Watergate—Cracks in the Coverup

by William H. Benson

April 4, 2019

     Martha Mitchell was the flamboyant and outspoken wife of John Mitchell, Richard Nixon’s former Attorney General and then, in the summer of 1972, the head of Nixon’s re-election campaign. After police apprehended five burglars inside the Watergate Hotel in Washington D.C on June 17, 1972, Martha suspected that Nixon and her husband were involved.

     For one thing, Martha knew James McCord, one of the five burglars, because he had worked as her daughter’s bodyguard and her driver. Martha knew that McCord and Mitchell knew each other, and she had also overheard her husband’s phone calls. She put the coverup plan together before anyone else did.

     Martha said, in reference to her husband, “I love him very much. He loves me because I’ve stood up for him. But he is defending the president, who planned the whole thing. I’m under surveillance day and night. I’m no fool.” Martha’s loose lips terrified White House officials.

     Later that summer, a White House operative named Stephen B. King detained Martha for twenty-four hours in a hotel room in Newport Beach, California, and refused to let her have access to adequate food or to a telephone. She was hysterical and said that she was “kept a prisoner.”

     When Martha tried to call out for help, King yanked the cord out of the wall. When she tried to escape through a window, she cut her hand on the glass. When the doctor arrived to stitch her wound, he and King held her down long enough for the doctor to give her a tranquilizing shot in her hip.

     Once back at her home in New York City, she called a White House reporter named Helen Thomas and said, “They’re not going to get away with this, Helen.” She then wrote a letter to Parade magazine and revealed all she had endured in that hotel room.

     The White House proceeded to smear Martha’s reputation, saying that she was “insane,” “a gossip and a drunk,” that “she needed institutionalized,” and that no one should believe her tall tales. It was “a sexist campaign to discredit a woman who knew too much.”

     Martha did drink, she did spread rumors, she was hysterical, but she was right about Nixon. She said, “I will not let these lies be told.”

     After James McCord appeared before Judge John Sirica, and he realized that he may face a stiff prison sentence, he fired off a letter to the judge on March 19, 1973, and said,

     “There was political pressure applied to the defendants to plead guilty and remain silent. Perjury occurred during the trial in matters highly material to the government’s case, others involved in the Watergate operation were not identified during the trial, and Watergate was not a CIA operation.”

     Two days later, on March 21, 1973, John Dean III, Nixon’s legal counsel, confronted Nixon in the Oval Office and told him that “Watergate is a cancer on his presidency,” but Nixon refused to back away from his coverup.

     Dean said, “The day I told Mr. Nixon there was a cancer on his presidency was the day I met the real Nixon. I knew I had to break rank.”

     On April 6, 1973, Dean hired an attorney and pleaded for leniency in exchange for his testimony before the Senate Watergate committee. He later said, “Nixon thought I should lie for him. I should fall on the sword. I should go to jail, so he can continue to be who he wants to be. I didn’t see it that way.”

     For five days, beginning on June 25, 1973, Dean testified before the Senate committee. His prepared statement was some 60,000 words, and over 80 million people watched his testimony. He implicated himself, John Mitchell, and President Nixon in the coverup. Nixon denied each of Dean’s accusations.

     On October 19, 1973, Dean pleaded guilty to “a single felony county of conspiracy to obstruct justice and defraud the United States,” and the judge reduced his sentence to time served, four months.

     Who do you believe? A talkative woman like Martha Mitchell, a burglar like James McCord, a polished White House legal counsel like John Dean, or the President of the United States? At the time, Republican party loyalists believed Nixon, but others were convinced Nixon was lying.

     Ever since, mental health professionals have labeled those who appear and act delusional but speak the truth the “Martha Mitchell effect.”

     Martha and John Mitchell separated in 1973. It was rumored she threw her husband’s clothes out of the window into the street below. She passed away on May 31, 1976, at fifty-seven, of multiple myeloma, but she lived to see Nixon resign in disgrace on August 8, 1974. Her estranged husband served nineteen months in prison.

     In 2017, President Trump appointed Stephen B. King Ambassador to the Czech Republic.

     Next time in these pages, “Watergate—the White House Tapes.”

