Posted on 03/06/2024 9:48:49 AM PST by ChicagoConservative27
When Clay T. (Tom) Whitehead arrived at the Old Executive Office Building on August 7, 1974, dressed as a cowboy, he surely didn’t want to run into Henry Kissinger. Whitehead was supposed to be on vacation in the Rockies, but a last-minute emergency meant he had to stay in D.C. “Well, you know, I got tied up for a little while,” he explained to President Richard Nixon’s powerful National Security Advisor. Kissinger, ever paranoid about being out of the loop, protested: “What is going on here? Something is going on here.”
What was going on had started three months earlier at Whitehead’s Georgetown home, and Whitehead had been keeping the secret ever since. It was a big secret, maybe Washington’s biggest secret that never leaked. Whitehead and three friends were planning for Gerald Ford’s ascension to the presidency, but nobody, not even the Vice President himself, knew what they were up to.
Fifty years ago, the country watched the dramatic final days of Richard Nixon’s presidency. The president, angry and possibly on the verge of suicide, had barely been holding on after the release of audio recordings that confirmed his integral role in Watergate—the bungled plot to break into the Democratic National Headquarters during the 1972 presidential campaign and plant listening devices. His fate seemed sealed, but nobody in the White House, including the vice president, was willing to publicly accept the inevitable end to his time in office. Even Nixon wavered on whether he’d resign.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonmonthly.com ...
Nixon resigned when the GOP Senate leadership told him they didn’t have the votes to prevent his removal.
What role people like Whitehead played in lobbying the senators might be an area worth exploring.
“audio recordings that confirmed his integral role in Watergate”
“confirmed.” True or false? News to me. If true, I think we would all have heard that recording many times. I conclude false and call B.S.
Beat me to it. There was no evidence taped or otherwise he set up the breakin. He was involved on containing the disaster. Woodstein and bernward made a career parroting info they got from the grand jury by way of an assistant director at FBI. Interesting even then the FBLIE was picking our presidents.
Yep Baker and O’Neill went up to the Whitehouse and told Nixon he either had to resign or hee would be impeached.
I remember the headline in THE STAR tabloid. In huge letters the tabloid said...
JEAN DIXON SAYS NIXON WILL NOT RESIGN!
This hit the news stands the day Nixon resigned. Jean Dixon was a popular so-called psychic at that time. Ten years later her publicity department tried to say she HAD predicted the resignation.
I will go further and say Nixon was setup. The Deep State got a worse deal when Carter got elected. They finally got what they wanted when Reagan won.
The Only Kept Secret in Washington
Agreed
Until Nixon was undone by Watergate, he had planned a major housecleaning of the federal government, including the FBI and CIA. Moreover, Nixon was telling staffers that the Warren Report was a fraud and that Kennedy was killed by a plot set in motion by LBJ and using in part CIA connected Cuban exiles furious over Kennedy's betrayal at the Bay of Pigs.
Watergate Committee staffers privately warned their bosses that Nixon's actions had precedents in prior administrations. At trial in the Senate, Nixon could have mounted a persuasive defense on the merits that might have saved his Presidency. In any event, such a defense by Nixon would have spilled many secrets that official Washington did not want exposed.
I didn't know until recently that Kennedy also betrayed the anti-Communists in another revolution--Vietnam--by ordering the US agents to assassinate Ngo Diem, the very popular, duly elected President of South Vietnam, who had been President of all of Vietnam before the Communist invasion.
After the invasion of the Communists from the North, Diem was the country's only proven leader, and was the brains behind the only military tactic that was working against the Communists: training and arming the individual towns (where the highly motivated locals knew the terrain) to defeat the invaders.
Makes you wonder which side Kennedy and his government were on.
Good thing they had presidential immunity back then
There were no promises of a pardon. Not true
There was no explicit promise of a pardon by Ford in return for Nixon’s resignation. Nevertheless, in the way of politics, Ford was induced to say privately that the country would be gravely injured by criminal charges against Richard Nixon and that Ford would use the pardon power to prevent that from happening. That was enough for Nixon. In the event, Ford was as good as his word.
More realistic and world-savvy men were astounded that Kennedy genuinely did not anticipate that the deaths of the Diem brothers were a near inevitable result of a coup. What did he think would happen?
Eventually, the US military under Creighton Abrams adopted an "enclave strategy" in which the South Vietnamese were trained and equipped to defend their rural countryside. This killed off the VC and the communist insurgency. Sadly, the Left in the Democratic Party then deliberately torpedoed that success by cutting off aid and letting the North Vietnamese mount a direct conventional invasion of the South for the win.
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