Free Republic

A new book shows that Woodward and Bernstein lied. And lied. And lied. I was a child of the Watergate generation. Vacationing at a lake house the summer I was 17, I spent weeks glued to the committee hearings on TV. Back in school that fall, I wrote a paper arguing that Nixon should resist pressure to resign. Headed south the next August, I watched Nixon’s resignation speech at a motor lodge on I-95 and the next day, on the highway, listened on the car radio as Gerald R. Ford declared “our long national nightmare” over. And then there was...

It has been fifty years since that momentous break-in at the Watergate office complex, and it seems a good time to revisit that episode, especially in light of the current abuses of power that seem so ubiquitous. Geoff Shepard's book, The Real Watergate Scandal and the just published book by Garrett Graff, Watergate, a New History, offer different perspectives. Shepard is more interested in the legal process and its abuse, while Graff's book relies more on the infamous White House tapes. It is the more comprehensive of the two. Here are some of observations based on these histories. *** Most...

... When Secret Agenda: Watergate, Deep Throat and the CIA was first published by Random House in November 1984 – more than a decade after the resignation and pardon of Richard Nixon – it presented such a large volume of new and revelatory information about a subject so widely considered exhausted that the book was greeted with the staggered astonishment typically reserved for apparitions. “If even half of this is true,” wrote J. Anthony Lukas in the New York Times Book Review, “Secret Agenda will add an important new dimension to our understanding of Watergate.” ...“But,” Lukas added, “it may...

A prosecutor who worked on the Watergate case against Richard Nixon 50 years ago said on Sunday that a Georgia election interference case is the most likely to send former President Trump to prison. “I think that’s enough. If you’re asking me which of the cases right now, which one is going to send Donald Trump to prison, that’s the case,” Nick Akerman told MSNBC on Sunday, referring to a January 2021 call between Trump and Georgia’s secretary of state.

Fifty years after the Watergate burglary that led to the downfall of US president Richard Nixon, Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward is still haunted by one question. "The unanswered question that pulses through all of this is 'Why?' Woodward said at an event at Post headquarters with his former reporting colleague Carl Bernstein.

Geoff Shepard, former deputy White House counsel for Nixon, has written three fabulous books that should forever change Americans’ views about Watergate — The Secret Plot to Make Ted Kennedy President (2008), The Real Watergate Scandal (2015), and The Nixon Conspiracy (2021). ... Shepard has also written a series of important articles on Watergate for The American Spectator. Shepard’s work has solidly built on the foundations laid by James Hougan’s Secret Agenda (1984) and Len Colodny’s and Robert Gettlin’s Silent Coup: The Removal of a President (1991). Shepard’s work shatters the conventional Woodward–Bernstein “history” of Watergate peddled by the mainstream...

With Friday marking the 50th anniversary of the Watergate break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters, Fox News Digital takes a look back at the media's fondness for invoking Watergate in its coverage of modern scandals. Throughout the presidency of Donald Trump, figures on CNN, MSNBC and other networks frequently referred to the infamous White House scandal that brought down Richard Nixon in their coverage of Trump, often saying what he was accused of was "worse than Watergate." From the Jan. 6 Capitol riot to the 2019 Ukraine phone call, to his handling of coronavirus and the sprawling Russia investigation...

The break-in at the Watergate complex 50 years ago today led to a sweeping government ethics overhaul that included a push to insulate the Department of Justice (DOJ) from politics. In a historical twist, this nearly half-century-old corrective may help frame the DOJ’s fraught decision over whether to criminally charge former President Trump for his effort to overturn the 2020 election results.

Every controversy of the last five decades, be it significant or small, has been distinguished by the the suffix '-gate,' a symbol of the lasting legacy of one of the greatest scandals of our time — Watergate. It all began 50 years ago today, on June 17, 1972, when a motley crew of five burglars, all with CIA connections, were caught breaking into the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee, then located on the sixth floor of a Watergate office building. The attempt by the Nixon administration to cover up the politically-motivated break-in would soon drag down Richard Nixon’s presidency,...

In their dogged reporting of the Watergate scandal, Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein uncovered the crimes that forced Richard Nixon to resign the presidency in August 1974. That version of Watergate has long dominated popular understanding of the scandal, which unfolded over 26 months beginning in June 1972. It is, however, a simplistic trope that not even Watergate-era principals at the Post embraced. For example, the newspaper’s publisher during Watergate, Katharine Graham, pointedly rejected that interpretation during a program 25 years ago at the now-defunct Newseum in suburban Virginia. “Sometimes, people accuse us of ‘bringing down a...