Watergate—Conspiracy to Coverup

by William H. Benson

March 21, 2019

     On June 17, 1972, police nabbed five burglars inside the Democratic National Party’s headquarters, in a sixth floor suite in the Watergate Hotel, alongside the Potomac River, in Washington D.C.

     On June 23, 1972, President Nixon met with his chief of staff, Robert Haldeman, who disapproved of the FBI’s investigation thus far to determine who had overseen and funded the burglary.

     To the President, Haldeman said, “The only way to solve this is for us to have CIA Deputy Director Vernon Walters call Pat Gray [the FBI director] and just say, ‘Stay out of this. We don’t want you to go any further on it.’” Nixon approved. “All right, fine,” he said.

     Thus began Nixon’s conspiracy to coverup his associates’ criminal actions.

     Nixon instructed the CIA to thwart the FBI’s investigation into a criminal case that would have implicated White House officials. According to historians and legal pundits, this conversation was Nixon’s “smoking gun,” an “abuse of presidential power and a deliberate obstruction of justice.”

     Also, Nixon’s personal attorney, Herbert W. Kalmbach, distributed “hush money. He “funneled over $200,000 to the five burglars and to the two men who had orchestrated the break-in, G. Gordon Liddy and E. Howard Hunt.” “Haldeman let Kalmbach use a $350,000 cash fund from the White House.”

     Late in June, Nixon’s press secretary Ron Ziegler dismissed the Watergate break-in as “a third-rate burglary attempt.”

     Then, when asked, Nixon’s former attorney general and head of Nixon’s re-election campaign John Mitchell, “denied any involvement with Watergate and disavowed any knowledge whatsoever of the five burglars.”

     On August 29, 1972, Nixon met with reporters at his San Clemente, California residence, and said that “an internal investigation into the June break-in revealed that no one on the White House staff, in his administration, or anyone ‘presently employed’ was involved.”

     On March 21, 1973, forty-six years ago this month, Nixon met John W. Dean III, Nixon’s young legal counsel, in the Oval Office to discuss the hush money that Kalmbach had paid thus far.

     Dean then delivered dire news to Nixon. “We have a cancer—within—close to the Presidency, that’s growing daily. It’s compounding.”

     Dean asked the president to consider Kalmbach’s hush money payments to the burglars, and then Dean delivered his punchline. “Bob [Haldeman] is involved in that; John [Ehrlichman] is involved in that; I’m involved in that; [John] Mitchell is involved in that. And that’s an obstruction of justice.”

     At that moment, Nixon could have stopped the coverup. He could have called in FBI agents, and told them what he knew, and when he knew it. He could have directed them to John Dean. Those actions might have saved his presidency, even though his associates may have gone to jail.

     Instead, that same day, Nixon discussed with Dean an additional payment to E. Howard Hunt, who was to appear before a judge in two days and receive sentencing. Hunt was now demanding another $122,000, in order to buy his further silence.

     Nixon asked Dean, “How much money do you need?”

     Dean replied, “I would say that these people are going to cost, uh, a million dollars over the next, uh, two years.”

     Nixon said, “We could get that. If you need the money. You could get the money. What I mean is, you could get a million dollars. And you could get it in cash. I know where it could be gotten. But the question is, ‘who would handle it’”

     Evan Thomas wrote in his 2015 biography of Nixon, “It is hard to explain this failure of judgment, the most critical mistake Nixon ever made. Favoring hush money over full disclosure was a moral lapse, regardless of whether Nixon had committed a crime, but the reasons for his actions are complex and not easy to sort out.”

     Thirteen months later, on April 30, 1973, Nixon appeared on television and again proclaimed his innocence. That day, he accepted Haldeman and Ehrlichman’s resignations, and he fired John Dean.

     Nixon said, “America, in its political campaigns, must not again fall into the trap of letting the end, however great that end is, justify the means. The easiest course would be for me to blame those to whom I delegated the responsibility to run the campaign, but that would be the cowardly thing to do.”

     Next time in these pages, Watergate—Cracks in the Coverup.

