Douglas Caddy

News Corp. Staving Off a Scandal The New York Times By AMY CHOZICK March 4, 2012 Last Monday, British investigators said that News Corporation’s British tabloid, The Sun, had participated in widespread bribery to “a network of corrupted officials.” Then on Wednesday, the widening inquiry into illegal activity at News Corporation’s British newspapers led to James Murdoch’s resignation as head of the company’s embattled British publishing unit. What happened back in New York? News Corporation’s stock went up. The wave of incriminating headlines and the surging stock price reflect the cognitive dissonance generated by News Corporation’s phone hacking scandal. Even while Rupert Murdoch, the company’s chairman and chief executive, has doubled down on one of the newspapers at the center of the worsening scandal, creating a new Sunday edition of The Sun, investors have been cheering the possibility that the negative news in Britain could prompt the company to spin off its newspapers. Last Tuesday, Chase Carey, News Corporation’s chief operating officer, said at a Deutsche Bank media conference in Palm Beach, Fla., that within the company “certainly there are a number of parties who feel — would push to looking at a way to spin the publishing business separate from the rest.” James Murdoch’s resignation from News International inextricably links Mr. Carey to the British newspapers, properties he technically oversaw before but had little interest in, according to people with knowledge of the internal dynamics at the company. News International’s chief executive, Tom Mockridge, will now report directly to Mr. Carey, having previously reported to James Murdoch. “Chase has no exposure whatsoever to the newspaper business, and Mockridge is a straight arrow,” said one of the people, who like the others requested anonymity to speak candidly about the company. “Either Chase learns the business, or they spin off the papers and Mockridge runs the new company.” A News Corporation spokeswoman pointed to Mr. Carey’s defense of the newspapers at the conference in Florida, in which he said: “Our focus right now is in managing these businesses and improving their profitability.” Wall Street has long disliked News International, publisher of The Sun and the closed News of the World. The unit accounts for less than 3 percent of News Corporation’s profits and brings outsize troubles. Analysts estimate that the cost of legal fees and settlements related to the hacking crisis could reach $1 billion. News Corporation has a market capitalization of $49 billion. Other than newspapers, the company’s assets like the Fox network, the Fox studios and cable channels like FX accounted for nearly 90 percent of its $2.9 billion in profit in the six months that ended Dec. 31. “Wall Street would love it even if negative news drove to a sale or separation of the newspaper group,” said Richard Greenfield, a media analyst at BTIG. On Friday, News Corporation closed at $20.15, up 46 percent from a 52-week low of $13.83 reached last summer at the height of the revelations about phone hacking at News of the World. Shares have gained about 10 percent in the last 12 months. The company is unlikely to spin off its newspapers as long as Mr. Murdoch, who turns 81 next week, runs the company. He is often said to have newspaper ink in his veins. “He’s not even considering that path,” said one former executive at News Corporation who requested anonymity to talk about internal debates at the company. On Feb. 26, Mr. Murdoch introduced The Sun on Sunday, partly to make up for the lost revenue at the closed News of the World, where reporters repeatedly hacked into voice mails. The creation of The Sun on Sunday, which Mr. Murdoch said sold 3.26 million copies in its first week, also sent a message to News Corporation executives that, like it or not, Mr. Murdoch was sticking with the British publishing business. (The company has not discussed spinning off News Corporation’s print assets in the United States like The Wall Street Journal, published by Dow Jones & Company, and The New York Post, according to people with knowledge of discussions within the company.) “He’s a combative guy,” Barton Crockett, a media analyst at Lazard Capital Markets, said of Mr. Murdoch. “He’s going to fight hard to stay relevant in the publishing business in the U.K., and I think investors are somewhat fearful about that.” To ease investors’ concerns about the print business, News Corporation in July approved a $5 billion stock buyback program led by Mr. Carey. As of Feb. 7, the company had bought $2.7 billion of its own Class A shares. Last week Mr. Carey said he planned another buyback when the current one ends in June. “We certainly have an undervalued stock, to me a woefully undervalued stock,” Mr. Carey said at the Deutsche Bank conference. “We think of another buyback to make sense.” James Murdoch, Rupert’s younger son, has long been viewed as his father’s heir apparent. James now works from News Corporation’s New York headquarters, a move first announced last March. As the company’s deputy chief operating officer, he oversees the company’s lucrative international pay-cable channels like Star TV in Asia, Sky Deutschland and Sky Italia. News Corporation predicts that Fox International Channels will bring in $1 billion in operating income by the fiscal year 2015. “The Fox International business plus the Star India business, which is run separately and reports directly to James Murdoch, we are the leaders in the international markets amongst the U.S. multinational media,” David Haslingden, president and chief operating officer of Fox Networks Group, told analysts at a conference the day James Murdoch resigned from the publishing unit. James’s position in New York does not sit well with some shareholders who have called for his removal from News Corporation’s board. “Responsibility for this debacle ends with the board,” said Michael Pryce-Jones, a spokesman for the CtW Investment Group, a shareholder activist group in Washington that works with pension funds for large labor unions like the Teamsters. “This is a governance issue, and obviously much of the burden falls upon James given his role as a key executive.” There is no clear end in sight to the scandals embroiling the company, as British investigators continue to inspect documents turned over by News Corporation’s management and standards committee. If the accusations of bribes authorized by “people at a very senior level within” The Sun to elected officials, the British police and the military are true, it could lead to heightened scrutiny in America. The Foreign Corrupt Practices Act makes bribery of international officials by American companies and their foreign subsidiaries a criminal offense. In a statement released last Monday, Rupert Murdoch said the bribery practices explained in the investigation were “ones of the past, and no longer exist at The Sun.” That defense signaled that he saw a future for his besieged tabloid. “Rupert is unlikely to make decisions when backed into a corner,” said Doug Mitchelson, an analyst at Deutsche Bank Securities. “If they ever spun off print, it’d be because he fixed it and wanted to highlight the value of print, not to remove the cancer from the organization.”

Breitbart's final "explosive revelation" -- much ado about nothing. http://www.breitbart.com/

Interesting compilation even though it is somewhat dated: http://www.serendipity.li/cia/death_squads1.htm

JFK was working towards ending U.S. involvement in Vietnam when he was killed. LBJ upon becoming president moved quickly to expand involvement. Here is a special report on subsequent historical events: http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=18846

