GORDON LIDDY: MY GUARDIAN OBIT

My obituary of G Gordon Liddy, the Nixon plumber of Watergate renown, who after getting out of prison turned into a right-wing showman with considerable success, appeared in the Guardian on April 8th; it had already gone up online, and you can link to that here.

For once, this appeared almost exactly as I wrote it: I had not been given a word count, but after over-writing Larry McMurtry I set one for myself and tried to stick to the facts, ma'am, and hope the readers were adept at reading between the lines. I hit my own word count almost precisely, and everything went smoothly.

Looking at other obits, I was amazed at how often he was billed as the "Watergate mastermind". Let's face it, Watergate was not exactly a brains operation, and when I looked at much of Liddy's career, I saw a similar pattern, by which a certain amount of macho bluster and spotlight chasing overpowered his responsibility for a series of, shall we say, mess-ups. In a way, E. Howard Hunt (that first initial thing has been a right-wing pseudo-upper class trope for a long time) was similar: remember Hunt was a long-time spy novelist, and many of his CIA operations seemed planned as if they were fictions. The two of them paired was trouble in a clandestine specimen jar. 

Watergate was one thing I would have liked to go into in more detail, but that would be opening a pandora's box. You could look at my obit of James McCord, of the CIA's Special Research Staff (at the Guardian here --also my Last Words interview about him here) for a sense of some of  my feeling about the nature of the burglary itself...and also the idea that both Hunt and McCord were accused of being in Dallas the day of JFK's assassination. Jim Hougan, who at the time was the DC editor of Harpers, wrote a seminal book on Watergate, Secret Agenda, part of which surmised that the bungled burglary was a deliberate act by the CIA to weaken Nixon (there was virtually no chance he would lose the '72 election to McGovern), perhaps because of "the Bay of Pigs thing" as Nixon referred to it in the infamous White House tapes. It wasn't until after Liddy's obit had been published that I discovered he had been one of the people associated with Norman Mailer, Edward Jay Epstein and other "deep politics" researchers who called themselves "The Dynamite Club". The easiest way to discredit those who believe in conspiracies is to send them down rabbit holes which distract them from the real prize and also eventually may discredit them: I can just see Liddy doing that to the guys in this club.

I didn't see the need to expound further on Liddy as right-wing shock-jock, pitch man, and huckster: who knows? he may have believed his own shtick, at least superficially. He certainly believed his uber-mensch persona, which was probably as close to the real GLL as we will get. I take his autobiography Will with a grain of salt, but it still might have been interesting to go deeper into those "bund" roots in Hoboken, and the way he celebrated this in his later years. However, the idea of Nixon as the leader whose own will could power America "back" to greatness (in the face of hippies, anti-war and civil rights protesters and the like) was so demonstrably false that when it was resurrected in Reagan's kinder gentler return to the Disneyland 1950s or Donald Trump's much more visibly Teutonic MAGA mode, it was no surprise many Americans bought it both times, and Liddy was there to cheerlead every authoritarian moment,and like a vulture profit from it. 

JAMES MC CORD: THE LAST WORD INTERVIEW

My discussion with Matthew Bannister about Watergate burglar James McCord is online at BBC Sounds,
you can link to it here. It starts about 13:30 in, if you want to go straight there. I originally recorded it about a month ago, but given the two years it took for McCord's death to become public knowledge, that's not really a pressing problem. We go through the basics of the Watergate burglary and trial, the Bay of Pigs, and McCord's other CIA work (including covering up the death of Frank Olson, which I mentioned in my post about my Guardian obituary, here) but not included in the broadcast edit is the link with JFK's assassination, or as Richard Nixon put it, 'the whole Bay of Pigs thing'.

WARREN ADLER: THE GUARDIAN OBITUARY

My obit of Warren Adler, whose 50 novels included The War Of The Roses, from which was made a hit film, is online at the Guardian; you can link to it here. It should be in the paper paper soon. Of course the movie is what the hook for the obit was -- it's odd that such a successful and prolific writer should have such a low-profile output.