Watergate—Crimes Committed

by William H. Benson

March 7, 2019

     John Mitchell smoked a pipe when he served as Attorney General in Nixon’s White House, and also as chair of the Committee for the Re-Election of the President, CREEP, in 1971, leading up to the Presidential election in November of 1972. Two years later, after the public learned the truth about Watergate, John Mitchell called the blunders that he witnessed, “the White House horrors.”

     First, there was the Huston Plan. In 1970, Tom Charles Huston, a White House liaison, issued a 43-page secret report that suggested “black-bag jobs, break-ins, domestic burglary, electronic surveillance by wiretapping, and clandestine mail openings,” all to get dirt on Nixon’s perceived enemies.

     Huston warned Nixon that these were illegal operations, but Nixon wanted to use them. Mitchell convinced Nixon to revoke the plan, but still the President implemented certain of its provisions.

     In late June and early July of 1971, on four occasions, Nixon ranted that he wanted someone to break into the Brookings Institute and bring back a file that he believed would embarrass the former President, Lyndon Johnson.

     Nixon said, “You remember Huston’s plan? Implement it.” He further said, “I want it implemented on a thievery basis. Go in and get those files. Blow the safe and get it.” In the summer of of 1971, the President of the United States demanded that his associates commit a crime, breaking and entering.

     Then, there was the Plumbers Gang, a White House “Special Investigations Unit,” set up on July 24, 1971, to stop leaks, including Daniel Ellsberg’s submission of the Pentagon Papers to the newspapers. The Papers told a tragic story of the US’s misguided military war in Vietnam.

1. Gordy Liddy, an extreme right-winger, and E. Howard Hunt, an inept former CIA agent, joined the Plumbers Gang. On September 3, 1971, Liddy and Hunt flew to Los Angeles, broke into Lewis Fielding’s psychiatric office in Beverly Hills, and tried, but failed, to find Daniel Ellsberg’s file. “They wanted the file to defame or blackmail Ellsberg.”

     In August of 1971, Charles Colson, one of Nixon’s most loyal associates, prepared “an enemies list,” of twenty people that Nixon did not like, including Daniel Schorr and Paul Newman. On occasion, when Nixon ranted about his enemies, he demanded that the IRS initiate a tax audit on them.

     In January of 1972, Liddy presented to White House officials—John Mitchell, and a young legal counsel named John Dean III—a preposterous plan called Gemstone. Thirteen months later, Dean explained to Nixon what Liddy had proposed that day. Dean said,

     “So I came over and Liddy laid out a million-dollar plan that was the most incredible thing I have ever laid my eyes on: all in codes, and involved black-bag operations, kidnapping, providing prostitutes to weaken the opposition, bugging, mugging teams. It was just an incredible thing.”

     John Mitchell told Liddy that the cost was too high, but later the Attorney General approved a reduced version of Gemstone at a cost of $250,000.

     Then, there were the “dirty tricks,” that Nixon’s operatives played on possible Democrat challengers in the forthcoming 1972 election, against Edmund Muskie, Edward Kennedy, George Wallace, and George McGovern. They spread malicious rumors, found and tossed away the candidates’ shoes.

     The most consequential, but not the last, “White House horror” occurred at Washington D.C.’s Watergate Hotel at 2:30 a.m., on the morning of June 17, 1972. Police arrested five Plumbers Gang members—James McCord, Eugenio Martinez, Virgilio Gonzales, Bernard Baker, and Frank Sturgis—inside the Democratic National headquarters on the sixth floor.

     The five burglars were taking photographs of campaign documents and inserting bugs into the telephones. Their two supervisors, Liddy and Hunt, fled the area, once the police nabbed the five.

     Watergate was the tip of an iceberg of criminality. In 2012, Robert Woodward and Carl Bernstein wrote in the Washington Post, that “Nixon had turned his White House, to a remarkable extent, into a criminal enterprise.”     

     Judge John Sirica gave the five burglars and their two handlers various sentences, but G. Gordon Liddy served the longest term in prison, four and a half years.

     Daniel Moynihan, later a Senator from New York, described Nixon’s White House, “They were not berserk. They merely let themselves get involved step by step into something that got out of control, whereupon they tried to cover up and thereupon came catastrophe.”