LBJ’s ‘X’ File on Nixon’s ‘Treason’ March 3, 2012 By Robert Parry Consortiumnews.com http://consortiumnews.com/2012/03/03/lbjs-x-file-on-nixons-treason/ Special Report: In the dusty files of Lyndon Johnson’s presidential library in Austin, Texas, once secret documents and audiotapes tell a dark and tragic story of how Richard Nixon’s team secured the White House in 1968 by sabotaging peace talks that might have ended the Vietnam War four years earlier, Robert Parry reports. On May 14, 1973, Walt W. Rostow, who had been national security adviser during some of the darkest days of the Vietnam War, typed a three-page “memorandum for the record” summarizing a secret file that his former boss, President Lyndon Johnson, had amassed on what may have been Richard Nixon’s dirtiest trick, the sabotaging of Vietnam peace talks to win the 1968 election. Rostow reflected, too, on what effect LBJ’s public silence may have had on the then-unfolding Watergate scandal. As Rostow composed his memo in spring 1973, President Nixon’s Watergate cover-up was unraveling. Just two weeks earlier, Nixon had fired White House counsel John Dean and accepted the resignations of two top aides, H.R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman. National security adviser Walt Rostow shows President Lyndon Johnson a model of a battle near Khe Sanh in Vietnam. (National Archives Photo) Three days after Rostow wrote the memo, the Senate Watergate hearings opened as the U.S. government lurched toward a constitutional crisis. Yet, as he typed, Rostow had a unique perspective on the worsening scandal. He understood the subterranean background to Nixon’s political espionage operations. Those secret activities surfaced with the arrest of the Watergate burglars in June 1972, but they had begun much earlier. In his memo for the record, Rostow expressed regret that he and other top Johnson aides had chosen – for what they had deemed “the good of the country” – to keep quiet about Nixon’s Vietnam peace-talk sabotage, which Johnson had privately labeled “treason.” “I am inclined to believe the Republican operation in 1968 relates in two ways to the Watergate affair of 1972,” Rostow wrote. He noted, first, that Nixon’s operatives may have judged that their “enterprise with the South Vietnamese” – in frustrating Johnson’s last-ditch peace initiative – had secured Nixon his narrow margin of victory over Democratic Vice President Hubert Humphrey in 1968. “Second, they got away with it,” Rostow wrote. “Despite considerable press commentary after the election, the matter was never investigated fully. Thus, as the same men faced the election in 1972, there was nothing in their previous experience with an operation of doubtful propriety (or, even, legality) to warn them off, and there were memories of how close an election could get and the possible utility of pressing to the limit – and beyond.” [To read Rostow’s memo, click here, here and here.] Rostow also was aware that – as the Watergate scandal deepened in late 1972 and early 1973 – Nixon’s men had curiously approached the retired President Johnson with veiled threats about going public with their knowledge that Johnson had ordered wiretaps to spy on their Vietnam peace sabotage in 1968. Apparently, Nixon thought he could bully Johnson into helping shut down the Watergate probe. Instead, the threat had infuriated Johnson, who was still pained by his failure to end the Vietnam War before he left office on Jan. 20, 1969, a tragic lost opportunity that he blamed on Nixon’s treachery and deceit. Just a couple of weeks after Nixon’s strange overture about the 1968 bugging and two days after Nixon was sworn in for a second term, Johnson died of a heart attack on Jan. 22, 1973. ‘The X Envelope’ So, in spring 1973, Rostow found himself in a curious position. As Johnson’s presidency ended in 1969 – and at Johnson’s instruction – Rostow had taken with him the White House file chronicling Nixon’s Vietnam gambit, consisting of scores of “secret” and “top secret” documents. Rostow had labeled the file “The ‘X’ Envelope.” Walt Rostow's "The 'X' Envelope" Also, by May 1973, Rostow had been out of government for more than four years and had no legal standing to possess this classified material. Johnson, who had ordered the file removed from the White House, had died. And, now, a major political crisis was unfolding about which Rostow felt he possessed an important missing link for understanding the history and the context. So what to do? Rostow apparently struggled with this question for the next month as the Watergate scandal continued to expand. On June 25, 1973, John Dean delivered his blockbuster Senate testimony, claiming that Nixon got involved in the cover-up within days of the June 1972 burglary at the Democratic National Committee. Dean also asserted that Watergate was just part of a years-long program of political espionage directed by Nixon’s White House. The very next day, as headlines of Dean’s testimony filled the nation’s newspapers, Rostow reached his conclusion about what to do with “The ‘X’ Envelope.” In longhand, he wrote a “Top Secret” note which read, “To be opened by the Director, Lyndon Baines Johnson Library, not earlier than fifty (50) years from this date June 26, 1973.” In other words, Rostow intended this missing link of American history to stay missing for another half century. In a typed cover letter to LBJ Library director Harry Middleton, Rostow wrote: “Sealed in the attached envelope is a file President Johnson asked me to hold personally because of its sensitive nature. In case of his death, the material was to be consigned to the LBJ Library under conditions I judged to be appropriate. “The file concerns the activities of Mrs. [Anna] Chennault and others before and immediately after the election of 1968. At the time President Johnson decided to handle the matter strictly as a question of national security; and in retrospect, he felt that decision was correct. … “After fifty years the Director of the LBJ Library (or whomever may inherit his responsibilities, should the administrative structure of the National Archives change) may, alone, open this file. … If he believes the material it contains should not be opened for research [at that time], I would wish him empowered to re-close the file for another fifty years when the procedure outlined above should be repeated.” Opening the File Ultimately, however, the LBJ Library didn’t wait that long. After a little more than two decades, on July 22, 1994, the envelope was opened and the archivists began the process of declassifying the contents. (Some documents, including what appears to be the oldest document in the file, an Aug. 3, 1968, “top secret” memo from White House national security aide Bromley Smith to Johnson, remain partially or wholly classified even today.) Still, the dozens of declassified documents revealed a dramatic story of hardball politics played at the highest levels of government and with the highest of stakes, not only the outcome of the pivotal 1968 presidential election but the fate of a half million U.S. soldiers then sitting in the Vietnam war zone. Relying on national security wiretaps of the South Vietnamese Embassy in Washington and surveillance of right-wing China Lobby activist Anna Chennault, Johnson concluded that Nixon’s Republican presidential campaign was colluding with South Vietnamese President Nguyen van Thieu to derail the Paris peace talks and thus deny a last-minute boost to Democratic presidential nominee, Vice President Hubert Humphrey. At the time, Johnson thought a breakthrough was near, one that could have ended a war which had already claimed the lives of more than 30,000 American troops and countless Vietnamese. Nixon, like Humphrey, was receiving briefings on the progress as the negotiations gained momentum in October 1968. The Johnson administration was encouraged when North Vietnam agreed on a framework for peace talks. However, America’s South Vietnamese allies began to balk over details about how the negotiations would be conducted, objecting to any equal status for the South Vietnamese Viet Cong insurgents. “Top Secret” reports from the National Security Agency informed President Johnson that South Vietnam’s President Thieu was closely monitoring the political developments in the United States with an eye toward helping Nixon win the Nov. 5 election. For instance, an Oct. 23, 1968, report – presumably based on NSA’s electronic eavesdropping – quotes Thieu as saying that the Johnson administration might halt the U.S. bombing of North Vietnam as part of a peace maneuver that would help Humphrey’s campaign but that South Vietnam might not go along. Thieu also appreciated the other side of the coin, that Johnson’s failure would help Nixon. “The situation which would occur as the result of a bombing halt, without the agreement of the [south] Vietnamese government … would be to the advantage of candidate Nixon,” the NSA report on Thieu’s thinking read. “Accordingly, he [Thieu] said that the possibility of President Johnson enforcing a bombing halt without [south] Vietnam’s agreement appears to be weak.” [Click here and here.] By Oct. 28, 1968, according to another NSA report, Thieu said “it appears that Mr. Nixon will be elected as the next president” and that any settlement with the Viet Cong should be put off until “the new president” was in place. Nixon’s Go-Between The next day, Oct. 29, national security adviser Walt Rostow received the first indication that Nixon might actually be coordinating with Thieu to sabotage the peace talks. Rostow’s brother, Eugene, who was Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, wrote a memo about a tip from a source in New York who had spoken with “a member of the banking community” who was “very close to Nixon.” The source said Wall Street bankers – at a working lunch to assess likely market trends and to decide where to invest – had been given inside information about the prospects for Vietnam peace and were told that Nixon was obstructing that outcome. “The conversation was in the context of a professional discussion about the future of the financial markets in the near term,” Eugene Rostow wrote. “The speaker said he thought the prospects for a bombing halt or a cease-fire were dim, because Nixon was playing the problem … to block. … “They would incite Saigon to be difficult, and Hanoi to wait. Part of his strategy was an expectation that an offensive would break out soon, that we would have to spend a great deal more (and incur more casualties) – a fact which would adversely affect the stock market and the bond market. NVN [North Vietnamese] offensive action was a definite element in their thinking about the future.” In other words, Nixon’s friends on Wall Street were placing their financial bets based on the inside dope that Johnson’s peace initiative was doomed to fail. (In another document, Walt Rostow identified his brother’s source as Alexander Sachs, who was then on the board of Lehman Brothers.) A separate memo from Eugene Rostow said the speaker had added that Nixon “was trying to frustrate the President, by inciting Saigon to step up its demands, and by letting Hanoi know that when he [Nixon] took office ‘he could accept anything and blame it on his predecessor.’” So, according to the source, Nixon was trying to convince both the South and North Vietnamese that they would get a better deal if they stalled Johnson. In his later memo to the file, Walt Rostow recounted that he learned this news shortly before attending a morning meeting at which President Johnson was informed by U.S. Ambassador to South Vietnam Ellsworth Bunker about “Thieu’s sudden intransigence.” Walt Rostow said “the diplomatic information previously received plus the information from New York took on new and serious significance.” That same day, Johnson “instructed Bromley Smith, Executive Secretary of the National Security Council, to get in touch with the Deputy Director of the FBI, Deke DeLoach, and arrange that contacts by Americans with the South Vietnamese Embassy in Washington be monitored,” Rostow wrote. The White House soon learned that Anna Chennault, the fiercely anticommunist Chinese-born widow of Lt. Gen. Claire Chennault and a member of Nixon’s campaign team, was holding curious meetings with South Vietnamese Ambassador to the United States Bui Diem. On Oct. 30, an FBI intercept overheard Bui Diem telling Mrs. Chennault that something “is cooking” and asking her to come by the embassy. Johnson Complains On Oct. 31, at 4:09 p.m., Johnson – his voice thick from a cold – began working the phones, trying to counteract Nixon’s chicanery. The Democratic president called Republican Senate Leader Everett Dirksen and broached a concern about Nixon’s interference with the peace talks. Johnson said he considered Nixon’s behavior a betrayal because he had kept Nixon abreast of the peace progress, according to an audio recording of the conversation released by the LBJ Library in late 2008. “I played it clean,” Johnson said. “I told Nixon every bit as much, if not more, as Humphrey knows. I’ve given Humphrey not one thing.” Johnson added, “I really think it’s a little dirty pool for Dick’s people to be messing with the South Vietnamese ambassador and carrying messages around to both of them [North and South Vietnam]. And I don’t think people would approve of it if it were known.” Dirksen: “Yeah.” Referring to his political trouble with Democrats as well as Republicans, Johnson continued, “While they criticized my conduct of the war, they have never told the enemy that he’d get a better deal, but these last few days, Dick is just gotten a little shaky and he’s pissing on the fire a little.” Johnson then told Dirksen, “We have a transcript where one of his partners says he’s going to frustrate the President by telling the South Vietnamese that, ‘just wait a few more days,’ … he can make a better peace for them, and by telling Hanoi that he didn’t run this war and didn’t get them into it, that he can be a lot more considerate of them than I can because I’m pretty inflexible. I’ve called them sons of bitches.” Dirksen responded by expressing the Republican concern that Johnson might spring a breakthrough on the peace talks right before the election. “The fellas on our side get antsy-pantsy about it,” the Illinois Republican said. “They wonder what the impact would be if a cease-fire or a halt to the bombing will be proclaimed at any given hour, what its impact would be on the results next Tuesday,” Election Day. Johnson denied he would play politics with the war and recalled Nixon’s pledges to support his handling of the war. Johnson said, “With Nixon saying ‘I want the war stopped, that I’m supporting Johnson, that I want him to get peace if he can, that I’m not going to pull the rug out [from under] him,’ I don’t know how it could be helped unless he goes to parting under the covers and gets his hand under somebody’s dress.” Knowing Dirksen would report back to Nixon, Johnson also cited a few details to give his complaint more credibility. “He better keep Mrs. Chennault and all this crowd tied up for a few days,” Johnson said. Bombing Halt That night, Johnson announced a bombing halt of North Vietnam, a key step toward advancing the peace process. The next morning at 11:38, he discussed the state of play with Sen. Richard Russell, D-Georgia, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee. Johnson again mentioned Nixon’s secret maneuverings though expressing hope that his warning to Dirksen had worked. Nixon has “had these people engaged in this stuff,” said Johnson, amid loud honking to clear his sinuses. “Folks messing around with both sides. … Hanoi thought they could benefit by waiting and South Vietnam’s now beginning to think they could benefit by waiting, by what people are doing. So he [Nixon] knows that I know what he’s doing. And this morning they’re kind of closing up some of their agents, not so active. I noticed that one of the embassies refused to answer their call.” However, on Nov. 2, Johnson learned that his protests had not shut down the operation. The FBI intercepted the most incriminating evidence yet of Nixon’s interference when Anna Chennault contacted Ambassador Bui Diem to convey “a message from her boss (not further identified),” according to an FBI cable. According to the intercept, Chennault said “her boss wanted her to give [the message] personally to the ambassador. She said the message was that the ambassador is to ‘hold on, we are going to win’ and that her boss also said, ‘hold on, he understands all of it.’ She repeated that this is the only message … ‘he said please tell your boss to hold on.’ She advised that her boss had just called from New Mexico.” In quickly relaying the message to Johnson at his ranch in Texas, Rostow noted that the reference to New Mexico “may indicate [Republican vice presidential nominee Spiro] Agnew is acting,” since he had taken a campaign swing through the state. That same day, Thieu recanted on his tentative agreement to meet with the Viet Cong in Paris, pushing the incipient peace talks toward failure. That night, at 9:18, an angry Johnson from his ranch in Texas telephoned Dirksen again, to provide more details about Nixon’s activities and to urge Dirksen to intervene more forcefully. “The agent [Chennault] says she’s just talked to the boss in New Mexico and that he said that you must hold out, just hold on until after the election,” Johnson said. “We know what Thieu is saying to them out there. We’re pretty well informed at both ends.” Johnson then renewed his thinly veiled threat to go public. “I don’t want to get this in the campaign,” Johnson said, adding: “They oughtn’t be doing this. This is treason.” Dirksen responded, “I know.” Johnson continued: “I think it would shock America if a principal candidate was playing with a source like this on a matter of this importance. I don’t want to do that [go public]. They ought to know that we know what they’re doing. I know who they’re talking to. I know what they’re saying.” The President also stressed the stakes involved, noting that the movement toward negotiations in Paris had contributed to a lull in the violence. “We’ve had 24 hours of relative peace,” Johnson said. “If Nixon keeps the South Vietnamese away from the [peace] conference, well, that’s going to be his responsibility. Up to this point, that’s why they’re not there. I had them signed onboard until this happened.” Dirksen: “I better get in touch with him, I think.” “They’re contacting a foreign power in the middle of a war,” Johnson said. “It’s a damn bad mistake. And I don’t want to say so. … You just tell them that their people are messing around in this thing, and if they don’t want it on the front pages, they better quit it.” A Worried Nixon After hearing from Dirksen, Nixon grew concerned that Johnson might just go public with his evidence of the conspiracy. Nixon discussed his worries with Sen. George Smathers, a conservative Democrat from Florida, who, in turn, called Johnson on the morning of Nov. 3, just two days before the election. Smathers recounted that “Nixon said he understands the President is ready to blast him for allegedly collaborating with [Texas Sen. John] Tower and [Anna] Chennault to slow the peace talks,” according to a White House summary of the Smathers call to Johnson. “Nixon says there is not any truth at all in this allegation. Nixon says there has been no contact at all. … Nixon told Smathers he hoped the President would not make such a charge.” At 1:54 p.m., trying to head off that possibility, Nixon spoke directly to Johnson, according to an audiotape released by the LBJ Library. “Mr. President, this is Dick Nixon.” Johnson: “Yes, Dick.” Nixon: “I just wanted you to know that I got a report from Everett Dirksen with regard to your call. … I just went on ‘Meet the Press’ and I said … that I had given you my personal assurance that I would do everything possible to cooperate both before the election and, if elected, after the election and if you felt … that anything would be useful that I could do, that I would do it, that I felt Saigon should come to the conference table. … “I feel very, very strongly about this. Any rumblings around about somebody trying to sabotage the Saigon government’s attitude, there’s absolutely no credibility as far as I’m concerned.” Armed with the FBI reports and other intelligence, Johnson responded, “I’m very happy to hear that, Dick, because that is taking place. Here’s the history of it. I didn’t want to call you but I wanted you to know what happened.” Johnson recounted some of the chronology leading up to Oct. 28 when it appeared that South Vietnam was onboard for the peace talks. He added: “Then the traffic goes out that Nixon will do better by you. Now that goes to Thieu. I didn’t say with your knowledge. I hope it wasn’t.” “Huh, no,” Nixon responded. “My God, I would never do anything to encourage … Saigon not to come to the table. … Good God, we want them over to Paris, we got to get them to Paris or you can’t have a peace.” Nixon also insisted that he would do whatever President Johnson and Secretary of State Dean Rusk wanted, including going to Paris himself if that would help. “I’m not trying to interfere with your conduct of it; I’ll only do what you and Rusk want me to do,” Nixon said, recognizing how tantalizingly close Johnson was to a peace deal. “We’ve got to get this goddamn war off the plate,” Nixon continued. “The war apparently now is about where it could be brought to an end. The quicker the better. To hell with the political credit, believe me.” Johnson, however, sounded less than convinced. “You just see that your people don’t tell the South Vietnamese that they’re going to get a better deal out of the United States government than a conference,” the President said. Still professing his innocence, Nixon told Johnson, “The main thing that we want to have is a good, strong personal understanding. After all, I trust you on this and I’ve told everybody that.” “You just see that your people that are talking to these folks make clear your position,” Johnson said. Nixon protested that some of his Democratic rivals were citing the bombing halt as good news for Humphrey’s campaign. “Some of Humphrey’s people have been gleeful,” Nixon said. “They said the bombing pause is going to help them and our people say it hurts.” “I’ll tell you what I say,” Johnson cut in. “I say it doesn’t affect the election one way or the other. … I don’t think it will change one vote.” Trying to end the conversation on a pleasant note, Nixon inserted, “Anyway, we’ll have fun.” According to some reports, Nixon himself was gleeful after the conversation ended, believing he had tamped down Johnson’s suspicions. However, privately, Johnson didn’t believe Nixon’s protestations of innocence. What to Do? In a 1:54 p.m. phone conversation with Secretary of State Rusk about the messages from the Nixon camp to the South Vietnamese leadership, Johnson said, “I don’t think they say these things without his knowledge.” Rusk: “Well, certainly not without Agnew’s knowledge, … some cutouts somewhere.” Johnson: “Well, what do we do now? Just say nothing?” Rusk: “I would think we ought to hunker down and say nothing at this point.” However, on Nov. 4, the White House received another report from the FBI that Anna Chennault had visited the South Vietnamese embassy. Johnson also got word that the Christian Science Monitor was onto the story of Nixon undermining the peace talks. The FBI bugging of the South Vietnamese embassy picked up a conversation involving journalist Saville Davis of the Monitor’s Washington bureau, seeking a comment from Ambassador Bui Diem about “a story received from a [Monitor] correspondent in Saigon.” Rostow relayed the FBI report to Johnson who was still at his Texas ranch. The “eyes only” cable reported: “Davis said that the dispatch from Saigon contains the elements of a major scandal which also involves the Vietnamese ambassador and which will affect presidential candidate Richard Nixon if the Monitor publishes it. Time is of the essence inasmuch as Davis has a deadline to meet if he publishes it. He speculated that should the story be published, it will create a great deal of excitement.” Davis also approached the White House for comment about the draft article, which had arrived from correspondent Beverly Deepe. Her draft began: “Purported political encouragement from the Richard Nixon camp was a significant factor in the last-minute decision of President Thieu’s refusal to send a delegation to the Paris peace talks – at least until the American Presidential election is over.” The Monitor’s inquiry gave President Johnson one more opportunity to bring to light the Nixon campaign’s gambit before Election Day, albeit only on the day before and possibly not until the morning of the election when the Monitor could publish the story. So, Johnson consulted with Rusk, Rostow and Defense Secretary Clark Clifford in a Nov. 4 conference call. Those three pillars of the Washington Establishment were unanimous in advising Johnson against going public, mostly out of fear that the scandalous information might reflect badly on the U.S. government. “Some elements of the story are so shocking in their nature that I’m wondering whether it would be good for the country to disclose the story and then possibly have a certain individual [Nixon] elected,” Clifford said. “It could cast his whole administration under such doubt that I think it would be inimical to our country’s interests.” Johnson concurred with the judgment, and an administration spokesman told Davis, “Obviously I’m not going to get into this kind of thing in any way, shape or form,” according to another “eyes only” cable that Rostow sent Johnson. The cable added: “Saville Davis volunteered that his newspaper would certainly not print the story in the form in which it was filed; but they might print a story which said Thieu, on his own, decided to hold out until after the election. Incidentally, the story as filed is stated to be based on Vietnamese sources, and not U.S., in Saigon.” Rostow’s cable also summed up the consensus from him, Rusk and Clifford: “The information sources [an apparent reference to the FBI wiretaps] must be protected and not introduced into domestic politics; even with these sources, the case is not open and shut. “On the question of the ‘public’s right to know,’ Sec. Rusk was very strong on the following position: We get information like this every day, some of it very damaging to American political figures. We have always taken the view that with respect to such sources there is no public ‘right to know.’ Such information is collected simply for the purposes of national security. “So far as the information based on such sources is concerned, all three of us agreed: (A) Even if the story breaks, it was judged too late to have a significant impact on the election. ( The viability of the man elected as president was involved as well as subsequent relations between him and President Johnson. © Therefore, the common recommendation was that we should not encourage such stories and hold tight the data we have.” According to a “memorandum for the record,” presumably written by Walt Rostow, “our contact with the man in New York” reported on Election Day, Nov. 5, that Nixon remained nervous about the election’s outcome and thus reneged on his commitment to Johnson not to exploit the peace-talk stalemate for political gain. “On the question of the problem with Saigon, he [Nixon] did not stay with the statesman-like role but pressed publicly the failure of Saigon to come along as an anti-Democrat political issue,” the memo said. So, even as Johnson refused to exploit evidence of Nixon’s “treason,” Nixon played hardball until the last vote was cast. Nixon’s Victory Nixon narrowly prevailed over Humphrey by about 500,000 votes or less than one percent of the ballots cast. On the day after the election, Rostow relayed to Johnson another FBI intercept which had recorded South Vietnamese Ambassador Bui Diem saying, prior to the American balloting, that he was “keeping his fingers crossed” in hopes of a Nixon victory. On Nov. 7, Rostow passed along another report to Johnson about the thinking of South Vietnam’s leaders, with a cover letter that read: “If you wish to get the story raw, read the last paragraph, marked.” That marked paragraph quoted Major Bui Cong Minh, assistant armed forces attaché at the South Vietnamese Embassy in Washington, saying about the peace talks: “Major Minh expressed the opinion that the move by Saigon was to help presidential candidate Nixon, and that had Saigon gone to the conference table, presidential candidate Humphrey would probably have won.” The White House also learned that Anna Chennault remained in contact with Ambassador Bui Diem, including a cryptic conversation on Nov. 7, in which she told him she had conveyed a message from President Thieu to “them,” presumably a reference to the Nixon team. The cable read: “She advised she had given ‘them’ everything when she finally got back to her office to call, that ‘they’ got the whole message. … Chennault continued that ‘they’ are still planning things but are not letting people know too much because they want to be careful to avoid embarrassing ‘you’, themselves, or the present U.S. government. Therefore, whatever we do must be carefully planned. … Chennault added that Senator John Goodwin Tower had talked to her today. … and Chennault and Tower plan to meet [Ambassador] Diem ‘either Monday.’” After reading the cable on the morning of Nov. 8, Rostow wrote to Johnson, “First reactions may well be wrong. But with this information I think it’s time to blow the whistle on these folks.” Of course, as the president-elect, Nixon was now in the driver’s seat and there wasn’t anything Johnson could do to change that. Another report on Nov. 8 described a breakfast meeting between Ambassador Bui Diem and “a reliable and trustworthy American,” who discussed President Thieu’s revised approach to the Paris talks which “gave the GVN [south Vietnam] a more prominent status than the NLF [Viet Cong] … and put negotiations on a Vietnamese-to-Vietnamese basis rather than a U.S.-to-Vietnamese basis. … “Asked if he [bui Diem] thought there was much chance of Hanoi’s acceptance, he replied ‘no,’ but he added that it put the GVN on the offensive rather than in the position of appearing to scuttle negotiations.” In other words, the South Vietnamese government was making a public relations move to ensure the talks would fail but without Thieu getting the blame. Bui Diem also expressed satisfaction that the U.S. elections had ousted key anti-war senators, Wayne Morse, Ernest Gruening and Joseph Clark. [Click here, here and here.] Pressuring Nixon The report upset Johnson, but he chose to continue trying to persuade Nixon to live up to his pre-election commitment to do whatever he could to push the peace process toward success. At 2:54 p.m. on Nov. 8, Johnson spoke again with Sen. Dirksen to stress the urgency of Nixon getting Thieu to reverse his position on the peace talks. “Hell, no, this ought to go right now,” Johnson declared. “If they [the South Vietnamese] don’t go in there this week, we’re just going to have all kinds of problems. … We want Thieu to get a message so he can get a delegation from Saigon to Paris next week. We think we’ve held up each day, we’re killing men. We’re killing men. … “Saigon now thinks that they will play this out and keep this thing going on until January the 20th [inauguration Day] and we think that’s a mistake.” That evening at 9:23, Nixon called Johnson from Key Biscayne, Florida, where Nixon was taking a vacation after the grueling election. Nixon sounded confident and relaxed, even as Johnson continued to push regarding the peace talks. Johnson recounted the evidence of the continued interference by Nixon’s emissaries and even described the Republican motivation for disrupting the talks, speaking of himself in the third person. “Johnson was going to have a bombing pause to try to elect Humphrey; they [the South Vietnamese] ought to hold out because Nixon will not sell you out like the Democrats sold out China,” Johnson said. “I think they’ve been talking to [Vice President-elect Spiro] Agnew,” Johnson continued. “They’ve been quoting you [Nixon] indirectly, that the thing they ought to do is to just not show up at any [peace] conference and wait until you come into office. “Now they’ve started that [boycott] and that’s bad. They’re killing Americans every day. I have that [story of the peace-talk sabotage] documented. There’s not any question but that’s happening. … That’s the story, Dick, and it’s a sordid story. … I don’t want to say that to the country, because that’s not good.” Faced with Johnson’s threat, Nixon promised to tell the South Vietnamese officials to reverse themselves and join the peace talks. However, nothing changed. At a Nov. 11 dinner party, President Thieu discussed what he termed a U.S. “betrayal” of him when he was getting pressured regarding the Paris peace talks, according to a “secret” U.S. government report on Thieu’s comments. The report added, “Thieu told his guests that during the U.S. election campaign he had sent two secret emissaries to the U.S. to contact Richard Nixon.” [Click here, here, here, here, here and here.] On Nov. 13, South Vietnam’s Minister of Information Ton That Thein held a press conference criticizing Johnson and his diplomats for rushing matters on the peace talks. Thein also acknowledged possible pre-election contacts with elements of Nixon’s campaign. A U.S. Embassy cable reported that “Asked whether Nixon had encouraged the GVN [the government of South Vietnam] to delay agreement with the US, Thein replied that, while there may have been contacts between Nixon staffers and personnel of the [south Vietnamese] Embassy in Washington, a person of the caliber of Nixon would not do such a thing.” [Click here, here and here.] On Nov. 15, ten days after the election, suspicions of the peace-talk sabotage began seeping into the U.S. news media. Columnist Georgie Anne Geyer reported, “Top Saigon officials are boasting privately they helped assure the election of Richard M. Nixon. They are pleased about it. ‘We did it,’ one of them said. ‘We helped elect an American President.’” Columnists Drew Pearson and Jack Anderson noted in a Nov. 17 column that Johnson “learned that Saigon’s Ambassador Bui Diem had been in touch secretly with Richard Nixon’s people. There were unconfirmed reports that South Vietnamese leaders had even slipped campaign cash to Nixon representatives.” ‘Lady Still Operational’ As the weeks passed and the peace talks remained stalled, Anna Chennault kept up her contacts with South Vietnam’s Embassy, briefing a senior diplomat there on Dec. 9, 1968, about Nixon’s selection of “her very good friend” Melvin Laird to be Secretary of Defense. According to the FBI cable, “She went on to say that ‘we’ should be very happy about this [and] not to be too concerned about the press’s references about a coalition government. Chennault indicated that Laird is a very strong man.” Rostow forwarded the cable to Johnson on Dec. 10, with the notation, “The Lady is still operational.” But Johnson’s White House remained tight-lipped about its knowledge of Nixon’s treachery. According to the documents in “The ‘X’ Envelope,” the first detailed press inquiry about the peace-talk sabotage came from St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter Tom Ottenad who contacted Rostow on Jan. 3, 1969, just 17 days before Johnson would leave office. Ottenad outlined the activities of Anna Chennault on behalf of the campaign and pressed Rostow to confirm that the administration was aware of the subterfuge. Rostow responded, “I have not one word to say about that matter.” An FBI intercept also picked up the Post-Dispatch questioning Bui Diem about contacts with Chennault. While he denied any improper contacts with the Nixon administration, Bui Diem acknowledged that Chennault “has visited the Vietnamese embassy from time to time, but not frequently.” As published, Ottenad’s article began, “A well-known top official of committees working for the election of Richard M. Nixon secretly got in touch with representatives of South Vietnam shortly before the presidential election. It was in connection with an apparent effort to encourage them to delay in joining the Paris peace talks in hopes of getting a better deal if the Republicans won the White House.” But there was little follow-up to Ottenad’s scoop. A sketchy account also appeared in author Teddy White’s The Making of a President 1968, which was published in summer 1969, drawing a response from Chennault, who called the accusations an “insult.” Even in retirement, Rostow remained mum about the Chennault episode, rebuffing another overture from Ottenad on Feb. 11, 1970. Ottenad also approached ex-President Johnson, but he too chose to hold his tongue, though his legacy had been devastated by his conduct of the Vietnam War – and by his failure to end it. After Ottenad’s inquiry, Johnson’s aide Tom Johnson offered a heads-up to Nixon’s chief of staff “Bob” Haldeman about another possible story on this touchy topic. To a somewhat baffled Haldeman, Tom Johnson volunteered that ex-President Johnson had given no authorization to anyone to discuss the matter. “Haldeman said he was most appreciative that we had advised him of this information and would keep the telephone call completely confidential,” Tom Johnson’s memo to ex-President Johnson read. “Haldeman seemed genuinely pleased and surprised that we would call on such a matter and expressed his thanks again for the attitude we have been taking toward President Nixon.” [Tom Johnson later served as president of CNN.] More Dead From the start of Nixon’s presidency in 1969, the U.S. participation in the Vietnam War continued for more than four years at horrendous cost to both the United States and the people of Vietnam. Having allegedly made his secret commitment to the South Vietnamese regime, Nixon kept searching for violent new ways to get Thieu a better deal than Johnson would have offered. Seeking what he called “peace with honor,” Nixon invaded Cambodia and stepped up the bombing of North Vietnam. In those four years, the war bitterly divided the United States, as anti-war protests turned increasingly confrontational; parents turned against their children and children against their parents; “hard-hats” attacked “hippies”; Nixon baited one group of angry protesters with his “V” for victory sign and called other protesters “bums”; four students were gunned down at Kent State. But it seemed nothing could stop the war, not massive protests, not even disclosures about the deception that had gotten the United States into the conflict. Former Defense Department official Daniel Ellsberg leaked the “Pentagon Papers,” a secret history of the war’s early years, but the conflict still ground on. Fatefully, Nixon struck back at Ellsberg by organizing a White House “plumbers unit” that broke into the office of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist. The “plumbers,” including ex-CIA operatives, later switched their attention to Nixon’s political rivals, burglarizing the Democratic National Committee at the Watergate building in search of intelligence, including what dirt the Democrats might have on Nixon. Before U.S. participation in the war was finally brought to a close in 1973 — on terms similar to what had been available to President Johnson in 1968 — a million more Vietnamese were estimated to have died. Those four years also cost the lives of an additional 20,763 U.S. soldiers, with 111,230 wounded. Ironically, as the Democrats stayed mum, Nixon apparently judged that they were more concerned about the information regarding his Vietnam War “treason” coming out than he was. So, after some of his “plumbers” got arrested at the Watergate on June 17, 1972, Nixon began to view the 1968 events as a blackmail card to play against Johnson to get his help squelching the expanding probe. Nixon discussed the 1968 bugging in his Oval Office meetings about Watergate as early as July 1, 1972. According to Nixon’s White House tapes, his aide Charles Colson touched off Nixon’s musings by noting that a newspaper column claimed that the Democrats had bugged the telephones of Anna Chennault in 1968 when she was serving as Nixon’s intermediary to Thieu. “Oh,” Nixon responded, “in ’68, they bugged our phones too.” Colson: “And that this was ordered by Johnson.” Nixon: “That’s right” Colson: “And done through the FBI. My God, if we ever did anything like that you’d have the …” Nixon: “Yes. For example, why didn’t we bug [the Democrats’ 1972 presidential nominee George] McGovern, because after all he’s affecting the peace negotiations?” Colson: “Sure.” Nixon: “That would be exactly the same thing.” By early November 1972, as Nixon was cruising to an easy victory over McGovern but was worried about future problems with the Watergate scandal, the tale of Johnson’s supposed wiretaps of Nixon’s campaign was picked up by the Washington Star, Nixon’s favorite newspaper for planting stories damaging to his opponents. Washington Star reporters contacted Rostow on Nov. 2, 1972, and, according to a Rostow memo, asked whether “President Johnson instructed the FBI to investigate action by members of the Nixon camp to slow down the peace negotiations in Paris before the 1968 election. After the election [FBI Director] J. Edgar Hoover informed President Nixon of what he had been instructed to do by President Johnson. President Nixon is alleged to have been outraged.” But Rostow still was unwilling to help on the story. Hoover apparently had given Nixon a garbled version of what had happened, leading him to believe that the FBI bugging was more extensive than it was. According to Nixon’s White House tapes, he pressed Haldeman on Jan. 8, 1973, to get the story about the 1968 bugging into the Washington Star. “You don’t really have to have hard evidence, Bob,” Nixon told Haldeman. “You’re not trying to take this to court. All you have to do is to have it out, just put it out as authority, and the press will write the Goddamn story, and the Star will run it now.” Haldeman, however, insisted on checking the facts. In The Haldeman Diaries, published in 1994, Haldeman included an entry dated Jan. 12, 1973, which contains his book’s only deletion for national security reasons. “I talked to [former Attorney General John] Mitchell on the phone,” Haldeman wrote, “and he said [FBI official Cartha] DeLoach had told him he was up to date on the thing. … A Star reporter was making an inquiry in the last week or so, and LBJ got very hot and called Deke [DeLoach's nickname], and said to him that if the Nixon people are going to play with this, that he would release [deleted material -- national security], saying that our side was asking that certain things be done. … “DeLoach took this as a direct threat from Johnson,” Haldeman wrote. “As he [DeLoach] recalls it, bugging was requested on the [Nixon campaign] planes, but was turned down, and all they did was check the phone calls, and put a tap on the Dragon Lady [Anna Chennault].” In other words, Nixon’s threat to raise the 1968 bugging was countered by Johnson, who threatened to finally reveal that Nixon’s campaign had sabotaged the Vietnam peace talks. The stakes were suddenly raised. However, events went in a different direction. On Jan. 22, 1973, ten days after Haldeman’s diary entry and two days after Nixon began his second term, Johnson died of a heart attack. Haldeman also apparently thought better of publicizing Nixon’s 1968 bugging complaint. Several months later – with Johnson dead and Nixon sinking deeper into the Watergate swamp – Rostow, the keeper of “The ‘X’ Envelope,” mused about whether history might have gone in a very different direction if he and other Johnson officials had spoken out in real time about what Johnson called Nixon’s “treason.” Still, Rostow chose to keep the facts from the American people. And the silence had consequences. Though Nixon was forced to resign over the Watergate scandal on Aug. 9, 1974, the failure of the U.S. government and the American press to explain the full scope of Nixon’s dirty politics left Americans divided over the disgraced president’s legacy and the seriousness of Watergate. Many Republicans viewed Watergate as a Democratic plot to reverse the landslide results of the 1972 election. Other observers saw the scandal as an isolated event provoked by Nixon’s personal paranoia. But almost no one made the connection that Rostow did, that Nixon’s high-handed political espionage had involved an earlier scheme that dragged out the Vietnam War for four bloody years. If the public had known that story — including the evidence that some of Nixon’s Wall Street friends were using inside knowledge of the peace-talk sabotage to play the markets — the Republicans would have been hard-pressed to argue that Nixon was simply a victim of partisan Democratic scandal-mongering. Over the years, pieces of the story about Nixon’s “treason” did surface from time to time, but never getting much traction with the major U.S. news media or the political classes. It fell into that hazy category between “conspiracy theory” and “old news.” In 1980, Anna Chennault published an autobiography entitled The Education of Anna, in which she acknowledged that she, indeed, had been a courier for messages between the Nixon campaign and the South Vietnamese government. She quoted Nixon aide John Mitchell as calling her a few days before the 1968 election and telling her: “I’m speaking on behalf of Mr. Nixon. It’s very important that our Vietnamese friends understand our Republican position and I hope you made that clear to them.” But still there was no outcry for a serious investigation. An October Reprise? The lack of interest in Nixon’s Vietnam peace-talk gambit also might have encouraged the Republicans to dig into Nixon’s bag of dirty tricks again in 1980 when some of his old allies, including George H.W. Bush and William Casey, were key figures in Ronald Reagan’s campaign and saw another prospect for ousting another Democratic president over another “October Surprise.” After all, if Nixon could get away with sabotaging Vietnam peace talks when half a million U.S. soldiers were in harm’s way, what was the big deal about upsetting President Jimmy Carter’s negotiations to free 52 U.S. embassy employees then held hostage in Iran? And if the Democrats eventually did get wind of any GOP-Iran hanky-panky, what were the chances that they would hold anyone accountable? Wouldn’t these Democrats be just as susceptible as Johnson’s team was to appeals that telling the whole sordid tale wouldn’t be good for the country? The Democrats had even taken a strange sort of pride in keeping these dirty Republican secrets secret. As it turned out, Democrats did show the same reluctance to seriously investigate allegations of Republican interference in Carter’s hostage negotiations with Iran as they did regarding the Nixon campaign’s sabotage of Johnson’s Vietnam peace talks. [For details on the 1980 reprise of Nixon’s “treason,” see Robert Parry’s Secrecy & Privilege or Consortiumnews.com’s “New October Surprise Series.”] Democrats also presided over timid investigations of Reagan’s later arms-for-hostage deals with Iran, known as the Iran-Contra Affair, and of Reagan’s secret military support for Iraq’s Saddam Hussein in the 1980s, the so-called Iraq-gate scandal. In 1992, I interviewed R. Spencer Oliver, a longtime Democratic Party figure whose phone was one of those that had been bugged at Watergate. Oliver also was one of the few Washington Democrats with the toughness and tenacity to push serious investigations into these Republican scandals. When I asked him why the Democrats so often retreated in the face of fierce Republican resistance, he explained that the Watergate scandal – though it led to the ruin of one Republican president – had taught the Republicans how to thwart serious inquiries: “What [the Republicans] learned from Watergate was not ‘don’t do it,’ but ‘cover it up more effectively.’ They have learned that they have to frustrate congressional oversight and press scrutiny in a way that will avoid another major scandal.” While Oliver was surely right, there was also the tendency of Democrats to avoid the risks required to stand up to Republican abuses. The failed investigations of the 1980 October Surprise case, the Iran-Contra Affair and Iraq-gate seemed part and parcel with avoiding a confrontation with Nixon over the Vietnam peace talks in 1968. In all those cases, there was the echo of Rostow’s musings in 1973, wondering whether the silence of Johnson’s White House regarding Nixon’s “treason” in 1968 had proved not to be “good for the country” after all. By not holding the Republicans accountable, Rostow had reflected, “There was nothing in their previous experience with an operation of doubtful propriety (or, even, legality) to warn them off, and there were memories of how close an election could get and the possible utility of pressing to the limit – and beyond.” But even with that recognition, Rostow still had kept silent. Indeed, if Rostow had had his way, “The ‘X’ Envelope” today would still be locked away from the American people for another decade – and possibly 50 years longer. By the time Rostow died on Feb. 13, 2003, the Republican Party had muscled its way back into power once more, via the tainted election in 2000 and the latest GOP president, George W. Bush, was marching the United States into another destructive war behind another smokescreen of lies and distortions, in Iraq. Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Neck Deep: The Disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush, was written with two of his sons, Sam and Nat, and can be ordered at neckdeepbook.com. His two previous books, Secrecy & Privilege: The Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq and Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & ‘Project Truth’ are also available there.