It is pretty much as I wrote it--but one thing was edited out. I have to confess I had never come across, in my time as a crime fiction reviewer, any of his Fiona Fitzgerald novels. They sound intriguing, and almost a natural for development on TV. I mentioned that, but what was cut out was the fact that the adapter is currently Eric Overmyer--who was the showrunner and adapter of Bosch (and was working on Man In The High Castle as well.) That would bode well.

In Adler's own biography, he mentioned that his classmates at the New School for Social Research included Marion Puzo and William Styron; when I wrote Thomas Berger's obit I recall writing the same thing. So I wonder if they ever overlapped, or if they somehow moved in different circles. I also wondered if Berger's The Neighbors (1980) might have been an influence on War Of The Roses?

Adler is good with set-ups, and it was impressive to me just how prevalent the theme of broken, dangerous or twisted relationships was at the heart of his books, whatever their genre. That he was such a devoted family man shouldn't surprise anyone, but making fiction out of the opposite, repeatedly, is something remarkable. I read a piece he wrote for the magazine of the American Association of Retired People, from which I drew that final quote, and it was very moving: told from a point of view of his own loss, you might say victimhood, and it seemed to me a cruel way of his having to go through what he put so many characters through.

It was also fascinating that, in his first career as a DC PR, he should have advised Nixon (on how he could win the Jewish vote) and been the man who gave the Watergate complex its name. Because of course the Guardian obit I had written just two days before Adler's was that of James McCord, leader of the Watergate burglar's, whose confession was the key to Nixon's being brought down. A strange bit of
synchronicity.

JAMES MC CORD: THE GUARDIAN OBITUARY

My obituary of the Watergate burglar James McCord went up on the Guardian online Sunday; you can link to it here. It should be in the paper paper soon. It is pretty much as I wrote it, as I went through it carefully with my editor to try to keep in on point to the Watergate saga and not digress too far into some of the other points of McCord's career. Thus there wasn't room for more detail on the deep background of Watergate, the relationship between Nixon and the CIA, and indeed the formal investigations: what they did and didn't approach and who indeed Deep Throat actually was. I will write more on this later, but after I talk about McCord on BBC Radio4's Last Word later this week.

The link between the Watergate burglary and Dallas is of course the biggest non-Watergate talking point. The placing of McCord in Dallas is double-hearsay, while Howard Hunt of course lost a libel suit when he was publicly named as being there on the 22nd of November 1963.

I should have brought up McCord's first big job with the Special Research Staff, which was cleaning up after the 1953 murder of Frank Olson at the Statler Hotel in Manhattan. Olson had been dosed with LSD a few days earlier in Maryland, as the CIA seemed to be worried he would inform on the 1951 incident in France involving an experiment with drugs--the deaths in the village of Pont Saint Esprit were blamed on rye bread and ergot. This was part of various CIA operations intended to use drugs as instruments of mind control and interrogation, as well as possible weaponisation. McCord helped ensure Church's death would be listed at suicide; the CIA#s MK-ULTRA program would resurface in the alleged brain-washing of Sirhan Sirhan.

ECHOES OF RIOTS, ECHOES OF AUGUST (1968)

The essay that follows is a sort of companion piece to one I wrote in March, 'Hey, Hey LBJ, What Did You Do 50 Years Ago Today', to which you can link here. There is, I think, much more to be said about those tumultuous years in the late Sixties, not only about how and why they succeeded or failed, or how they have been misinterpreted, but also about what they have to say to us who lived through them, and what they might say to young people today. I'm sure more essays will follow, but for now, here's a memory of that summer...