     Next time in these pages, “Watergate—conspiracy to coverup.”

Spiro Agnew and “Bagman”

by William H. Benson

February 21, 2019

     News of two separate scandals rocked the White House and stunned the American people in 1973.

     The first was President Nixon’s coverup of his election committee’s burglary at the Watergate Hotel, and the second was Vice-President Spiro Agnew’s criminal scheme to accept kickbacks, actual cash payments, from contractors who Agnew had lined up to receive contracts for county and state and Federal government-funded projects: for roads, streets, water and sewer plants.

     The kickbacks extended back to the 1960’s, when Agnew served as Baltimore County’s Executive. Then, once elected Maryland’s governor, Agnew continued to receive cash payments, and when he moved into his office in the White House’s West Wing, bagmen brought him sealed envelopes stuffed with cash, outright criminal action.

     Agnew had no knowledge of and did not participate in the Watergate coverup, and Nixon was unaware of Agnew’s crimes until the spring of 1973, four years after the two entered the White House.    

     The American people may remember details about Nixon’s scandal, but they are vague about Agnew’s crimes. “Didn’t he resign for something?” Rachel Maddow, host at MSNBC, hopes to rectify that lack of clarity with her recent podcasts, “Bagman.”

     Maddow reveals the truth that Nixon’s Attorney General, Elliot Richardson, forced Vice-President Spiro Agnew to plead no-contest to one felony charge of income tax evasion, and to resign, rather than face a rock-solid case that included some forty counts of “criminal conspiracy, bribery, and extortion.”

     Agnew submitted his resignation to Secretary of State Henry Kissinger on October 10, 1973, on the same day that he appeared before a judge in a courtroom. Agnew though refused to admit any guilt.

     One wonders why Elliot Richardson agreed to accept a plea bargain for a lesser crime, income tax evasion, when the prosecutors had documents, testimonies, and hard evidence of bribery.

     Maddow reveals that the Attorney General’s first priority was to remove Agnew from the line of succession to the presidency, in case Nixon should face impeachment and removal. Few in the Justice Department, or the Federal government wanted Spiro Agnew sitting in the Oval Office.

     The heroes in Maddow’s story are three young Federal prosecutors in Maryland—Barney Skolnick, Tim Baker, and Ron Liebman—and their supervisor, George Beall, the Federal attorney in Maryland then. Their homework and evidence convinced Elliot Richardson of Agnew’s guilt.

     Rachel Maddow found another egregious detail, unknown until now. She listened to Nixon’s tape recordings, and heard Nixon, Agnew, Haldeman, and Ehrlichman form a plan to obstruct justice.

     These White House officials decided to ask George H. W. Bush, then the chair of the Republican National Committee, to approach J. Glenn Beall—George Beall’s brother and a Maryland Senator—to lean on George Beall and insist that he stop the government’s investigation into Agnew.

     Senator Glenn Beall took the high road and refused Bush’s request.

     After Agnew resigned, the Federal judge ordered Agnew to pay $160,000 in taxes on the bribes he had received but not included on his tax return. The judge also insisted that Agnew pay a $10,000 fine, but jail time the judge suspended. The bar association then disbarred Agnew from practicing law.

     And where did Agnew get the money to pay the taxes and the fine, after he had spent the bags of cash on “mistresses, sports cars, and jewelry?” A friend, Frank Sinatra, loaned him the money.

     Jonathon Baird, a columnist at the Concord Monitor—Concord, New Hampshire’s newspaper—listened to Maddow’s podcast and asked, “How does a corrupt government official under criminal investigation maintain his or her grip on power?”

     Baird answered, “On TV, I saw Roger Stone describe the game plan: ‘Admit nothing, deny everything, and counterattack.’ Stone was not the first in American politics to advocate such a game plan. Forty-five years ago, then-Vice President Spiro T. Agnew pioneered the modern plan.”

     Indeed, on the day Agnew appeared in court, he denied any guilt and blamed his accusers. In his 1980 memoir, “Go Quietly . . . or else,” he said, “it wasn’t shakedown stuff; it was merely going back to get support from those who had benefitted from the Administration.”