This video fails to identify who is talking. I am attempting to find this out. In the interim I am posting it because of its scenes from the Church Senate Committee investigation into the CIA.

New York Times Book Review March 2, 2012 Expletives Deleted By CURTIS SITTENFELD WATERGATE By Thomas Mallon 432 pp. Pantheon Books. $26.95. I’m fairly sure it’s a faux pas to compare a novel and a television show, but I mean it as a compliment to both when I say that Thomas Mallon’s new novel, “Watergate,” bears a certain resemblance to “The West Wing.” Like that much-loved NBC drama, “Watergate” shifts among various men and women — mostly men — working inside and outside the White House. Even when the action becomes convoluted, we’re propelled forward and kept highly entertained by the colorful characters, the delicious insider details, the intelligence of the dialogue. Where “The West Wing” and “Watergate” diverge, at least most obviously, is that one is about a fictitious, idealized Democratic president and his staff while the other features fictional depictions of real, corrupt Republicans. This difference is less pronounced than you might imagine, however, largely because of Mallon’s evenhandedness. He’s not out to lampoon Richard Nixon or anyone else. Nor is he out to redeem the Nixon administration, which would have been just as tedious. In fact, Mallon avoids rendering Watergate in the familiar and expected ways: there are only fleeting references to Woodward and Bernstein, and the eventual profusion of indictments and imprisonments aren’t major plot points. What Mallon captures particularly well is the fundamental weirdness and mystery at the center of the scandal. Who was trying to achieve what with those break-ins? And why? Given how ineptly they were carried out, could the sloppiness have been intentional — either as a result of double agentry or as individual self-­sabotage? In these pages, even those closest to the events remain bewildered by their smallness — their ridiculousness, even — and their contrastingly outsize and ruinous consequences. It appears that Mallon’s primary goal, one he achieves with great finesse, is to make the portrayals of his characters as believable as possible. Like the rest of us, they aren’t simply moral or immoral but are both clever and defensive, selfish and self-pitying, sweet and loyal, generous and venal. Also, there are quite a lot of them. Mallon’s initial list of “The Players” in this book contains 112 names, perhaps an unnecessary resource for readers who lived through Watergate, but extremely valuable for those, like me, who did not. Yet Mallon’s control over his material, his ability to subtly cue the reader about what information warrants close attention, means that “Watergate” isn’t usually confusing, even to a younger reader and even though name-bestrewn passages like this one, which describes the night of Nixon’s landslide 1972 re-election, are common: “Nixon sorted through congratulatory messages and returned phone calls from Rockefeller and Frank Rizzo, Philadelphia’s tough-cop mayor, who made Agnew look like Elliot Richardson, according to Ehrlichman. When Haldeman reminded them of this line, Nixon asked, ‘Was Richardson on the platform at the hotel?’ ” With such a large cast, it’s no surprise that the characters who show up the most often emerge the most vividly: Fred LaRue, a gentle White House aide from Mississippi, haunted by a not-so-gentle secret, who deliberately flies below the radar of the public; Rose Mary Woods, the president’s tough and steadfast secretary (and yes, the eraser of those tapes — though not for the reason everyone thinks); Elliot Richardson, who serves as secretary of health, education and welfare, then of defense and finally as Nixon’s attorney general, hiding his own presidential ambitions behind a screen of self-­righteousness. (Hoping to be tapped as Gerald Ford’s vice president after Nixon’s resignation, Richardson makes an amusingly blunt list “of his rivals’ liabilities”: Gov. Nelson Rockefeller is “too old, pushy,” while Senator Edward Brooke is “too liberal, black.”) Also included in the mix is Alice Roosevelt Longworth, daughter of Theodore Roosevelt, widow of the former House speaker Nicholas Longworth and famed deliverer of bons mots. At 90, Mrs. L. remains “a creature of motiveless mischief” who steals every scene she’s in. She demands that the White House schedule Christmas parties around her own calendar, performs bucktoothed impersonations of her cousin Eleanor, rides the dumbwaiter in her house (or claims to) because there’s no elevator and stays up all night reading, then uses the bone from a veal chop as a bookmark. As for the Nixons, sad and stoic Pat is also keeping a secret, one that makes her seem highly sympathetic. And Mallon abandons the usual sweaty, paranoid caricature of Nixon, offering instead a nuanced man who can even be endearing — quite a feat for those of us in the generation for which a Nixon Halloween mask is as much a reference point as Nixon himself. Mallon’s Nixon is preoccupied less with his enemies than with his foreign policy. An oddly touching moment in October 1972 has Rose Mary Woods glancing at a folder marked Oslo, “containing a plan of action to be implemented should the president win the Nobel Peace Prize. If he secured the Vietnam deal on top of China and Russia, how, Rose wondered, could he not get it?” (Ironically, Henry Kissinger, Nixon’s secretary of state, would win it the following year.) A “misanthrope in a flesh-presser’s profession,” this Nixon is awkward rather than evil. He’s chivalrous with elderly Mrs. Longworth, forgiving of subordinates’ mistakes and entirely human in poignant ways: fastidious about having the White House barber “clip a little tuft of chest hair emerging above his collar,” irritated by the fact that the edited transcripts of the White House tapes make him sound as if he drops hard-core obscenities rather than mild ones. And yet it’s the very fact that Mallon portrays Nixon and others so convincingly that raises questions about the fairness of depicting real people in a work of fiction. Is this type of literary borrowing less transgressive when it makes readers like the subjects better? When the subjects are dead? If so, for how long? Ten years? A hundred? Obviously, there’s no consensus when it comes to any of this, but I do know that if you write a novel about, say, Catherine the Great, you probably won’t be scolded for misrepresenting her or otherwise infringing on her privacy, while if you write a novel inspired by Laura Bush, as I did in 2008, you most definitely will. In my case, I changed names, which Mallon has chosen not to do. And I made peace with the intrusive nature of what I was doing by telling myself that to sincerely imagine what the world looks like from someone else’s perspective is an act of compassion. The counterargument, of course, is that even the most savagely mocking skit on “Saturday Night Live” is less insidious than the sustained realism of a novel. “The reason it’s such a violation,” a journalist told me about my own book, “is that every single thing in it is plausible.” Judged by the same standard, Thomas Mallon is — appropriately enough, for a book about Watergate — equally guilty. Curtis Sittenfeld’s fourth novel, “Earthquake Season,” will be published next year.

