Wake Up America!

Since World War II, the United States has become a screwed-up place where the presidents who have done the most good are the ones most demonized. Despite the ongoing effort of faux impeachment against President Donald Trump, still the most demonized of all presidents was Richard Nixon. Because of Watergate and his forced resignation, Nixon is held in disrepute and contempt by most people even today. Compared to the criminals that have occupied the oval office since Ronald Reagan, however, Nixon was quite an accomplished president and overall a pretty standup guy.

Nixon was responsible for all of our environmental protective legislation: The National Environmental Policy Act, the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the Clean Air Act, Earth Week, the Clean Water Act, and the Endangered Species Act. He was also perhaps the most knowledgeable president about foreign affairs that the U.S. has ever had. Those who worked with him would tell you how Nixon worked diligently to find solutions to improve the prospects for all of mankind. Nixon traveled widely and met and established valuable relations with leaders of many countries of the world. He understood, unlike the neo-conservatives who have dominated U.S. foreign policy since Clinton, that the conflict between the nuclear powers had to be resolved or the world was in grave danger.

Nixon initiated the arms control treaties with the Soviet Union and opened meaningful dialogue with China. Because of anti-communist neo-conservative influence in Washington, Nixon had to represent his negotiations with China as an opening of a wedge between the Soviet Union and China. The U.S. military/security complex saw these openings to be the beginning of a process that would end the very profitable Cold War. President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in part because he worked to defuse rather than intensify tensions with the Soviet Union as the Joint Chiefs and CIA demanded. The coverup report by the Warren Commission had been so badly damaged by the known factual evidence that it was not possible to follow up Kennedy’s assassination with having Nixon killed, so the CIA decided to assassinate Nixon politically using its asset the Washington Post.

“Watergate” was a burglary of an office in the Watergate complex, buildings consisting of condos, hotel, and offices by the Kennedy Center on the Potomac in DC. No one even today knows what the burglary was about. One claim is that operatives working for Nixon’s re-election thought that they would find evidence in a Democratic Party Watergate office of communist money funding the Democrats. G. Gordon Liddy, one of the Watergate burglars, claimed that they were looking for a call girl list in the Democratic office that had listed among the available prostitutes the wife of a legal adviser to President Nixon. It was purported that Nixon's legal adviser wanted the black book recovered and destroyed in order to protect his wife and his job. Various law suits erupted over Liddy’s claims, but Liddy won and survived the suits. Liddy said that the curious thing about the burglary was that some member of the team taped the locks open so that Watergate security would discover that someone was inside, but Liddy didn't know which member of the team set them up for discovery. (In 1999, I had occasion to serve legal documents at the Watergate Hotel to an upper floor office. Even twenty years after the Nixon debacle, every floor of the Watergate was still in lock down with two roving security guards per floor.)

Nixon knew nothing about the burglary. When informed of it, he thought that if he initiated an investigation the Washington Post would twist it in some contorted way to prevent his re-election. Nixon decided to ignore the incident until after his re-election, which turned out to be his big mistake.

News of the burglary got out, and Nixon’s “crime” was not the burglary but misrepresenting the date when he learned of it. The Washington Post turned this into lying to Congress and the American people. Nixon realized that someone was out to get him, but apparently did not realize at the time that it was actually the CIA. Consequently, he sought to use the CIA to stop the assault on his office when, in fact, the CIA was behind it.

Washington Post reporters Woodward and Bernstein were fed disinformation, which they used to create in readers’ minds that something very sinister was going on, directed by Nixon. There was never anything in their reports except ominous meetings with “deep throat” in dark and deserted underground parking garages at midnight that radiated danger. The effect of their stories was to cover Nixon in a cloak of evil as someone who might do anything. Nixon had no answer to this kind of demonization. At least Trump has Twitter when the CIA and its media agents tries to bury him in their orchestrated hoax of “Russiagate.”

In the 1970s, an erased 20-minute tape became evidence of Nixon’s guilt. Today Hillary Clinton can erase multiple gigabytes of information from computers and nothing happens. It all depends on who the military/security complex wants to get and who they want to protect – the perennial double standard of Washington insiders.

Essentially, President Richard Nixon was assassinated politically because his peace and disarmament policies were a threat to the military/security complex’s massive budget and power. It always comes down to a matter of following the money. Without communist enemies, real or contrived, there was no reason for such vast sums year after year to be poured into the military/security complex.

When President Reagan undertook to end the Cold War he also experienced resistance from the military/security complex. When President Trump announced that his aim was to restore normal relations with Russia, Russiagate landed on his head.

Nixon is also still hated by the liberal/progressive/left for the Vietnam War, even though this was an unwanted war he inherited from President Lyndon Johnson. President Kennedy had intended to withdraw the small U.S. force in Vietnam after his re-election. After his death, it was President Johnson who kowtowed to the military/security complex and built up the war to keep the money flowing and prevent the dominoes from falling. Nixon wanted out of the war, but refused to be the first American president to accept defeat and walk away from a conflict. The awful engagements that occurred under his administration, including Cambodia and Laos, were desperate attempts to create conditions that would allow the U.S. an “honorable” withdrawal. Needless to say, it is anything but easy to extricate the U.S. from a war; Obama said he was going to do it and Trump has continued the effort to withdraw from the wars the Bush regime started.

It was President Dwight D. Eisenhower who warned in 1961 about the dangers inherent in dealing with the U.S. military/security complex: “In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.”

Democracy requires an alert citizenry. Democracy fails when citizens are insouciant. A country with an inattentive population and a media hijacked by interest groups cannot hold government or those interest groups accountable. Ignorance and indifference are the greatest enemies of liberty. Our insouciance may be costing us our country. With the Constitution being ravaged during the past twenty years by the contrived “war on terror,” the outlook for America may indeed be at its nadir. The time is ripe for a great public awakening. Wake up America! It is high time to understand that the presidents that are vilified the most by the media and the entrenched establishment of Washington are generally our greatest advocates and the ones we need to be defending against all these muddled fabricated charges.

Adapted from the writing of Paul Craig Roberts