     In other words, he believed he was raising campaign contributions from those who had received state contracts. But, the truth was, it was bags of cash that he received, and not checks made out to an election committee.

     On August 9, 1974, ten months after Agnew resigned, in the face of almost certain impeachment, President Richard Nixon also resigned.

California’s Housing Crisis

by William H. Benson

February 7, 2019

     Last time in these pages, I discussed Michael Greenberg’s recent article in the New York Review on the plight of migrant workers in California’s central valley, Indians from Mexico hired to pick fruits and vegetables. In a second article published also last month in the New York Review, Greenberg discusses California’s lack of affordable housing.

     The statistics are disheartening. California now ranks 49^th in housing affordability. Only Hawaii is more expensive. Zillow placed the median price on a California home last July at $597,000, whereas the national median price is $218,000.

     Certain well-paid employees in Silicon Valley have given up on the thought of ever buying a house there and have opted to commute from two hours away, driving up housing prices “in Oakland to the north, Salinas to the south, and across the Coast Ranges as far east as Sacramento and Fresno.”

     It is sad but true, that only 30% of California households can afford the state’s median priced home, but in San Francisco only about 15% can afford the median priced home there. In Palo Alto, a suburb south of San Francisco, the median price on a home is $3,155,700.

     Yet, California, for all its wealth and high-priced homes, is one of the poorest states. Greenberg writes, “California has the highest poverty rate in the US.”

     Homelessness is rampant. Greenberg says that “the homeless colonize almost every public space: under freeways, in parks, in private lots whose chain-link fences have been cut and bent open. Pup tents and ripped plastic tarps are everywhere. Thousands more live out of cars or RV’s parked on the street.”

     A professor at the University of California at Irvine told Greenberg that “at least 10 percent of his students, at one time or another, sleep in their cars.”

     How did California get into this position, where employees and students lack affordable housing.

     The acronym NIMBY explains in part the underlying reason. “Not in my backyard” contains within it the drawbridge attitude, the idea that once someone moves into an unspoilt neighborhood, he or she should work hard to prevent others from entering after them.

     Greenberg writes, “In most localities homeowners have tight control over their neighborhoods and reject proposals for moderately priced multi-unit buildings.”

     People who subscribe to Nimbyism may want affordable development—apartments, townhouses, and condominiums—but elsewhere, not in their backyard.

     Then, there are others who fear the model of urban sprawl, the ugly type of development that gave California a bad reputation decades ago. Instead, they preach conservation, and then they point to laws that they use as a pretext to limit construction of housing for people of modest means.

     For example, in 1970, then Governor Ronald Reagan signed into law the California Environmental Quality Act, an act that promotes land use that protects the environment, but in recent years, Nimbyists have used “arcane provisions in that act to block high-density development that would reduce pollution and help alleviate the housing crisis.”

     Those who want to delay or block development file a series of costly CEQA lawsuits, but not because they wish to protect the environment.

     Then, in June of 1978, California voters approved Proposition 13, an amendment that froze property taxes, and allowed only a maximum 2% annual increase. If the property is ever sold, then officials can increase the property tax, but they are limited to just 1% of the sales price.

     As a result, owners of homes or commercial property are hesitant to sell, shorting the supply of real estate in the face of accelerating demand. This drives prices up.

     Because of Nimbyism and zoning laws, California cannot build enough affordable housing units.

     California state’s Senate Bill 827 “would have legalized apartment construction in area’s well served by transit,” including trains, buses, or subways, but California’s congressmen voted it down.

     In 2016, Governor Brown proposed to exempt affordable housing construction from the state’s crippling CEQA review process, but the congressman voted his proposal down as well.    

     Greenberg sees a little hope. He says that “At the very least, voters are likely to support an end to the tax freeze on commercial real estate.” He also suggests that California’s cities should look to Minneapolis, “which has eliminated single-family zoning in every neighborhood, and now allows for three units on plots of land where only one was permitted before.”

     Until the zoning laws change though, housing prices in California will continue to spike up.