At no point in my life did it ever occur to me to congratulate myself for living through August 1968, but somehow I have now I managed to 'survive', to use the more self-sensitive 21^st century term, its fiftieth anniversary. Anniversary remembrance is symbolic, triggered by nothing more than mathematical convenience (years ending in zeroes) which appeals to our senses of order. But August 1968 was not about order, but chaos. As Chicago Mayor Richard Daley explained, on 29 August, after his cops had run riot through protestors at the Democratic Party's Presidential Convention, “the policeman isn't there to create disorder, (he) is there to preserve disorder”.

The Chicago convention riots may have been the high-water mark of political counter-culture in an America (the cultural high would come a year later), which was built around by two great political issues: civil rights at home and the war in Vietnam abroad. The latter was driving a new spike through the liberal political establishment which had already begun to re-order itself in the wake of President Lyndon Johnson signing the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts in 1964 and '65. Disaffected racist Southern 'Dixiecrats' still rallied to LBJ's waging of the war. But at the start of 1968 the Viet Cong's Tet Offensive suggested to America that LBJ wasn't 'winning' the war, and in February trusted news-anchor Walter Cronkite returned from Vietnam confirming that was the case. “If I've lost Cronkite, I've lost America,” Johnson said. 

In March, on my seventeenth birthday, anti-war candidate Eugene McCarthy came close to defeating incumbent President Johnson in the New Hampshire primary. On the last day of the month, Johnson realised his candidacy would divide his party, and announced he would not stand for re-election. My teenaged self, thinking I was now part of a triumphant revolution, celebrated. But the celebrations were premature, and short-lived.

Four days later, Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated in Memphis, and riots in cities across the country left 46 people dead. Protest increased. Columbia University students occupied campus buildings; but that paled in the face of French students sparking a general strike joined by some 22 million workers. Meanwhile, Robert F. Kennedy was trying to unify the opposition to LBJ's designated successor, Hubert H. Humphrey, whom many McCarthy supporters treated as an opportunist carpet-bagger. Yet in the same way King had, just before his murder, specifically linked the issue of civil rights to American conduct in Vietnam, so RFK seemed to be rallying King's constituency to anti-war coalition. Then, on 4 June, as he celebrated winning the California primary, he too was assassinated. Riots didn't follow immediately, but it's not unfair to see those in Chicago as a delayed by-product of that assassination, bringing white kids out on the streets the same way Rev. King's killing had brought out the black population in the cities.

August began with Nixon winning the Republican nomination, and new Defense Secretary Clark Clifford raising the number of US soldiers in Vietnam to its peak, 541,000. We watched again as European dissent got more real than ours; Soviet tanks rolled into Czechoslovakia to put an end to the Prague Spring. Surely there was something more we could do.

Thousands flocked to disrupt the Democratic convention, to stem the Humphrey tide that would ensure Johnson's war continued. But this was America; concrete action and coalition-building was subsumed into political theatre which played better on television news. Inside the convention, the winning of primaries proved to be less important than the wishes of the party bosses who ran the smoky rooms; the big party chief was John Bailey, from Connecticut, who'd given my grandad his marching orders for one term in the state legislature. Frustration overwhelmed those outside the convention hall, and then Daley unleashed the police. The cops, taking out their own frustration against what they saw as spoiled long-hairs untrue to their country, made the fatal mistake of including the reporters covering their attack among its targets.

Inside the hall, Senator Abraham Ribicoff, a Bailey protege from Connecticut, stood up and excoriated a lack of democratic process which led to “Gestapo tactics being used in the streets of Chicago”. Ribicoff was also Jewish, like my mother, so we watched him with a special pride. He had responded with great grace to a letter I'd written him when I was 12, asking about appointments to the Naval Academy. That was a much different me, I remember thinking, just as Mayor Daley was caught on camera cupping his hand round his mouth and shouted at Ribicoff. We lip-read what he screamed, which wasn't difficult. At least the 'you Jew bastard' part.

