bebe Rebozo and spent later by the President...” Then there is sex – the wild card in the pack of possible motives. Though mostly neglected by researchers, there had been an earlier break-in at the Watergate, weeks before the one that triggered the scandal. On May 28, 1972, the same burglary team had successfully photographed papers on O’Brien’s desk and planted bugs on two telephones – one used by O’Brien’s secretary, another by a party official. Over the weeks that followed, logs of calls on the official’s phone had been passed up the chain of command at Nixon campaign headquarters. The bug on the secretary’s phone had been faulty, however – and that led to the fateful decision to go back to the office to fix it. It is clear now that there was a sexual element to the plot. From the start of the Nixon presidency, one operative testified, there was a concentration on getting information on the sex lives of their Democratic opponents. The man who monitored the bugged Watergate calls, Alfred Baldwin, told prosecutors his orders were to give that category of information special attention. Many of the calls the bug on the official’s phone picked up, were “explicitly intimate”. Another CREEP operative, former FBI agent Lou Russell, said the hidden microphone intercepted conversations in which two prominent Democratic leaders “made dates with women over the phone... for sexual liaison purposes”. O’Brien had been one of those prominent Democrats, Russell claimed, and he identified a prostitute O’Brien allegedly frequented by name. Russell had worked for Nixon personally, long before Watergate. If the Democrats were vulnerable to sexual exposure, so were their Republican counterparts. One long-time Nixon aide, interviewed by us on condition of anonymity, recalled in detail that the deputy chief of the White House protocol office “was always using those call-girls at the place next to the DNC”. In a rundown house in North Florida, I found Barbara Ralabate, the former madam named by Russell – and identified in police records – as having managed call-girls at the Columbia Plaza apartments near the Watergate. Her professional credo, she said, did not allow her ever to divulge clients’ names. She confirmed, however, that in 1972 they included both Republicans and Democrats. “There was a lot of business won at that place,” she said, referring to the Democratic Party headquarters at the Watergate. Ralabate told me, too, that she was visited by a senior Democratic official at the height of the Watergate scandal. “He wanted to know what I was going to say when I was questioned,” she recalled, “I said, 'What I am going to say is, I don’t know what anyone is talking about.’” It was a denial, in the face of compelling evidence, worthy of President Nixon himself. Robbyn Swan is co-author with Anthony Summers of The Arrogance of Power: The Secret World of Richard Nixon. Their latest book, The Eleventh Day, was a finalist for this year’s Pulitzer Prize, and is shortlisted for the Golden Dagger award for non-fiction on crime

Rupert Murdoch pressured Tony Blair over Iraq, says Alastair Campbell Murdoch joined an 'over-crude' attempt by US Republicans to accelerate British involvement in the Iraq war, Campbell says By Nicholas Watt, chief political correspondent guardian.co.uk, Friday 15 June 2012 14.30 EDT Rupert Murdoch previously told the Leveson inquiry: 'I've never asked a prime minister for anything.' Photograph: Mike Theiler/EPA Rupert Murdoch joined in an "over-crude" attempt by US Republicans to force Tony Blair to accelerate British involvement in the Iraq war a week before a crucial House of Commons vote in 2003, according to the final volumes of Alastair Campbell's government diaries. In another blow to the media mogul, who told the Leveson inquiry that he had never tried to influence any prime minister, Campbell's diary says Murdoch warned Blair in a phone call of the dangers of a delay in Iraq. The disclosure by Campbell, whose diaries are serialised in the Guardian, will pile the pressure on Murdoch in light of his evidence to the Leveson inquiry. The Cabinet Office released information on Friday that raised doubts about Murdoch's claim that Gordon Brown pledged to "declare war" on News Corporation after the Sun abandoned its support for Labour in September 2009. It supported Brown's claim that he never made such a threat by saying that the only phone call between the two men during the period took place on 10 November 2009 and focused on Afghanistan. Murdoch tweeted in response: "I stand by every word is aid [sic] at Leveson." But there will be fresh questions about one of Murdoch's most memorable declarations from his appearance before the inquiry in April. The founder of News Corporation said: "I've never asked a prime minister for anything." Campbell wrote that on 11 March 2003, a week before the Commons vote in which MPs voted to deploy British troops to Iraq, Murdoch intervened to try to persuade Blair to move more quickly towards war. "[Tony Blair] took a call from Murdoch who was pressing on timings, saying how News International would support us, etc," Campbell wrote. "Both TB and I felt it was prompted by Washington, and another example of their over-crude diplomacy. Murdoch was pushing all the Republican buttons, how the longer we waited the harder it got." The following day, 12 March, he wrote: "TB felt the Murdoch call was odd, not very clever." Campbell's description of Murdoch's intervention is one of a series of disclosures in his diaries, The