Watergate Tapes: Thompson Was Nixon’s Mole

... and Nixon didn’t return the favor, calling Fred Thompson ”dumb as hell.” That shouldn’t stop Republicans, we’ve been saying that about George W. Bush for years.

Anyway, the Associated Press has given a listen to the Watergate tapes in the National Archives and is reporting that a then-30-year-old Fred Thompson served as Nixon’s mole in the Watergate hearings, not the dedicated patriot committed to uncovering the truth as has been believed. According to the transcripts, Thompson informed Nixon that the Senate committee looking into the Watergate break-ins knew of the famed secret tapes--the same tapes that would eventually lead to Nixon’s downfall. Thompson also agreed to work with Nixon to discredit star witness John Dean. Read, weep:

Publicly, Baker and Thompson presented themselves as dedicated to uncovering the truth. But Baker had secret meetings and conversations with Nixon and his top aides, while Thompson worked cooperatively with the White House and accepted coaching from Nixon's lawyer, J. Fred Buzhardt, the tapes and transcripts show.

"We've got a pretty good rapport with Fred Thompson," Buzhardt told Nixon in an Oval Office meeting on June 6, 1973. The meeting included a discussion of former White House counsel John Dean's upcoming testimony before the committee.

Dean, the committee's star witness, had agreed to tell what he knew about the break-in and cover-up if he was granted immunity against anything incriminating he might say.

Nixon expressed concern that Thompson was not "very smart."

"Not extremely so," Buzhardt agreed.

"But he's friendly," Nixon said.

"But he's friendly," Buzhardt agreed. "We are hoping, though, to work with Thompson and prepare him, if Dean does appear next week, to do a very thorough cross-examination."

Count me not shocked. Republicans have been trying to present Thompson as “his own man,” a person who is far different from the rubber-stamp loyalists who have dominated the party for the past 15 years. But I’ve known all along that Soft-n-Safe® is just SOS: Same Old Shit. Who else hires rubber stamp loyalists like Mary Matalin, Liz Cheney and George P. Bush to be his advisors? Come on, wake up and smell the Kool-Aid.

Anyway, in a sane world the tanscripts themselves would be damning. Of course, we live in an insane world at the moment, so I wouldn’t be surprised if we’re calling Soft-n-Safe® Mr. President in January 2009.

A Loss Of Personal Integrity

From today’s New York Times, a cautionary tale from Watergate figure Egil Krogh. It’s astonishing that we’ve forgotten the lessons of Watergate, but perhaps not surprising. I urge everyone to read the entire column (I don’t think it’s behind the Select firewall), but here are some pertinent excerpts:

In early August 1971, I attended a secret meeting in Room 16, a hideaway office in the basement of the Old Executive Office Building, across the street from the White House. Huddled around the table were G. Gordon Liddy, a former F.B.I. agent; E. Howard Hunt, a former C.I.A. agent; and David R. Young Jr., a member of the National Security Council staff. I was deputy assistant to the president.

Two months earlier, The New York Times had published the classified Pentagon Papers, which had been provided by Daniel Ellsberg. President Nixon had told me he viewed the leak as a matter of critical importance to national security. He ordered me and the others, a group that would come to be called the “plumbers,” to find out how the leak had happened and keep it from happening again.

Mr. Hunt urged us to carry out a “covert operation” to get a “mother lode” of information about Mr. Ellsberg’s mental state, to discredit him, by breaking into the office of his psychiatrist, Dr. Lewis Fielding. Mr. Liddy told us the F.B.I. had frequently carried out such covert operations -- a euphemism for burglaries -- in national security investigations, that he had even done some himself.

I listened intently. At no time did I or anyone else there question whether the operation was necessary, legal or moral. Convinced that we were responding legitimately to a national security crisis, we focused instead on the operational details: who would do what, when and where.

For you younger kids who don’t remember, the Pentagon Papers was a top secret Dept. of Defense report on America’s involvement in Vietnam from 1945 to 1971. It was filled with a lot of embarassing revelations, like how America had expanded its military activities with attacks on Laos and North Vietnman at a time when President Johnson was publicly promising not to expand the war. Their publication helped turn public opinion against the Vietnam War.

Sound familiar?

Then we have all the president’s men, set out to publicly discredit an administration critic by trying to obtain embarassing personal information--this time by breaking into the man’s psychiatric records. They are so wrapped up in what they are doing that they’ve convinced themselves this vendetta is in the interest of “national security,” not Richard Nixon’s ego.

Again, sound familiar?

The premise of our action was the strongly held view within certain precincts of the White House that the president and those functioning on his behalf could carry out illegal acts with impunity if they were convinced that the nation’s security demanded it. As President Nixon himself said to David Frost during an interview six years later, “When the president does it, that means it is not illegal.” To this day the implications of this statement are staggering.

.......

I finally realized that what had gone wrong in the Nixon White House was a meltdown in personal integrity. Without it, we failed to understand the constitutional limits on presidential power and comply with statutory law.

In early 2001, after President Bush was inaugurated, I sent the new White House staff a memo explaining the importance of never losing their personal integrity. In a section addressed specifically to the White House lawyers, I said that integrity required them to constantly ask, is it legal? And I recommended that they rely on well-established legal precedent and not some hazy, loose notion of what phrases like “national security” and “commander in chief” could be tortured into meaning. I wonder if they received my message.

I think we know the answer to that question.