Protest had failed. August was over. Immediately after the Chicago riots, I was off to university to play football. My music was changing, with LP records and FM radio. I went off to college with the Buffalo Spingfield's final album, with The Band's first, with Al Kooper and Mike Bloomfield's Super Session. Those old compilations of two hits and filler which kept pop music profitable were yesterday's news, though Otis Redding's History, James Brown Live At The Apollo and Aretha Now had made my cut. John Coltrane's Impressions had somehow cracked my consciousness, which was ripe for being expanded. My hair, under the football helmet, grew. Eventually I even managed to jump onto the running board of the sexual revolution. But before that happened, it was now September 1968. Surely whoever won the Presidency would hear the collective cries of so many of us seeking an end to racial discrimination, an end to the folly of the Vietnam war.

History can tell you how that turned out. The trial of the Chicago Eight protest leaders would become America's greatest example of political theatre of the absurd. Nixon narrowly defeated Humphrey, helped by his 'October Surprise' which sabotaged LBJ's peace talks with North Vietnam in Paris. The Democrats would make new rules, increasing the importance of their presidential primaries, which would result in George McGovern, who had led the Kennedy delegates after Bobby's killing, wiinning the nomination in 1972. Nixon would defeat him in a landslide, despite the clues provided by the early Watergate reports. The Vietnam war would continue until it was lost; Nixon would continue until he was lost, and resign. The Dixiecrats would defect full scale to the Republicans, and a few years later Ronald Reagan would begin the shift of America's political paradigm to the right, as prophesied from jail by Nixon's campaign manager and Attorney General, John Mitchell.

It was still a great time to protest, especially within the protective walls of a small liberal arts college. Especially because even there you found chaos, division between black and white, left and right, straight and hip. It was obvious this would not be a French-style movement for change. It was also a safe time to lose oneself to the cultural revolution, but after Woodstock the following August, that too began to crumble into what became known as the 'me' generation. By 1970 even students, at Jackson State and Kent State, were being killed. Lives were there to be got on with. Some of us would be lucky enough to try to continue to protest. Eventually I would even vote for a presidential candidate who won. But that took decades. Back in August 1968 (was it really 50 years ago?) I would have told you change was in the air. Almost everything still seemed possible, especially if you were 17.

CIVILITY, TOLERANCE, NIXON, AND AMERICA: Michael Goldfarb's FRDH podcast

My friend Michael Goldfarb has posted an excellent essay on his FRDH (First Rough Draft of History) podcast. It's called Civility and the 'Paradox of Tolerance' and it's worth a 12-minute listen before you proceed here because I will be talking about some of its points (not spoilers, exactly). Anyway you won't find many people weaving together Newt Gingrich, Sarah Sanders' dinners, Karl Popper and the Sidney Lumet movie The Hill in such an entertaining, and chilling, fashion. You can link to the website here.

Back already? Michael's jumping off point was an essay in Politico, the Sporting News of False Equivalence, by Rutgers professor David Greenberg. As Michael says, Greenberg warns about the 'last time' the left got 'uncivil', pointing to a 1970's bomb explosion which killed members of the Weather Underground in New York. You can read the piece here if you must. How this equates to a mother berating former cabinet member and arch-grafter Scott Pruitt at his latest expensed dinner, or the owner asking Sarah Sanders to leave a restaurant, or diners forcing Mitch McConnell, in his mom jeans, to skedaddle from his night out, is only the peak of the piece's fatuousness. In terms of incivility we could point to the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy in 1968, Nixon's October Surprise, the Chicago Eight trial, Nixon's plumbers, Watergate, the intelligence scandals of the 70s, Reagan's October Surprise, Iran-Contra, militia bombing federal facilities or shooting it out with federal marshals, assassinations of abortion-providing doctors, and other acts of political incivility, all of which pre-date Newt Gingrich's arrival in Congress to fight the second civil war.