Burden of Power, Countdown to Iraq, which are serialised in the Guardian on Saturday and Monday. The diaries show: • Blair believed that the Prince of Wales had been "captured by a few very rightwing people", according to Campbell, after the Daily Mail published leaked letters from the prince about a US-style compensation culture in 2002. Blair "liked, rated and respected" the Queen but thought her heir tried to have a "dig" at the Labour government in a speech during her golden jubilee in 2002. • Gordon Brown agitated so aggressively against Tony Blair – demanding a departure date soon after the 9/11 attacks – that Downing Street concluded in 2002 that the then chancellor was "hell-bent on TB's destruction". The diaries will raise questions about Brown's claim at Leveson that he and his staff never briefed against Blair. Campbell provides specific examples of when Brown and his chief aide, Ed Balls, were suspected of doing just that. In one example, the former health secretary Alan Milburn told Blair that Brown encouraged MPs to defy a government three-line whip to vote against foundation hospitals in 2003. • Blair was "thwarted" from joining the euro by Brown and Balls in 2003. On 11 June 2003, two days after Brown concluded that Britain had not yet met his five tests on euro membership, Campbell wrote: "Things just hadn't worked on the euro and TB was pretty fed up...The judgment was settling that GB had basically thwarted him. TB feared we were making the wrong decision for the wrong reasons." Campbell said he had mixed views about Brown. He told the Guardian: "I do have very conflicted views about Gordon. On the one hand he could be extraordinarily difficult to deal with. But on the other hand he could be absolutely brilliant. Often we were sitting there longing for the brilliant to be in charge and for the impossible to fade away and it never quite happened. During this period it is the first time that Tony does at least articulate the possibility of actually sacking him. And at various points [he] says I am going to do it. Of course he never did. I completely understand why he decided to stick with Gordon because, as Tony keeps saying throughout the diaries: 'Look, when it comes to ability, he and I are head and shoulders above the rest.' That may sound a bit arrogant but most people will accept that." Campbell's disclosure of Murdoch's intervention on the eve of the Iraq war is the second substantive example to raise questions over the News Corp chairman's claim that he never tried to influence any prime minister. John Major told Leveson on Tuesday that Murdoch told him in February 1997, three months before the general election, that he would withdraw support for the Tories unless the then prime minister changed his policies on Europe. Major told the inquiry: "If we couldn't change our European policies, his papers could not and would not support the Conservative government." Campbell told the Guardian that Murdoch's intervention on Iraq was a "very rightwing voice" that came "out of the blue" adding: "On one level [Murdoch] was trying to be supportive, saying I know this is a very difficult place, my papers are going to support you on this. Fine. "But I think Tony did feel that there was something a bit crude about it. It was another very rightwing voice saying to him: look isn't it about time you got on with this? I think, as I recall Tony saying, he didn't think it was terribly clever." Campbell also mentioned the Murdoch phone calls in a second witness statement to the Leveson inquiry last month. News Corp believes there was nothing improper about the phone call, one of three, because the support of the Sun and News of the World for the war was well known. Lord Justice Leveson, whose lead counsel, Robert Jay, asked Murdoch about the calls, also indicated that it was "reasonable" for him to have views on such international matters. Leveson told Murdoch: "You've mentioned that you talked about Afghanistan, and it would be perfectly reasonable for you to have a view on that. Lots of people will. And your view may be informed by your worldwide contacts through the businesses that you operate. That's merely your view." Murdoch addressed the phone calls in his witness statement to the Leveson inquiry. He said: "As for the three telephone calls with the then prime minister, Tony Blair, in 2003, I cannot recall what I discussed with him now, nine years later, or indeed even if I spoke with him at all. I understand that published reports indicate that calls were placed by him to me. What I am sure about is that I would not in any telephone call have conveyed a secret message of support for the war; the NI titles' position on Iraq was a matter of public record before 11 March 2003." He then cited four articles from the Sun and the News of the World which illustrated their "pro-war stance" before 11 March 2003 when the main phone call took place. In his testimony to the inquiry said he did not remember the calls but added that the Sun's support for the Iraq war was well known. "I don't remember the calls. The [call on] 11th might even have been calling me for my birthday, but no, our position on the war had been declared very strongly in all our newspapers and the Sun well before that date." The company said tonight: "It is complete rubbish to suggest that Rupert Murdoch lobbied Mr Blair over the Iraq war on behalf of the US Republicans. Furthermore, there isn't even any evidence in Alastair Campbell's diaries to support such a ridiculous claim."

