Nixon had nothing to do with the break-in. So “why” is a stupid question.
He probably participated in the cover up.
> “50 years after Watergate, Woodward still wonders why Nixon did it
Nixon did it because there were (as now) deep domestic enemies inside the US government, the Media, and the two main political parties.
Nixon was not personally popular. He lacked the charisma of JFK. He was not inspirational.
He made some mistakes.
But there was no doubt he was a patriot who loved his country.
Patriotism and love of country took a backseat to the drop-in-turn-on-tune-out popular culture of the 60s. Ergo, Nixon was not “groovy.”
But there is one thing that surfaced recently that would have saved Nixon from his hurtful and disastrous 2nd term.
Geoff Shepard found out more than 40 years after the fact, that the Watergate prosecutors cheated and colluded with democrats to deny Nixon due process. This fact sealed Nixon’s fate. Had Nixon’s attorneys been given access to notes and records, as by law they should have been at the time, Nixon would have survived.
https://nypost.com/2021/12/04/nixon-defense-lawyer-geoff-shepard-says-watergate-prosecutors-cheated
50 years later, the records of the cheaters were finally released.
It would be like accusing someone of grand larceny and causing loss of job, instability, health problems, social removal and personal non grata status, then hiding the evidence it was all a setup.
Nixon fired people and secretly taped others because he needed to prove who the real enemies were. This is when Americans learned it’s not so much the crime as it is the cover up.
Trump learned not to follow Nixon’s fatal steps.
When Trump ran in 2015-2016, he knew, like Nixon before him, there were dangerous enemies of the American People abroad and within.
Trump mentioned repeatedly before he was elected that there people in power who did not have the best interests of Americans in mind. Trump knew he would be setup to be the next Nixon.
And today we see how Trump has so far outsmarted the evil axis in DC and Davos, and they are livid about it.
Embrace the Suck, Woodward!
The (com)Post is going through a self-congratulatory anniversary celebration of its role as a Deep State agent in bringing down a President.
Ignore this crap.
50 years later and he’s still trying to be relevant to anything and anybody.
Bernstein is the Post’s version of Joe Biden: an old crank trying to remain relevant.
I have no trouble recalling the vivid details of Watergate. It kept all of the soap operas off the air. I am not ashamed to tell you that it was only mildly interesting to a 21 year old and, looking back, not near as important as Bob Woodwood thinks it was.
Was Nurse Ratched wiping the dribble off Woodward’s chin when he supposedly posed the question?
Exactly
Woodward. Still trying to stay relevant.
The real reason, it now seems - if "Silent Coup" is correct - was that Nixon's lawyer, John Dean, was hiding an embarrassing personal liaison.
Dean's wife, Maureen Biner Dean, had been a roommate and close friend of a woman who headed a ring of Washington, D.C., prostitutes. That information was locked inside the DNC office.
"The real ops (operations) officer was Hunt; and his principal, the man who conceived and commanded the Watergate operation, was John Dean. John Mitchell and Richard Nixon had nothing whatsoever to do with it," Liddy said.
"In other words," I asked him, "if Nixon had known Dean's real reasons for the break-in, he would not have protected the `burglars' and the cover-up would never have happened?"
"That's exactly correct," Liddy said. "He would have flushed the whole thing right at the start. Mitchell would not have gone to jail and Richard Nixon would have retained his presidency."
Woodward, one act obsession!
It has been many years since I’ve read a serious survey of the literature. The last time I did so, probably 15-20 years ago, there seemed to be a consensus among the serious historians — as opposed to democrat hacks doing their usual thing — that Nixon probably didn’t know about the break in.
Occam’s Razor always suggested to me that this was correct. Nixon completely bungled his reaction to and long-term management of the crisis. The simplest explanation is that he didn’t know what he was dealing with, and he was being lied to by the people who did.
Has anyone read a more recent literature review that covers the state of play among real historians?
I do not pretend to any great expertise on the subject, but in my own life I have encountered three people, none of them professional historians but all of them sober, intelligent, politically savvy professionals, who took enough interest to actually read the infamous White House tapes. They all had the same reaction: the tapes make it abundantly clear that Nixon was in the dark.
The most adamant proponent of the call girl theory I’ve ever met was a very well-wired democrat operative who swore it was true. But he never told me his sources.
All the President’s Men screwed him. Muskie would not have beat Nixon. The break-in broke him.
Those two luckups need to just die already and go away. Watergate, Watergate, Watergate. Everything to them only relates in the context of Wategate.
The stumbled over a story handed to them on a silver platter and are still living that nonsense half a century later...
yeah.. I guess it’s a little interesting why Nixon felt the next for a little dirty trick.
But over 20 years later and I am still wondering why Bill Clinton felt the need to rape multiple women?
Maybe it’s just me.. but I am far more concerned about women being raped than political dirty tricks.
To find out where the democrats were getting their off shore money form.
Russia China?.
50 years later, and he still doesn’t understand even what he reported, much less the context.