MSNBC “Morning Joe” host Joe Scarborough on Thursday touted the House Select Committee’s primetime hearings over the January 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol. Scarborough agreed with The Atlantic’s Caitlin Flanigan, who said she was as “riveted” by the hearings as her parents were with the Watergate hearings. The MSNBC host added he didn’t think the American people would care about the hearings but noted that the “numbers have been staggering.”

The Monologue Consider this one the powers that be in Big Government-Big Business don't want to create any more electricity generating capacity with fossil fuels. But these same powers want everyone to use electric cars. And they want to manipulate electricity production towards wind and solar. "A Nationalist Is The Same As A Communist"... The Police Unions Are A Powerful Force In Our Country-Ask Chesea Boudin... It Takes A Trudeau To Help Explain Watergate... Newsdump Alert: President Trump Endorses Katie Britt In Republican US Senate Runoff In Alabama Donald Trump getting in bed with Mitch McConnell this weekend not to...

Long-time Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward said on Tuesday that he plans to release a new audiobook based on 9 hours of a never-before-heard interviews with former President Donald Trump. "I'm going through, now, nine hours of Trump interviews I did, that were not published, we're going to put out an audio book, Simon & Schuster, of nine hours of Trump that we have never heard before," Woodward said on MSNBC's Morning Joe. "You see who this man is, what he cares about, the self-focus, the absence of being concerned about the people out there," he also said. "This is...

Nixon's Revenge It’s been a long time since Watergate. For its 25th anniversary, I wrote a book with Peter W. Morgan, originally titled Nixon’s Revenge, on one of Watergate’s most toxic legacies, the proliferation of “ethics rules” and ethics authorities that in practice do anything but promote ethical behavior in government. (The publisher chose a less-provocative title, The Appearance of Impropriety, instead, which I still think was a mistake.) But now 25 more years have passed, and I will not be producing another book. Instead, I offer a few thoughts on Andrew McCarthy’s 50th-anniversary retrospective. McCarthy’s central claim is that...

(CNN)Their mission was to break into the Democratic National Committee headquarters in Washington, bug the room and photograph documents. If everything had gone as planned, no one would have ever known. But instead June 17, 1972, became an infamous day. The burglary set off a series of actions that brought down Republican President Richard Nixon -- the only US president to resign. "Watergate is the largest political scandal in American history," John Dean, who was White House counsel to Nixon, told CNN for the Original Series "Watergate: Blueprint for a Scandal," which commemorates its 50th anniversary.

Barry Sussman, a key editor who helped oversee the reporting of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein as they covered the Watergate break-in, has died. He was 87. Though not as well known as the more flamboyant Washington Post executive editor Ben Bradlee, Sussman played an indispensable role in the paper’s Pulitzer Prize-winning coverage of the scandal that resulted in President Richard M. Nixon’s 1974 resignation. As the District of Columbia editor, Sussman was part of the story from the very beginning, when the paper learned of a break-in of the Democratic National headquarters at the Watergate complex in Washington on...

This June 17 will mark 50 years since five burglars were caught red-handed in the Watergate offices of the Democratic National Committee. We will be regaled once again with laudatory tales of the two intrepid cub reporters, whose dogged investigative work thwarted a determined cover-up by President Richard Nixon and his henchmen. *** The truth behind a separate troubling event did not emerge until Jeff Himmelman’s book Yours in Truth: A Personal Portrait of Ben Bradlee was published in 2012. He tells the story of his discovery of a seven-page Bernstein memo in Bradlee’s files, detailing Bernstein’s highly improper interview...

One of the bumbling crooks in the infamous Watergate Hotel break-in that set off the chain of events leading to the resignation of President Richard Nixon has died. Alfred Baldwin III, who later became a star witness for the prosecution against the rest of the burglars, died after a battle with cancer in January 2020 but his death was not made public until now. He was 83 years old.

Behind every great political scandal, there are players whose stories get shoved to the side by the first, second and even third drafts of history. “Gaslit,” overpacked but compelling, shoves back — though not quite hard enough. The actors traverse a wide variety of styles, from sardonic satire to raw sincerity. While that stylistic range can feel indecisive in some episodes, it’s an awfully good cast. With a deft balance of social cunning and justifiable paranoia, Julia Roberts takes the lead as “mouth of the south” Martha Mitchell. Her public statements regarding Richard Nixon’s ineptly corrupt administration helped bring down...

Fifty years after Watergate, a new limited series is revisiting the scandal that birthed “a lot of this widespread conspiracy theorist sentiment in the country,” its showrunner said in a panel discussion Tuesday. Based on the first season of Slate’s “Slow Burn” podcast, “Gaslit” centers the perspective of Martha Mitchell (Julia Roberts), the wife of former U.S. Attorney General John Mitchell (Sean Penn) who leaked the details of her husband’s dealings with former President Nixon.