Rebekah Brooks texted David Cameron: 'We're definitely in this together!' Text exchanges revealed as PM gives evidence to Leveson inquiry about friendship with former News International boss By John Plunkett guardian.co.uk, Thursday 14 June 2012 08.38 EDT David Cameron gives evidence to the Leveson inquiry. Photograph: -/AFP/Getty Images Rebekah Brooks sent an effusive text message to David Cameron on the eve of his 2009 party conference speech, telling him: "Professionally, we're definitely in this together!" and signing off: "Yes he Cam!" Brooks sent the text on 7 October 2009 during the Conservative party conference, a week after the Sun had switched allegiance to the Tories on the eve of then prime minister Gordon Brown's Labour party conference speech. At the time, Brooks was chief executive of the Sun's parent company, News International, and Cameron was still leader of the opposition. "I am so rooting for you tomorrow not just as a proud friend but because professionally we're definitely in this together!" wrote Brooks. "Speech of your life! Yes he Cam!" Brooks's sign-off was repeated the following day in the headline on the Sun's leader comment, heaping praise on Cameron's speech. Cameron, appearing at the Leveson inquiry on Thursday, said the text referred to the fact his party and Brooks's newspapers would be "pushing the same agenda". "I think that is about the Sun had made this decision to back the Conservatives, to part company with Labour, and so the Sun wanted to make sure it was helping the Conservative party put its best foot forward, with the policies we were announcing, the speech I was going to make and all the rest of it, and I think that's what that means," he added. "I think what it means was that we were, as she put it, … friends, but professionally we – as leader of the Conservative party and her in newspapers – we were going to be pushing the same political agenda." Robert Jay QC, lead counsel to the inquiry, said the first part of the text had been redacted because it was not relevant. Jay added that it probably included a joke, as Brooks's message continued: "But seriously I do understand the issue with the Times. Let's discuss over country supper soon. "On the party it was because I had asked a number of NI people to Manchester post-endorsement and they were disappointed not to see you. But as always Sam was wonderful – (and I thought it was OE's that were charm personified!)." "OE" is thought to refer to "Old Etonian". Asked about the text by Jay, Cameron said: "The issue with the Times was that at the party conference I had not been to the Times party. "The major newspaper groups tend to have big parties at the party conference and they expect party leaders, cabinet ministers, shadow cabinet ministers to go, and that would be the normal thing to do, the Telegraph, the Times, others would do this. Jay asked if the "country supper" reference was "the sort of interaction you often had with her?" The prime minister replied: "Yes, we were neighbours." Earlier, Jay asked Cameron at what point he had begun to count Brooks as among his "good friends". Cameron said he was reluctant to be specific because he could not remember and did not want to get it wrong. "We got to know each other because of her role in the media, my role in politics, but we struck up a friendship. Our relationship got stronger when she married Charlie Brooks, who I've known for some time and who's a neighbour," he added. Asked if the two were in contact on a weekly basis by 2008 and 2009, as Brooks's evidence to the inquiry suggested, Cameron said: "It's very difficult because I don't have a record and I don't want to give you an answer that isn't right. "Sometimes I expect we would have been talking to each other quite a bit, particularly around the time perhaps of the wedding or when we were both in Oxfordshire, we would have had more frequent contact. He added: "Particularly once she started going out with Charlie Brooks, living a couple of miles down the road, I was definitely seeing her more often because of my friendship with Charlie as a neighbour and Charlie and I played tennis together and all sorts of other things." ------------------------------------------ Key questions for David Cameron at the Leveson inquiry Prime minister must explain why he hired Andy Coulson amid phone hacking scandal and let Jeremy Hunt handle BSkyB bid guardian.co.uk, Thursday 14 June 2012 01.00 EDT David Cameron and Jeremy Hunt. 'Sir Alex Allen could have exonerated (or dispatched) Hunt, and David Cameron could have happily electioneered in Milton Keynes.' Photograph: Dominic Lipinski/PA Archive/Press Association Ima • Why did you hire Andy Coulson given that you knew phone hacking had happened during his time as editor of the News of the World? • Why, despite mounting evidence of the scale of phone hacking at the News of the World reported by the Guardian in July 2009 and New York Times in September 2010, did you not seek independent assurances that Coulson did not know about criminality at the paper? • Why was Coulson not put through the highest level of "developed vetting" security clearance when he joined No 10? Did you fear he would fail given the furore around the phone-hacking scandal? • Rebekah Brooks claims you texted one another on a weekly basis. Did you text other newspaper executives as frequently? Did you sign those texts LOL? • Given that you knew Jeremy Hunt believed the UK media sector would "suffer for years" if the BSkyB takeover was not approved and it would be "totally wrong to cave in" to opponents of the bid, why did you choose him to replace Vince Cable? • Can you describe your conversation with Rupert Murdoch at the George club in London on 10 September 2009 at which he confirmed the Sun would back the Conservatives at the election