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2024-08-10 Caucasus/Russia/Central Asia
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Leonid Ilyich's Mistake: How to Make the US President Resign
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Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited.
by Dmitry Bavyrin
"There are people who hope that the President of the United States will give in to pressure and step down, but we are glad to note that you are not going to give them that satisfaction." With these words, conveyed in a 1974 letter through the ambassador, Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev tried to support Richard Milhous Nixon, who was being pushed to resign by the Watergate scandal.
The General Secretary valued his American counterpart as a co-author of "détente": Nixon, like himself, was sincerely afraid of bringing the Cold War to a hot Third World War. They talked a lot, drank together, almost trusted each other - there was a "spark" between them, regardless of the General Secretary's famous kisses. But Brezhnev miscalculated: Nixon was "left" after all.
Leonid Ilyich’s mistake is forgivable because it is common.
Few believed that one of the most popular, successful and powerful US presidents in history could be brought to heel. But in just a few months, Nixon had become a despised bigwig and antagonist who is still casually kicked around at home and who was only spared jail by a pardon from his successor.
Many colossi in history have fallen from conspiracies - sometimes exposed, more often suspected.
Behind the first and so far last voluntary resignation of a US president, which happened exactly 50 years ago, there still seems to loom the world government, the Masonic lodge, the powerful handful and other “real masters of America” who overthrew Nixon either for “détente” or for withdrawing troops from Vietnam.
But the thread in any case stretches back to unscrupulous toilet paper manufacturers who left their mark back in the distant forties.
While the Soviets were trying to stop the Nazi advance on Moscow, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission was working on another problem: Was the Red Cross brand of toilet paper intentionally misleading consumers into believing that its product was affiliated with the same Red Cross that helps the wounded? U.S. law prohibits that.
A young, ambitious official named Mark Felt was tasked with clarifying this issue.
After speaking with hundreds of consumers, he says he came to three conclusions. First, most Americans used toilet paper. Second, most Americans didn't like being asked questions about toilet paper. Third, he—a J.D. and former senator aide—was doing something wrong with his life.
With the Pipifax plot unsolved, Felt decided to change his life and applied to the FBI, where he was assigned to catch German spies.
He made a brilliant career, entered the inner circle of the Bureau's creator and the most influential person in the United States, Edgar Hoover, at some point even becoming his right hand. This allowed Felt, after the death of the patriarch, to become the heir to his files with compromising information on the Washington regional committee and the first deputy director of the FBI. However, he was not the director.
But Felt became a secret informant for The Washington Post, hiding for years under the pseudonym Deep Throat, thanks to whom a minor incident in the Watergate hotel complex became a national scandal and Richard Nixon's "Koschei needle."
He later explained this as an impulse of a lover of truth, which few people believe.
According to a more widespread version, Felt was taking resentful revenge for himself and for his father Hoover, who had a hostile relationship with Nixon, and the president took advantage of the director’s death to appoint his own man to head the Bureau, rather than Felt’s actual leader and ready-made successor.
The second version sounds logical, but there is a nuance.
Nixon appointee Louis Patrick Gray deliberately covered for Felt, who was in charge of internal security at the FBI and was looking for the source of the leak, that is, catching himself.
Moreover, Gray himself was ready to become Deep Throat for another newspaper, The New York Times, but the material about this was mysteriously not published.
At the same time, certain forces manipulated public opinion, successfully convincing Americans that they cared about what happened in Watergate.
But they didn't care: despite the scandal, Nixon was re-elected for a second term with an overall result of more than 60% and a clear victory in 49 states out of 50. This record has not been broken since then.
About six months before the election, a security guard at the Watergate office of the opposition Democratic Party called the police and reported a break-in for the purpose of robbery. For some reason, it was not the police who responded to the call, but FBI agents who, after searching the office, found a group of men with wiretapping equipment.
Hacking is a criminal offense, and two of the five arrested had ties to the Nixon campaign. But at first, the incident did not seem outrageous.
First, no one was hurt. Second, politics is known to be a dirty and spy-intensive business. Third, many believed that Nixon's opponent and Democratic candidate George McGovern was a crypto-communist who needed to be watched 24 hours a day.
But then the arrested men were allegedly identified as two of the three vagabonds - almost folklore characters who were seen near the site of Kennedy's assassination.
This version, which "took the covers off" the main political assassination in the United States in the 20th century, has been repeatedly refuted, but it riveted the nation's attention to the seemingly boring trial of the Watergate burglars. And Deep Throat's benefit performance began.
Then a former communications officer who handled the White House-CIA liaison testified that Nixon personally ordered Langley to wiretap Democrats. That was probably a lie, but the CIA is prohibited from engaging in domestic operations even at the president's direction, so Congress launched its own investigation.
By that time, Nixon was already a proven liar with the manners of a godfather, and the entire country was watching the trial of his consigliere, capos and soldiers.