Pat: You should have gone to law school. You missed your natural calling. Your interrogation of a witness at trial would have been a sight to behold. That plus your unwavering intent to stick with the facts (as shown in your forum postings and comments) would have always carried the day -- assuming you had an honest judge and none of the jurors had been bribed. In answer to your questions: 1) I give great credibility to the accusations made by Billie Sol Estes in the relevant 1984 letter to the U.S. Department of Justice. There were contemporaneous newspaper reports of the untimely deaths of almost all of the persons listed by him in the letter. In addition, Texan historian J. Evetts Haley in his 1964 book, A Texan Looks at Lyndon, wrote in great detail about Estes and the victims. 2) I don’t think my having met Estes, which originally occurred in 1983 when I was asked to do so by Shearn Moody, Jr., of the Moody Foundation in connection with a grant request from Estes, influenced my assessment of the accusations one way or the other. This is because there already existed in the public record much evidence to support Estes’ accusations. 3) U.S. Marshal Clint Peoples, who had closely followed Estes’ activities for 25 years, told me on several occasions that his research supported Estes’ accusations. His exact words to me: “It is about time that the truth comes out.” It was Marshal Peoples who arranged for Estes to testify in 1984 before the Robertson County grand jury. Press reports at the time disclosed that Estes reiterated his accusations in his grand jury testimony. 4) There was no signed and notarized document of Estes dating before I met him that recorded his accusations. He had not determined to tell what he knew until while still in federal prison at Big Spring, Texas, he contacted Shearn Moody, Jr. in 1983 and indicated he was prepared to relate for the public record what he knew. 5) Estes has maintained that he has taped recordings of conversations of the conspirators that support his accusations. I have not heard the recordings and have no knowledge of their whereabouts, 6) He confided in U.S. Marshal Peoples of what he knew. Peoples is now deceased. However, the transcript of Estes’ testimony before the Robertson County grand jury in 1984, if it were unsealed, would clarify much. 7) At the time of JFK assassination, LBJ was facing criminal proceedings stemming from his involvement in the Billie Sol Estes and the Bobby Baker scandals that were reaching the explosive stage. LBJ’s involvement in these two scandals certainly adds credence to what Estes has alleged. http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/JFKestes.htm http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billie_Sol_Estes Thanks, Doug. Was Estes' Grand Jury testimony covered by the act creating the ARRB? Is it available from the archives? And, if not, why not? I am not conversant enough with the act creating the ARRB to answer these questions. Hopefully, another forum member can do so.

