(Tony Sifert, Headline USA) A new book on the Watergate scandal suggests that legendary Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein “hid the truth” about the media’s and CIA’s role in engineering President Richard Nixon’s downfall.
The exposé comes courtesy of John O’Connor, the San Francisco attorney who outed former FBI Associate Director Mark Felt as “Deep Throat” in a 2005 article published by Vanity Fair.
In The Mysteries of Watergate: What Really Happened, O’Connor argues that the June 17, 1972, break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters in Washington, D.C., “wasn’t really a Nixon job,” but rather “a CIA caper,” and that Woodward and Bernstein suppressed the truth in order to “bring down Nixon,” according to a review by FrontPage Mag’s Bruce Bawer.
The purpose of the break-in was not to discover political secrets, but rather to uncover “a prostitution referral service that was operating out of DNC headquarters,” O’Connor wrote.
The Washington Post—which, as Bawer points out, was “founded in 1877 as the official organ of the Democratic Part”—had no interest, however, in damaging Democrats, and decided therefore engaged in “a cover-up far more significant than Nixon’s.”
“It soon became clear to [Woodward and Bernstein] that the Watergate break-in had been a CIA operation,” Bawer wrote.
“Yet the Post . . . didn’t want to bring down the CIA,” he added. “It wanted to bring down Nixon.”
O’Connor’s analysis of the Watergate scandal can be read alongside a recent long essay in First Things, a publication by the Institute on Religion and Public Life. In it, political scientist Christopher Caldwell described the Watergate scandal as “regime change, American style.”
“Watergate introduced a new system for disciplining the country’s chief executive and a new balance of constitutional forces,” Caldwell wrote. “Impeachment [now] became a routine way of changing an administration.”
Caldwell also suggested that there is no such thing as “investigative journalism.”
“It does not begin with a journalist hunting down a source,” Caldwell wrote. “It begins with a disgruntled member of the power structure, eager to unload on his bureaucratic rivals, looking for a journalist to serve as an unwitting accomplice.”
