A 40-Year Conspiracy of Silence on Nixon

Gary North -

It was 40 years ago today that Richard Nixon climbed into a government-supplied helicopter that was about to carry him into private life. He raised both hands in the famous V-sign, which supposedly symbolized victory, but which marked the most important single personal defeat in the history of the American presidency.

Nixon over the next 20 years wrote his way back into a kind of grudging acceptance. He could always write, and he had plenty of time to write. The man who was more hated by Democrats than any other Republican, long known as tricky Dick, wrote his way out of trickiness, disgrace, and general resentment against him. In this sense, he probably had the most successful post-presidency of any American President. He pulled himself out of the deepest hole that any President had ever dug for himself.



I voted for Nixon in 1968. I had a very good reason for doing this: revenge. If national politics is not based on revenge, then it's based on nonsense. If you base your commitment to national politics on hope, then you are terminally naïve. But revenge is a perfectly good reason to vote for somebody, if you're trying to get even with a politician's enemies.
In 1962, ABC Television ran a program: "The Political Obituary of Richard Nixon." Wikipedia's article on Howard K. Smith is accurate.

After the 1962 mid-term elections, Smith presented a documentary entitled, "The Political Obituary of Richard Nixon" as part of his Howard K. Smith: News and Comment (1962--1963) television series. Smith referred to Nixon's "last press conference" after his disastrous losing campaign against Democrat Edmund G. "Pat" Brown, Sr., for governor of California. In that exchange, the former vice president famously told reporters that they would not "have Nixon to kick around any more." Smith included in the broadcast an interview with Nixon's longstanding nemesis Alger Hiss, a convicted Cold War perjurer.

I decided when I saw Hiss brought in as a character witness against Richard Nixon, that if I ever had an opportunity to vote for Nixon, I would. My motive was simple: to get even with Howard K. Smith. I also vowed that I would never do it again, and I never did.
The Watergate story is one of the most amazing stories in American history. It is amazing for at least two reasons. First, historians have never figured out why somebody on Nixon's staff ordered the break-in. What in the world did this person have in mind? What did he expect to discover in the Democratic Party National Committee's headquarters?
But the second aspect of it is, and has remained, the most amazing. We are told that Watergate illustrates the triumph of American democracy, because a sitting President was forced to resign. Nobody ever asks this question: "How did the government know which sections of the infamous Watergate tapes to demand from Nixon and his lawyers?" They were not granted access to all of the tapes. The tapes have never been released. They are still incomplete in terms of public transcripts and access. The government's lawyers could only request highly specific segments of specific tapes. They knew exactly which sections to subpoena.

January 8, 1973 from 4:05 to 5:34 P.M. (E.O.B.) a) at approximately 10 minutes and 15 seconds into the conversation, a segment lasting 6 minutes and 31 seconds:
b) at approximately 67 minutes into the conversation, a segment lasting 11 minutes;
c) at approximately 82 minutes and 15 seconds into the conversation, a segment lasting 5 minutes and 31 seconds.

How did they know? That question was asked a generation ago by Susan Huck, in the John Birch Society's American Opinion magazine. It was asked again by Gary Allen in his paperback exposé of Rockefeller. Yet no establishment historian or reporter, as far as I know, has ever asked this question.
I asked it when I wrote two articles on the Nixon tapes in 2005.

http://www.lewrockwell.com/2005/06/gary-north/how-nixon-was-taken-down
http://archive.lewrockwell.com/north/north384.html

Somebody deep inside the bowels of the White House had access to the tapes. This person leaked the exact position of the tapes to the government's lawyers. This was illegal. The government knew it was illegal. Any reporter with an ounce of sense would have known it was illegal. Any historian with an ounce of sense would have followed the trail back into the White House. And yet, 40 years later, nobody in the mainstream has done it.
When something this important sits under the nose of every full-time journalist and historian for 40 years, and no one picks up the trail, this testifies to an extreme lack of curiosity on the part of historians and journalists. It reveals, for all to see, that journalists and historians choose not to investigate, in depth, things that ought to be obvious, things that were judicially crucial, and things that they would rather not have the public think about.
Forcing Nixon out of office was not a triumph of democracy. It was the triumph of a mole inside the White House, the complicity of the courts at theft, and the self-imposed silence of the media.