What Rick Santorum doesn't understand about JFK By Kathleen Kennedy Townsend Washington Post Published: March 2 America’s only Catholic president referred to God three times in his inaugural address. He invoked the Bible’s command to care for the poor and the sick. Later in his presidency, he said, unequivocally, about civil rights: “We are confronted primarily with a moral issue. It is as old as the Scriptures and is as clear as the American Constitution.” Yet, last Sunday, Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum, who is also Catholic, told ABC News that John F. Kennedy’s classic 1960 campaign speech in Houston about religious liberty was so offensive to people of faith that it made him want to vomit. “To say that people of faith have no role in the public square? You bet that makes you throw up,” Santorum said. “What kind of country do we live [in] that says only people of non-faith can come into the public square and make their case?” Either Santorum doesn’t know his American history or he is purposefully rewriting it. How can he seriously imagine that Kennedy, a person who got down on his knees each night to pray, who gave his time and money to win tough primaries in states with strong anti-Catholic traditions, who challenged us to live our Christianity by ending racial hatred, somehow lacked the courage of faith or tried to exclude people of faith from government and politics? In his presidential campaign, Kennedy faced fierce anti-Catholic prejudice. He appeared before the Greater Houston Ministerial Association because he feared that his faith was being used unfairly against him. Norman Vincent Peale, along with 150 other ministers, had issued a letter urging citizens to vote against Kennedy because, should he win, he would be controlled by the Vatican. Peale’s group called itself the National Conference of Citizens for Religious Freedom. How ironic that the term “religious freedom” would be used as double-speak for religious hypocrisy — but it certainly was not the first or last time. Anti-Catholic prejudice has a long history in America. Construction of the Washington Monumentwas halted partly because an anti-Catholic controversy erupted in 1854, when the pope gave us a stone from Rome for the project. (You can see a change in color partway up the monument between the initial structure and the rest, finished nearly 30 years later.) Catholic students at public schools who didn’t want to recite the Protestant version of the Lord’s Prayer were sometimes expelled. As late as 1928, voters rejected Catholic presidential candidate Al Smith, calling the Democratsthe party of “rum, Romanism and rebellion.” Kennedy, my uncle, hoped to make it clear that the pope would not control him. The government would not regulate church doctrine, and no minister would determine government policy. As he put it: “I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute; where no Catholic prelate would tell the president — should he be Catholic — how to act, and no Protestant minister would tell his parishioners for whom to vote; where no church or church school is granted any public funds or political preference; and where no man is denied public office merely because his religion differs from the president who might appoint him or the people who might elect him.” He specifically referred to birth control, too, saying he would follow his conscience in accordance with what he believed to be in the national interest and not cave in to “religious pressures or dictates.” Santorum is more like Kennedy than he may realize — he follows his conscience. It’s true that on some issues, such as contraception, where the bishops are at odds with many other Catholics, he sides with the bishops. (I’m tempted to recall my father Robert Kennedy’s observation that priests are Republican and nuns Democratic.) But Santorum has also taken positions at odds with the Catholic hierarchy. He has opposed the church’s pro-immigrant policies. He has attacked President Obama’s “phony theology,” which he says involves caring for the Earth — no matter Pope Benedict’s pronouncements on protecting the environment. Nor in his recent Wall Street Journal op-ed did Santorum cite papal views on the financial crisis. On Feb. 15, in an address at Rome’s Major Seminary, the pope said that “the world of finance, while necessary, no longer represents an instrument that favors our well-being or the life of mankind; instead it has become an oppressive power that almost demands our adoration.” Somehow Santorum missed that. Can he be so ignorant of what Kennedy actually said and what the pope has actually preached? Or is he using his faith for political purposes? Santorum has since expressed regret for his choice of words about Kennedy, but his words cannot be forgotten. The challenge is not Santorum — it is the 28 percent of Americans who think the separation of church and state should be abolished. Santorum is encouraging division and intolerance. The subtext of his remarks is that America should be a conservative religious nation — and that Kennedy was denying it. Well, he was. Here are his words to the ministers in Houston: “I believe in an America where religious intolerance will someday end; where all men and all churches are treated as equal; where every man has the same right to attend or not attend the church of his choice; where there is no Catholic vote, no anti-Catholic vote, no bloc voting of any kind; and where Catholics, Protestants and Jews, at both the lay and the pastoral level, will refrain from those attitudes of disdain and division which have so often marred their works in the past, and promote instead the American ideal of brotherhood.” Perhaps Santorum should recall the Gospel’s teachings, which might direct us to positions different from those he advocates. Jesus told his followers that they would be judged on how they clothed the naked, fed the hungry and welcomed the stranger. His directive to love God and our neighbor leads many faithful Americans to support same-sex marriage and to see that marriage itself can be strengthened when couples make love without fear of an unplanned pregnancy. Each of these positions can be made in a secular setting, but they also have a moral argument, grounded in faith. In 2012, people of many faiths are running for office — Barack Obama, Mitt Romney, my own godson, Joseph Kennedy — and one can disagree with their policies while respecting their religious views. Bishops, priests, nuns, ministers, rabbis and imams lobby Congress and state legislatures on various issues. They have a voice. They just don’t always win every election or argument. Welcome to democracy. kathleen.kennedy.townsend1@gmail.com Kathleen Kennedy Townsend is the former lieutenant governor of Maryland and the author of “Failing America’s Faithful: How Today’s Churches Are Mixing God With Politics and Losing Their Way.” She is on the board of Catholic Democrats.

Pat: This is not directly related to your questions. At the request of Robert Morrow, I sent him today by email two conversations that I had on the general subject of LBJ's involvement in the JFK assassination. These conversations are reproduced below: When Barr McClellan's book, LBJ Killed JFK, was about to be released in 2003, both Barr and I independently received about a half dozen phone calls from someone who was vitally intent in stopping its publication or limiting its impact. The person who called always remained unidentified and the phone number from which the call was made was later found to be non-existent. In one of the phone conversations with me, the person in response to my bringing up Robert Caro hopefully covering LBJ's involvement in JFK assassination, told me that "We are not worried about Caro. He is on board." I was disappointed to hear this because I took it to mean that Caro may downplay LBJ's involvement in his forthcoming final volumes on the biography of LBJ. In 1985 or 1986, Robert Caro gave an address at the University of Houston on the subject of urban planning. I attended his speech accompanied by my father. After the speech I approached Caro, who was answering questions posed by about half a dozen attendees gathered around him. I decided to pose my own question to him, asking, "Do you plan to cover the role of Mac Wallace in your biography of LBJ?" Caro looked startled and shaken and grabbed me by the lapels of my business suit, saying "Who are you? How can I get in touch with you?" I gave him my business card, which he examined on the spot and pocketed it. However, I never heard anything more from him.

Pat: You should have gone to law school. You missed your natural calling. Your interrogation of a witness at trial would have been a sight to behold. That plus your unwavering intent to stick with the facts (as shown in your forum postings and comments) would have always carried the day -- assuming you had an honest judge and none of the jurors had been bribed. In answer to your questions: 1) I give great credibility to the accusations made by Billie Sol Estes in the relevant 1984 letter to the U.S. Department of Justice. There were contemporaneous newspaper reports of the untimely deaths of almost all of the persons listed by him in the letter. In addition, Texan historian J. Evetts Haley in his 1964 book, A Texan Looks at Lyndon, wrote in great detail about Estes and the victims. 2) I don’t think my having met Estes, which originally occurred in 1983 when I was asked to do so by Shearn Moody, Jr., of the Moody Foundation in connection with a grant request from Estes, influenced my assessment of the accusations one way or the other. This is because there already existed in the public record much evidence to support Estes’ accusations. 3) U.S. Marshal Clint Peoples, who had closely followed Estes’ activities for 25 years, told me on several occasions that his research supported Estes’ accusations. His exact words to me: “It is about time that the truth comes out.” It was Marshal Peoples who arranged for Estes to testify in 1984 before the Robertson County grand jury. Press reports at the time disclosed that Estes reiterated his accusations in his grand jury testimony. 4) There was no signed and notarized document of Estes dating before I met him that recorded his accusations. He had not determined to tell what he knew until while still in federal prison at Big Spring, Texas, he contacted Shearn Moody, Jr. in 1983 and indicated he was prepared to relate for the public record what he knew. 5) Estes has maintained that he has taped recordings of conversations of the conspirators that support his accusations. I have not heard the recordings and have no knowledge of their whereabouts, 6) He confided in U.S. Marshal Peoples of what he knew. Peoples is now deceased. However, the transcript of Estes’ testimony before the Robertson County grand jury in 1984, if it were unsealed, would clarify much. 7) At the time of JFK assassination, LBJ was facing criminal proceedings stemming from his involvement in the Billie Sol Estes and the Bobby Baker scandals that were reaching the explosive stage. LBJ’s involvement in these two scandals certainly adds credence to what Estes has alleged. http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/JFKestes.htm http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billie_Sol_Estes

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/andrew-breitbart-death-of-a-douche-20120301

The section on Senator Howard Baker and Watergate begins on page 65 of this CIA document. http://www.scribd.com/doc/80786813/William-E-Colby-as-Director-of-Central-Intelligence

http://www.juancole.com/2012/03/dear-msm-andrew-breitbart-was-not-a-blogger.html

ABC News reports that he had a history of heart problems. http://abcnews.go.com/Health/HeartDisease/andrew-breitbart-history-heart-problems/story?id=15825103

