The Swamp by Eric Bolling

Author:Eric Bolling
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

10. FROM GREAT SOCIETY TO -GATE SOCIETY

When the president does it, that means it is not illegal.

—PRESIDENT RICHARD NIXON

I was eleven years old and in sixth grade when Richard Nixon waved from the steps of his helicopter on August 9, 1974, and his presidency came to a bizarre and rather shocking end. I worried about what this meant for the country. It tugged at my emerging conservative heartstrings. It was a sad exit for a presidency that had begun with law-and-order themes, vowing to oppose the moral chaos of the “counterculture” era. While I might not have fully understood what was going on, I did understand that the president of the United States had done something bad and dishonest. And that alone was both confusing and concerning for me. Hard to fully grasp, actually.

In 1968, Nixon had accepted his party’s nomination with the promise to end a troubled period in which “the nation with the greatest tradition of the rule of law is plagued by unprecedented lawlessness.” By November 1973, nine months before he left office, he was reduced to assuring Americans during a press conference that “I am not a crook.” (What an ironic twist of fate and history.)

Nixon was immersed in party-politics wheeling and dealing long before the Watergate scandal that led to his resignation. In an interview with Randy Dotinga, author Mark Feldstein recounts the events described in his book Poisoning the Press, whereby Nixon’s desire to have the 1972 Republican convention take place in San Diego may have led to both the Watergate break-in and an assassination threat. The International Telephone and Telegraph Corporation donated a whopping $400,000 to the convention—in return for asking that some antitrust litigation pending against the company be stopped. Columnist Jack Anderson (whom we met in the previous chapter) got his hands on a memo from an ITT lobbyist that outlined the plan, and it even contained the instruction “Please destroy this.” Anderson and others widely publicized the brazen memo. While some creatures in Washington lurk in the shadows of the Swamp and deal in hiding, others are bolder and many of them make the mistake of putting their illegal, unethical, or corrupt ways in writing. In hindsight, this type of quid pro quo would be deemed both illegal and unethical on every level. It is shocking that all parties thought they would get away with the scheme.

The scandal didn’t end there, though, since the confirmation of the quid pro quo contradicted false testimony given by both John Mitchell, Nixon’s attorney general, and Richard Helms, the director of the CIA, attesting that there was nothing fishy about the $400,000. The Nixon White House tried to squash the scandal by spreading the rumor that the lobbyist, Dita Beard, was a lesbian, hoping that would discredit her. In reality, Beard appears to have been a promiscuously heterosexual, hard-drinking, smoking, swearing tough cookie, and ITT may have rewarded her silence, says Feldstein, with a farm of her own in West Virginia.

The Republican Party was embarrassed enough by the ITT donation to move the convention from San Diego to Miami.

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