Okay, so maybe Nixon shouldn’t have just resigned, but how did the CIA get the whole watergate thing to go down in the first place?
Nixon won 49 states. He was much better on viet nam than Johnson. They removed him why exactly?
Thanks to the revelations concerning Felt, the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s role in Nixon’s downfall is better understood. The Central Intelligence Agency’s role, however, remains mysterious. It was only one of several US intelligence agencies spying on Nixon and his officials, but Langley’s role in Watergate set it apart. As Hougan shows, it infiltrated and sabotaged “The Plumbers,” the covert unit responsible for the Watergate burglaries, run by several figures in Nixon’s re-election campaign committee with connections to the White House. It was the CIA that set in motion the events that forced Nixon from the presidency.
The CIA, the military, and other agencies spied on the White House because Nixon the president acted differently than Nixon the politician. As congressman, senator, and vice president, Nixon was a dyed-in-the-wool Cold Warrior. While this position earned him the ire of media and academic elites, especially when he exposed the treason of their darling Alger Hiss, anti-Communism was at the time a fairly conventional position within military and intelligence circles. In backing Nixon in 1968, his supporters in the military and intelligence communities thought they were getting a hawk who would stop trying to micromanage the Vietnam War and national security from the White House.
Nixon had other ideas.
Sometime in the mid-to-late-’60s, he had become a heretical anti-Communist. While Nixon wanted the United States to remain vigilant against the spread of Communism, in a series of 1967 articles, he recognized the limits of American power and wanted to avoid conflicts that weren’t in the national interest. Rejecting Manichean assumptions in foreign policy as a recipe for escalation and war, Nixon called for stronger economic and political ties with the Soviet Union and China and a legitimate acknowledgement of their interests as the preconditions for hard-nosed but effective diplomacy. Moreover, he opposed granting the intelligence and military bureaucracies more autonomy. Nixon had grown skeptical of their conformism, their inefficiencies and errors, and the way they shielded themselves from accountability and control by the executive branch.
To that end, he planned a grand course-correction to the way the US government operated.
The old,"Show me the man and I'll show you the crime" principle. If he didn't attempt to cover up the Watergate break-in, they would have gotten him on something else.
“how did the CIA get the whole watergate thing to go down in the first place?”
I’m not sure what Tucker’s particular theory is, but it’s an established fact that most of the Watergate “burglars” were CIA assets.
For one thing, Bob Woodard was a CIA Agent.
Yale, Navy Intel, aboard the USS Wright, and was one of two officers assigned to move or handle nuclear launch codes the Wright carried in its capacity as a National Emergency Command Post Afloat, the gets out of the Navy, accepted to Yale law but skips to be a journalist. Can’t get hired because he has no experience. Gets hired anyway at the Post.
Comes up with a deep throat source story which turned out to be an FBI agent.
The stinky CIA was all over this.
4 out of the 5 “burglars” were Feds - that’s how.