Horsegate: David Cameron 'not straight' over links with News International The Telegraph By Christopher Hope, Senior Political Correspondent 2:50PM GMT 02 Mar 2012 http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/phone-hacking/9118889/Horsegate-David-Cameron-not-straight-over-links-with-News-International.html David Cameron has been accused of not being straight about his close links with News International after he finally admitted riding Rebekah Brooks’s ex-police horse. The Prime Minister apologised for three days of “confusion” about the affair. The embarrassing admission raises questions about the closeness between Mr Cameron and Mrs Brooks, the former tabloid editor who quit as chief executive of News International at the height of the phone hacking scandal last summer. Labour's deputy leader Harriet Harman said: "People will be dismayed that while News International was busy hacking phones, David Cameron was out hacking with Rebekah Brooks's husband. "David Cameron has not been straight about just how close he was to senior executives at News International and it's time for him come clean about the extent of this relationship." It emerged on Tuesday that Mrs Brooks was lent a retired police horse by the Metropolitan Police for two years. The horse, called Raisa, was stabled at Mrs Brooks's farm in the Cotswolds from 2008 to 2010, before she was handed back to Scotland Yard. Despite sustained questioning from The Daily Telegraph since Tuesday, Downing Street had refused to say whether Mr Cameron had ridden the horse. At a press conference in Brussels, Mr Cameron finally made clear that he had ridden the horse with Charlie Brooks, Mrs Brooks’s race horse trainer husband, before the 2010 election. Does it matter that David Cameron rode Rebekah Brooks's horse? Yes, it is illustrative of his close ties to News International executives Yes but not that much, it was before he was Prime Minister No, it's just a horse VoteView ResultsShare This Mr Brooks, a columnist with The Sunday Telegraph, is an old friend from when the pair attended Eton public school. Mr Cameron said: “Let me shed some light on it. I have known Charlie Brooks, the husband of Rebekah Brooks for over 30 years, and he is a good friend. “He is a neighbour in the constituency, we live a few miles apart. I have not been riding with him since the election. “Before the election I did go riding with him. He has a number of different horses and yes one of them was this former police horse Raisa, which I did ride.” Mr Cameron apologised for failing to come clean earlier, when The Daily Telegraph first started asking questions. He added: “If a confusing picture has emerged over the last few days, I am very sorry about that. I think my staff have had to answer a lot of questions about horses.” The Prime Minister added that he was sad to learn that Raisa, who was given back to Scotland Yard in 2010, had since died. He said: “I am very sorry to hear that Raisa is no longer with us and I think I should conclude that I won't be getting back into the saddle any time soon.” Rebekah Brooks, the former Sun editor, was one of the only 12 people allowed to adopt a horse from Metroplitan Police Mounted Branch Top Gear presenter Jeremy Clarkson, a member of the so-called Chipping Norton set, had claimed that Mr Cameron had never ridden the horse in question. Contradicting Downing Street's confirmation that the Prime Minister did ride Raisa, Mr Clarkson told Chris Evans on BBC Radio 2: "I can categorically state that he never rode that horse. I do actually live there. It's all rubbish." Mr Clarkson, who writes newspaper columns for News International titles The Sun and The Sunday Times, was speaking before Mr Cameron himself admitted that he had ridden Raisa. "I saw that horse and it wasn't badly treated as some people were saying, it was beautifully treated, it was only there for a very short time and David Cameron never rode it," Mr Clarkson said. He added that he himself had never ridden it but Mrs Brooks "probably did and her husband did". After three days of refusing to say whether Mr Cameron had ridden the horse, aides disclosed on Thursday night that in all probability he did, although he could not be sure as he rode several of Mr Brooks' horses. One of the Prime Minister’s aides said: “It is highly possible that he was on that horse. It is likely that he rode that horse. He used a number of Charlie’s horses.” She also confirmed that it was possible Mr Cameron had also gone riding with Mrs Brooks, because he could not be “100 per cent sure” that he had not. The aide said: “He has no recollection of ever going riding with Rebekah Brooks.” The Daily Telegraph has established that the horse was lent to Mrs Brooks in 2008 following discussions with Dick Fedorcio, the Met Police’s director of public affairs. Raisa was returned to the care of Scotland Yard in early 2010, before the general election, and put out to pasture in Norfolk. She died a few months later. Labour MP Tom Watson said Raisa threatened to symbolise the cosy friendship between the key players embroiled in the phone hacking scandal. He told The Daily Telegraph: “This horse is becoming the symbol of this scandal. It shows how powerful media players and politicians got too close.”

Horsegate: I did ride Rebekah Brooks's police horse Raisa, says David Cameron Prime Minister David Cameron has finally admitted riding Rebekah Brooks’s ex-police horse, and apologised for three days of “confusion” about the affair. By Christopher Hope, Senior Political Correspondent The Telegraph 11:47AM GMT 02 Mar 2012 http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/phone-hacking/9118305/Horsegate-I-did-ride-Rebekah-Brookss-police-horse-Raisa-says-David-Cameron.html The embarrassing admission raises questions about the closeness between Mr Cameron and Mrs Brooks, the former tabloid editor who quit as chief executive of News International at the height of the phone hacking scandal last summer. It emerged on Tuesday that Mrs Brooks was lent a retired police horse by the Metropolitan Police for two years. The horse, called Raisa, was stabled at Mrs Brooks's farm in the Cotswolds from 2008 to 2010, before she was handed back to Scotland Yard. Despite sustained questioning from The Daily Telegraph since Tuesday, Downing Street had refused to say whether Mr Cameron had ridden the horse. At a press conference in Brussels, Mr Cameron finally made clear that he had ridden the horse with Charlie Brooks, Mrs Brooks’s race horse trainer husband, before the 2010 election. Does it matter that David Cameron rode Rebekah Brooks's horse? Mr Brooks, a columnist with The Sunday Telegraph, is an old friend from when the pair attended Eton public school. Mr Cameron said: “Let me shed some light on it. I have known Charlie Brooks, the husband of Rebekah Brooks for over 30 years, and he is a good friend. “He is a neighbour in the constituency, we live a few miles apart. I have not been riding with him since the election. “Before the election I did go riding with him. He has a number of different horses and yes one of them was this former police horse Raisa, which I did ride.” Mr Cameron apologised for failing to come clean earlier, when The Daily Telegraph first started asking questions. He added: “If a confusing picture has emerged over the last few days, I am very sorry about that. I think my staff have had to answer a lot of questions about horses.” The Prime Minister added that he was sad to learn that Raisa, who was given back to Scotland Yard in 2010, had since died. He said: “I am very sorry to hear that Raisa is no longer with us and I think I should conclude that I won't be getting back into the saddle any time soon.” Rebekah Brooks, the former Sun editor, was one of the only 12 people allowed to adopt a horse from Metroplitan Police Mounted Branch After three days of refusing to say whether Mr Cameron had ridden the horse, aides disclosed on Thursday night that in all probability he did, although he could not be sure as he rode several of Mr Brooks' horses. One of the Prime Minister’s aides said: “It is highly possible that he was on that horse. It is likely that he rode that horse. He used a number of Charlie’s horses.” She also confirmed that it was possible Mr Cameron had also gone riding with Mrs Brooks, because he could not be “100 per cent sure” that he had not. The aide said: “He has no recollection of ever going riding with Rebekah Brooks.” The Daily Telegraph has established that the horse was lent to Mrs Brooks in 2008 following discussions with Dick Fedorcio, the Met Police’s director of public affairs. Raisa was returned to the care of Scotland Yard in early 2010, before the general election, and put out to pasture in Norfolk. She died a few months later. Labour MP Tom Watson said Raisa threatened to symbolise the cosy friendship between the key players embroiled in the phone hacking scandal. He told The Daily Telegraph: “This horse is becoming the symbol of this scandal. It shows how powerful media players and politicians got too close.”

Sketch: Leveson grills the 'champagne coppers' Michael Deacon watches the latest events at the Leveson Inquiry into phone hacking and media ethics. The Telegraph By Michael Deacon, Parliamentary Sketchwriter 7:01PM GMT 01 Mar 2012 Ever wonder why you hardly ever see bobbies on the beat any more? The reason’s quite simple: they’re all too busy chomping lobster in celebrity restaurants. Or so you might have concluded from listening to the ex-Met policemen who appeared at the Leveson Inquiry today. John Yates, the former counter-terror chief, seems to have dined out more often than Michael Winner. Robert Jay QC took him through the many glamorous dinners listed in his diary while he was Assistant Commissioner. The Ivy, Scott’s, Scalini, Racine… All with his friends in journalism, most prominently Neil Wallis, then a senior editor at the News of the World. As in, the newspaper that the Met had been investigating – with strikingly little success – over phone hacking. Not that there was anything untoward about these fancy dinners, Mr Yates took pains to make clear: when he was with Wallis they tended just to talk about football. Harmless laddish fun. Work didn't really come up. Mr Yates wasn’t actually present at the inquiry – he was speaking via video link from Bahrain. He is not there, as you might have assumed, to complete a Michelin Guide to the Persian Gulf’s finest restaurants, but to oversee reform of the country’s police force. Sitting in a black swivel chair, staring out at the courtroom from a giant screen, he looked like a Bond villain about to announce his dastardly plan to destroy us all with a missile launched from his volcano lair. Mr Yates is not, of course, a cackling villain hell-bent on our annihilation, although even if he were I don’t think we’d need to worry unduly about his chances of succeeding. He spent much of the time squirming clammily, like an Edwardian youth accused of scrumping apples. “I know you’re cross, Mr Jay, but…” His most embarrassing moment came when it was revealed that the News of the World had ordered a female journalist to get a scoop out of him by “calling in all those bottles of champagne”. Mr Yates defended himself hotly. “That’s just a turn or phrase,” he protested, three times. Had he ever drunk champagne with that journalist? Mr Yates spoke carefully. “There may have been the odd occasion when a bottle was shared between several people…” Next in for questioning – this time in person – was Andy Hayman, who led the original investigation into hacking in 2006. Last summer, when Mr Hayman appeared before a select committee on hacking, one MP called him “a dodgy geezer”. Perhaps she was alluding to his broad Cockney accent and wideboy jocularity (“OK, beat me up for being upfront and honest!”). Today, though, we met a different Hayman. This one was quiet, earnest, bespectacled, and above all deferential. His evidence was “sir” this, “sir” that, as if he were a humble gamekeeper doffing his cap to the squire. “Thank you, sir… With respect, sir… My instinctive answer, sir… I can’t remember, sir…” All three of the ex-Met policemen questioned – the other was Peter Clarke, formerly Deputy Assistant Commissioner – agreed that while the original investigation was taking place they’d been so caught up with foiling terrorists that hacking seemed relatively trivial. “I feel terrible for the victims of phone hacking,” piped up ’Umble Andy ’Ayman, “but I’d rather be facing questions about that than about loss of life.” Terrorists must be kicking themselves. “I told you we should have sent them some champagne!”

Leveson Inquiry: John Yates' dinners and lunches with NOTW executives John Yates, the former Scotland Yard officer who twice refused to reopen the phone hacking investigation, enjoyed a series of previously undisclosed dinners, lunches and meetings with News of the World executives, the Leveson inquiry heard. By Mark Hughes, Crime Correspondent The Telegraph 4:15PM GMT 01 Mar 2012 http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/leveson-inquiry/9116231/Leveson-Inquiry-John-Yates-dinners-and-lunches-with-NOTW-executives.html Mr Yates was also the subject of an email sent from a member of staff at the News of the World to the paper’s crime reporter, Lucy Panton in which she was told to “call in all those bottles of champagne” she had bought the officer. Mr Yates resigned from the Metropolitan Police last year following criticism of his handling of the phone hacking scandal and scrutiny over his friendship with Neil Wallis, the former deputy editor of the paper who has since been arrested in the new Scotland Yard investigation into phone hacking. Yesterday it was revealed that Mr Yates arranged to meet Mr Wallis privately at least 10 times during a period of 16 months when the Met were being criticised for their failure to properly investigate the hacking scandal. The inquiry heard that Mr Yates only attended eight of these meetings but that the pair attended a further three football matches together, watching games involving Manchester United, Arsenal and Liverpool. However Mr Yates said he had never discussed the hacking case with Mr Wallis. The inquiry heard that the pair had dined and drank together at London restaurants Scalini, Scotts and Bar Boulud at the Mandarin Oriental. But that Mr Yates did not declare these meetings in the Scotland Yard hospitality register because they were private and not work-related, but they do appear in his diary. He said: “It was a private appointment, it was friends, it had nothing to do with policing at all, that’s why is says ‘private appointment’”. Mr Yates said that he met Mr Wallis because the pair were friends. He added: “I have always been completely open, he is a good friend. Certainly he was a good friend; I haven’t seen him for nigh on a year.” The inquiry was also shown an email from James Mellor, a member of the News of the World newsdesk, to Lucy Panton which mentions Mr Yates. The email, sent in October 2010, discusses a terrorism story that Mr Mellor is asking Miss Panton to enquire about. He suggests Mr Yates would know about the story. He writes: “Think John Yates could be crucial here. Have you spoken to him? Really need an exc [exclusive] splash line so time to call in all those bottles of champagne.” Robert Jay QC, for the inquiry, said that the email suggested: “Lucy Panton is plying you with Champagne. That was known about by James Mellor and the suggestion is that the favour needs to be returned.” Mr Yates accepted that he may have drank Champagne in the company of Miss Panton, but said: “It is a turn of phrase and no, I had not been plied with champagne by Lucy Panton and I think it is an unfortunate emphasis you are putting on it.” Miss Panton has since been arrested in the new Scotland Yard probe into allegations that journalists paid police officers for information.