California’s Farmworkers

by William H. Benson

January 24, 2019

     Michael Greenberg, reporter for the New York Review, examined California in two recent articles, the first in December on agriculture, and the second in January on housing’s high cost.

     In the first, he paints a stunning picture of agriculture in California’s San Joaquin Valley, a stretch of land “234 miles long and 130 miles wide,” with Stockton to the north and Bakersfield to the south.

     Greenberg writes, “Measured by yearly production, the San Joaquin Valley is one of the highest-value stretches of farmland in the country, and is dominated by large growers who preside over a labor force of migrant workers. A few hundred families own the land. Some own 20,000 or 40,000 acres.”

     The owners grow “raisins, table grapes, pistachios, almonds, tomatoes, fruits, garlic, cabbage, the clementines we buy in netted bags at the supermarket, as well as pomegranates.” All together those “few hundred families” receive annual gross revenues of about “$47 billion, more than double that of Iowa, the next-biggest agricultural state.” 

     One of the people whom Greenberg interviewed, Mark Arax, was blunt when he said that the valley “is like a Central American country. It’s the poorest part of California. There’s almost no middle class. To find its equivalent in the United States, you’d have to go to Appalachia or the borders of Texas.”

     Greenberg was surprised to learn that the farm laborers “speak none or very little Spanish, much less English,” even though “at least 80% of them are undocumented Mexicans.” Instead, they are “Mixteco and Trique Indians, from the states of Oaxaca, Sinaloa, and Gerrero, the poorest regions in Mexico.”

     One day in June, Greenberg visited a tomato field that the Gargiulo family owned, and estimated that “250 were working that day, almost half of them women, some of them visibly pregnant.” Each day the laborers work for five hours, “from 5 to 10 a.m., when the temperature rises to 113 degrees.”

     To protect themselves against exposure to pesticides, the workers wear “several layers of clothes: caps, hoodies, scarves, sweatshirts over sweatshirts, two pairs of pants, heavy socks and boots; only eyes and cheeks and fingers were exposed,” while the merciless sun beats down on them.

     The workers receive “73 cents for every five-gallon bucket they could fill.” Forced to stoop over to pick the tomatoes, “the Oaxacans went at it with dizzying speed. The younger workers filled two buckets at a time. In five hours, a skilled picker could earn between $75 and $85.”

     Once tomato season ends in October, “the laborers will move to the east side of the Valley to pick citrus fruits. With luck, a diligent field hand can find work for eight or nine months a year, and earn $20,000 to $23,000, before taxes.”

     Greenberg researched the amount of taxes that the workers received and discovered that, “In 2010, undocumented workers paid about $12 billion in Social Security taxes, money that accrued to the retirement benefits of American citizens—benefits those farmworkers will likely never receive.”

     Some Indians from Mexico have worked the fields “for at least a decade, have established families here, but live in terror of la migra, the Spanish word for the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Instant deportation or imprisonment would wrench them from their children.”

     Greenberg said, “Thousands exist in a cordon of terror.” Determined to stay and work, they evade ICE by watching for unmarked cars, and by avoiding all legal troubles, such as traffic violations.

     The farmworkers refuse to “allow their children to follow them into the fields, because of the heat, the physical toil, the pesticides, the low wages, and the feudal power of the growers.”

      Thus, fieldwork in central California, Greenberg explained, “is a one-generation job, and that means that a constant supply of impoverished Mexican immigrants willing to do the work is required, but those immigrants are not coming now.”

     “In 2000, when the border was far more porous than it is now, 1.6 million Mexicans were apprehended trying to cross into the US. In 2016, the number was 192,969. This reduction is due to  improved conditions in Mexico, plus the cost and fear of venturing across the border.”

     Immigrants do not steal farm labor jobs from American citizens. A farm labor contractor said that he “has never had a white, American born person take an entry-level job.” Another said that one day he hired “twelve citizens or legal residents, and not one of them lasted longer than a day.”

      Each week millions of Americans buy a bag of table grapes, another of tomatoes, or a netted bag of clementine oranges, but few understand the arduous and dangerous physical effort that a farm laborer exerted to pick that fruit from its stem. Yet, ICE wants to deport that laborer back to Mexico.