Everyone knew that a special department of daring people had been created at the presidential election headquarters to "solve issues" in defiance of the law. These people had imagination and had huge plans, for example, to turn some Democratic party event into an orgy with the help of bribed prostitutes.
In the public mind, Nixon was like the fat spider at the center of this mafia web.
The real Nixon, wherever he was in reality, did not need all these tricks: he easily won the election in any scenario. A successful and powerful workaholic president, who rose from the bottom and traveled all over America - against the dull and too liberal pacifist McGovern, who was known as the Whiner and All-Winner and took as his running mate (as a vice-presidential candidate) a man with a tendency to manic depression.
Half a century has passed, and it is still unclear what benefit spying on losers could have brought to the presidential team, what the goals of this action were, what the calculation was.
The closest analogy to what happened in Watergate is the Soviet comedy Operation Y. They say about such performers that "drug addicts were recruited from an ad."
They couldn't install the primitive device the first time and sealed the bolt of the lock on one of the office doors with tape - so that it wouldn't slam shut. The tape was noticed and removed by a security guard, thinking it was a cleaning lady, but that same night the same bolt was sealed with the same tape a second time.
After this, the police received a request to arrest the robbers, but instead of the robbers, the FBI agents arrested the all-powerful Nixon's special group for especially dirty deeds, which went down in history as the "White House plumbers."
The head of the group was George Gordon Liddy, another student of Papa Hoover, a brilliant FBI agent in the past. He personally arrested especially dangerous criminals and organized the fight against the mafia in hopeless places in this regard, until he decided to go first into politics, and then to become Nixon's "plumbers".
Nixon himself called Liddy "the most dangerous man in America," but his first deputy, Howard Hunt, seemed even more dangerous.
Hunt served in the CIA for more than twenty years, was part of the Langley elite, and specialized in changing undesirable regimes. Sometimes it worked, as in Guatemala, sometimes it was disastrous, as in the case of the famous landing in the Bay of Pigs to overthrow Fidel Castro. The failure in Cuba cost the careers of both Hunt and his boss, the CIA director, "that same" Allen Dulles, who had a bad plan or no plan at all.
Both "plumbers" were brave, smart, experienced and even literary, only one worked as a "literary ghostwriter" for the FBI director, and the other for the CIA director. But fate brought them to Nixon's campaign headquarters as a kind of toilet paper, to plant McGovern's propaganda materials at crime scenes and to break into psychiatrists' apartments in search of dirt on their patients - the enemies of the "godfather".
The choice, then, is limited: either believe that a team of real James Bonds got screwed over by a piece of scotch tape, or believe what American conspiracy theorists believe - a plot that brought down Nixon when he began to take too much and give too little.
Conspiracy theorists seem like more sensible people in this situation, but there is a nuance - the chaos of everything that happened around Watergate.
The American elite is often accused of using the tactics of “controlled chaos,” but the chaos of Watergate would have been too difficult to manage. Nixon himself tried, but what began as a misunderstanding over duct tape became one of the greatest political disasters in Washington history as the president became involved in protecting “his boys.”
The Watergate scandal bore little resemblance to the subtle mechanism of a seasoned intriguer. Rather, it resembled the planting of a bomb that, when it exploded, naturally scattered everyone and everything around it, including the planters themselves.
Twenty-five influential people, including the Prosecutor General and the head of the presidential administration, went to prison because of their boss.
The vain Felt narrowly escaped their fate - he was identified, forced to leave "quietly", and then persecuted for his own dirty deeds in the FBI. The man who inherited Papa Hoover's archive with the secrets of the American elite squandered this inheritance, failing to extract any visible benefit from it, except for a pardon from President Ronald Reagan.
Liddy and Hunt are among those who saw the checkered sky - one for 52 months, the other for 33, but in the end both lived to be 90 years old each. This is, albeit indirect, but important evidence that there was no general conspiracy - the "pawns" of real conspirators do not live long.
Just before his death, Hunt, allegedly mistaken for a vagrant at the scene of President Kennedy's assassination, confessed to his two sons that he was involved in the assassination of President Kennedy.
True, by that time he was sick with Parkinson's disease, and those two were the "black sheep" in a large family - all of Hunt's other children and relatives accused them of wanting to hype (become famous and make money) on their father's fading age.
This example, even more than the toilet paper story, makes us think about how political life in the United States is actually organized.
Like a puppet theater, where unknown people pull the strings or even cut them, like ancient Greek goddesses of fate? Like a brain center of cunning intrigues, producing everything planned at the click of a finger - wars, revolutions, impeachments?
Or as a banal terrarium of like-minded people?
Outwardly, it is an almost diligent system, but inside, driven by pride, greed and other sins, ordinary people drown and set each other up, making unimaginable and expensive mistakes for everyone because of the belief in their undervaluation and exclusivity.
There is no consensus on Richard Nixon's America. But Joe Biden's America is definitely the third option.
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Posted by badanov 2024-08-10 00:00||
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Posted by Deacon Blues 2024-08-10 10:19||
2024-08-10 10:19||
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