Murdoch Jr flies away from trouble – but it may follow him to America US authorities expected to investigate NI's illicit practices as executive chairman quits to run father's TV business The Independent By Ian Burrell Thursday, 1 March 2012 James Murdoch severed ties with his father's stable of British newspapers yesterday as he resigned from News International following fresh revelations of a corporate cover-up of the company's involvement in phone hacking and bribery of public officials. Mr Murdoch gave up his position as executive chairman of NI only two days after a senior police officer gave evidence that the news organisation presided over a "culture of illegal payments" at The Sun. The Leveson Inquiry into media standards also heard on Monday that NI's chief executive, Rebekah Brooks, was being privately briefed by Scotland Yard on its original phone-hacking inquiry into NI when she was editor of The Sun in 2006. Ms Brooks, James Murdoch's immediate deputy before her resignation last summer, has been arrested and questioned by detectives working on the inquiries into hacking and bribery. Yesterday's resignation means that James Murdoch no longer has a responsibility for the company amid growing expectation of an investigation by American authorities into the illicit practices of News Corp's British subsidiary. James Murdoch, who remains as News Corp's deputy chief operating officer, will continue to have responsibility for international businesses including Star TV, Sky Deutschland, Sky Italia and BSkyB. Rupert Murdoch said of his son in a statement: "We are all grateful for James's leadership at News International and across Europe and Asia, where he has made lasting contributions to the group's strategy in paid digital content and its efforts to improve and enhance governance programmes." James Murdoch has had limited involvement in NI, which also publishes The Times and The Sunday Times, since he was promoted to a New York-based role in March last year. One well-placed source compared that move to "an SAS operation to remove a hostage from a vulnerable situation". Since then, James Murdoch was recalled to give evidence last July before a parliamentary committee on phone hacking, when he told MPs there were "no immediate plans" to create a Sunday edition of The Sun in place of the News of the World. When Rupert Murdoch flew to Britain to oversee last Sunday's launch of a new edition of The Sun, he pointedly left James behind and took his elder son, Lachlan, on a morale-boosting tour of the paper's newsroom. In his own statement yesterday, James Murdoch linked the birth of the new paper to his departure. "With the successful launch of The Sun on Sunday and new business practices in place across all titles, News International is now in a strong position to build on its successes in the future," he said. Since reopening its investigation into NI, Scotland Yard has arrested two dozen former and current members of NI staff. Deputy Assistant Commissioner Sue Akers told the Leveson Inquiry on Monday that the company financed a "network of corrupted officials". One former NI executive said last night: "The real story here is the cover-up and conspiracy that News International could be culpable of." The resignation of James Murdoch does not mean he will avoid Britain in future. As chairman of BSkyB he will attend board meetings of the satellite broadcaster and he retains an office at its headquarters in Isleworth, west London. The media analyst Douglas McCabe, of Enders Analysis, highlighted Mr Murdoch's talents as a television executive and said he would be "relieved" to concentrate on what he does best. "It is about distancing him from News International and from problems at The Sun but he maintains his wider roles," he said. "Within the broader context you have to remember that newspapers are a relatively small part of revenue and profits within News Corp as a whole." Since succeeding Ms Brooks as chief executive of NI last summer, Tom Mockridge, a News Corp veteran, has tried to cleanse the company's reputation at its headquarters in Wapping, east London. James Murdoch: His mistakes Gordon Taylor settlement Failed, according to his own testimony, to fully investigate the circumstances behind NI's decision to offer a £725,000 settlement to the footballers' union boss. The 'for Neville' email Denied claims by NOTW lawyer Tom Crone and editor Colin Myler that they told him about the "for Neville" email which confirmed voicemail interception had gone beyond a single "rogue" reporter. The 'smoking gun' email Claimed not to have read an email exchange sent to him by Mr Myler which suggested that hacking was "rife" at the NOTW. His aggressive denials Said the company had moved into "aggressive defence too quickly" when revelations were made about the true extent of hacking in 2010. The CV from: Harvard to the Leveson Inquiry 1995 Dropped out of Harvard just three terms into a film and history degree. 1996 Set up independent label Rawkus Records, launching the career of Mos Def. Sells the company to his father later that year. 1997 Appointed head of News Corp's music and internet strategy and chairman of the company's music label, Australia-based Festival Records. 2000 Appointed chairman and chief executive of News Corp's Asian satellite service, Star Television. 2003 Became the youngest-ever boss of a FTSE-100 listed company after being made chief executive of BSkyB at the age of 30. 2007 Became chairman and CEO of News Corp Europe & Asia, with direct responsibility for the strategic and operational development of the company's television, newspaper and related digital assets there and in the Middle East. March 2011 Took up the newly created post of News Corp's deputy chief operating officer, making him the third most senior individual in the media empire. September 2011 As questions mount over what he knew about phone hacking, James Murdoch resigns as director of News Group Newspapers Limited, publisher of The Sun, and Times Newspapers Limited. He then quits NI completely just six months later.

The Sun's defence editor, latest journalist arrested The Telegraph By Martin Evans 2:06PM GMT 01 Mar 2012 Virginia Wheeler, defence editor of The Sun, has been arrested by police investigating corrupt payments to public officials. Miss Wheeler, 32, was arrested by appointment and is currently in custody at a South London police station. She is the 23rd person arrested as part of Operation Elveden, launched by Scotland Yard to investigate allegations that journalists at News International had paid police officers and other public officials for information. Last month detectives launched a series of dawn raids detaining nine senior journalists from the Sun newspaper. A serving member of the Armed Forces, a Ministry of Defence employee and a Surrey Police officer were also detained. All have been bailed to a future date. A spokesman for the Metropolitan Police Service said: “Detectives from Operation Elveden have today arrested a 32 year old woman by appointment on suspicion of corruption under the Prevention of Corruption Act 1906 and aiding and abetting misconduct in a public office (contrary to common law) and conspiracy in relation to both offences. “She is currently in custody at a south London police station. This is the twenty third arrest as part of Operation Elveden.” The spokesman added: “The operation is investigating suspected payments to police officers and public officials and is not about seeking journalists to reveal confidential sources in relation to information that has been obtained legitimately.” Miss Wheeler has worked at The Sun for six years and last year was promoted becoming the paper's first ever female defence editor. She has reported from Afghanistan and Libya during her time in the role. Earlier this week Dep Asst Commissioner Sue Akers, who is running the investigation, told the Leveson Inquiry into press standards that police had uncovered “network of corrupt public officials” who had received tens of thousands of pounds from journalists. She said the investigation had uncovered a “culture” of corrupt payments at The Sun but added the majority of information traded was “salacious gossip” rather than stories in the public interest. Those already arrested as part of the probe include The Sun's deputy editor Geoff Webster, picture editor John Edwards, chief reporter John Kay, chief foreign correspondent Nick Parker, and news editor John Sturgis. Head of news Chris Pharo, 42, and Mike Sullivan, the paper’s long serving crime editor, along with former executives at the paper, Fergus Shanahan, 57, and Graham Dudman, were also detained. Their arrests led The Sun's associate editor, Trevor Kavanagh, to launch an attack on police, claiming his colleagues had been treated like "members of an organised crime gang". He described the investigation as a "witch-hunt" and suggested that free speech in the UK was under attack.

James Murdoch's ignominious exit from News International Disliked within News Corp and disgraced by the phone-hacking scandal, James Murdoch played corporate politics – and lost By Michael Wolff guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 29 February 2012 12.39 What's done is done – even if they don't yet acknowledge that it is 100% done. James Murdoch, hopelessly tarred by the phone-hacking scandal, exits his position as chairman of News International, the tainted News Corp subsidiary in the UK, and takes up, in his father's words, "a variety of essential corporate leadership mandates, with particular focus on important pay-TV businesses and broader international operations." Let us first dispense with that fig leaf: James Murdoch does not have a role at News Corp. He is the shadow man. Nobody talks to him – not even, at least not meaningfully, his father. (They once spoke two or three times a day, managing the affairs of their world.) His siblings shun or pity him. He has not existed as a force, and hardly as presence, since the meltdown of the News of the World last summer. And, to say the least, there is no possibility that he will inherit the top job. The reality is stark: everybody in the company blames James for the terrible things that have happened in London. They blame his father for falling under James's sway – but blame James more for swaying him. In a way, it's even starker than that: since he left the top job at BSkyB at his father's behest and took over News Corp's operations in Europe and Asia, James has become the most disliked man in the company. This is partly because, for all the obvious reasons, Murdoch's entitled children would breed a predictable resentment. But additionally, it is because James is an extraordinarily cold, abrasive know-it-all. "Who would have thought anybody could make Lachlan look good," said one of Murdoch's close executives, referring to the contrast between James and his brother Lachlan, who once was the heir apparent – and, in his moment, another headquarters albatross. But starker still, within News Corp, there is a structural analysis of why everything in London went so wrong – with James as the faulty linchpin. In his father's determination to elevate James, James Murdoch found himself with vastly more power than he should have had. He used it, as power-mad people are wont to do, to grab more power. He did this by pressuring his father to push out all the key executives – chief operating officer Peter Chernin, general counsel Lon Jacobs, communications chief and Rupert-right hand Gary Ginsberg – who, for so long, had so adroitly steered Rupert and the company. And they had had a tight hold on his ear – for Murdoch often tends to listen most to the last person he has spoken to. Thus, in the end, with everybody else gone, James was calling most of the shots. His was the strategic mind dealing with the meltdown in London. Or worse: his was the strategic mind that allowed Rebekah Brooks, the former Sun editor who became the CEO of News International, to be the strategic mind. And then, the Taylor payment: one News Corp view is that he authorised the vast settlement payment to Gordon Taylor, chief executive of the Professional Footballers Association, whose voicemail the News of the World had hacked – not so much because he was afraid of what Taylor might say, but because he thought any potential scandal might provide an excuse for American executives to take a greater oversight role of what was now his domain. James Murdoch was not trying to cover up the company's crimes – and it never quite made sense why he would. Rather, he was playing internal politics. Hence the smoking gun: his legal approach during his testimony before the British parliament this summer was the tried-and-true theory of "plausible deniability". If he carefully couched his testimony, then, ultimately, there would just no way of truly knowing what he knew. Except there was. In essence, the bureaucracy, in the form of Tom Crone, the company lawyer, and Colin Myler, the News of the World editor, whom James had implicitly blamed, rebelled – saying they had told him all. And they had an email to prove it. James's only defence was that he had not read it all. Plausible deniability gone. He should, of course, step down and out. Not be a distraction, until name is cleared, etc. He continues as an executive now because his father has great difficulties saying the obvious. And because James himself has determined that his personal interests are best served by staying on the inside and being able to pick up what scuttlebutt he can. The story, however, is not completely over. He will not be the chief executive of News Corp, or much of anything else, but even from jail, if that is where he finds himself, he will be one of four siblings who each control 25% of their birthright company.

CBS Evening News tonight (Feb. 29, 2012)reported that executives of News Corp., an American corporation, have been contacted by the FBI as part of an U.S. investigation into the Murdoch criminal enterprise. http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=7400525n&tag=contentMain;contentBody

If this tape has been posted before in the forum, I apologize as it just came to my attention.

http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=18822&st=0&gopid=247578&