Michael and I have had this discussion many times: I like to trace the modern Republicans back to the Goldwater fiasco in 1964, but more importantly to the Civil and Voting Rights legislation which brought about a re-balancing of American politics. Formerly, each party had its moderate wing; the Dems also had the racist southern Dixiecrats, loyal to hating the party of Lincoln. The Republicans had the John Birch, Ayn Rand, cowboy money faction who got Goldwater the nomination. When civil rights brought black people the vote, the Dixiecrats moved swiftly to the Republican party: all the right-wingnuts were now in the same canoe. And yes, it took them until Gingrich, and the 1994 shut down of government, for them to begin to understand what they had.

You wouldn't get any of this from David Greenberg, and I knew why. 15 years ago or so I reviewed a book of his, Nixon's Shadow, for the TLS. The book was about the way Nixon was portrayed in media, and I criticised it for the mess of selective assumption, historical blindness, false equivalence, and twisted values that it was. The editor who commissioned the review loved it, but it was spiked by the then-editor of the TLS, who as it turned out was also an unreconstructed Nixon-supporter. They do survive. The review appeared in the estimable political magazine Lobster, but when I started this blog I reprinted it, and you can find it here. It will give a decent idea of why Michael found the Politico essay so irritatingly off-base.

We are living in an age of determinedly minority government. I am used to it in the UK, but in America
gerry-mandering, voting repression, and the onslaught of propaganda disguised as news had led Fintan O'Toole in the Irish Times to make a compelling case about seeing the growth of a fascist state.  You can find that here; it's worth a read.

Michael, through Karl Popper, asks how far we should extend tolerance to the intolerant. In 2016 I screamed in frustration as Obama sat still and allowed Mitch McConnell to sideline his nominee for the Supreme Court. I wanted him to force a Constitutional crisis, bring events to a head, stand up to the intolerant. As I read O'Toole, I was reminded I am reading a book called The Trial Of Adolf Hitler right now; it's about the Beer Hall Putch and the trial that followed, and it is all about the tolerance of those who didn't feel the threat about which O'Toole is writing.

Anyone listening to Michael quote Popper: "for it may turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument. They may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive" and not thinking of Trump, Fake and Fox News, has been living in a cave. The kinds of things like Greenberg's Politico piece are the other side of the coin, seeming rational, but encouraging a 'tolerant' acceptance of the intolerant. This must not be allowed to happen. 

ROBERT F KENNEDY, THE LAST CAMPAIGN: MY LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS ESSAY

My essay on the 50th anniversary of the RFK assassination is on the LRB Blog, you can link to it here. It's a little different from the one I originally wrote. Partly in layout: I led with the John Stewart quote, then explained who Stewart was. But mostly in detail: I went in to a little more description of the three assassinations I mention, to draw out their similarities, but I can understand why LRB wanted to keep
the focus tighter on the story of that campaign as well as the what ifs had Bobby not been murdered.

The RFK assassination is in many ways the most perplexing of those three. On the face of it, the evidence of conspiracy is the most obvious, but in most ways it remains the hardest to prove. I had started to write a separate essay recapping where we stand, and another drawing the parallels in the modus operandi in all three murders, recurring themes of conspiracy and cover up, as it were. But each time I got bogged down in the minutiae of what remains a conundrum for most people.

My suspicion of Bobby was real at the time. My lack of enthusiasm for Humphrey was just as real. By 1970, and in the wake of the student strike, the futility of protest began to tempered by what seemed democratic political progress; eventually George McGovern would use changes in the primary and convention process (spearheaded by his campaign manager, Gary Hart) to capture the Democratic nomination. McGovern was the man who had stepped forward to lead the 1968 delegates already won by Bobby; that he and Eugene McCarthy could never reach an accommodation that would raise a viable challenge to Humphrey is, in a nutshell, the most lasting legacy of Bobby's death.

McGovern's nomination in 1972 was probably the high point, or the last high point, of Sixties protest. McGovern, of course, would be trounced by Nixon in the '72 election; no October Surprise was necessary, though the Watergate break-in, like Russian interference in 2016, was swept under the carpet until well after the election results were known. When Nixon was finally toppled, there was no danger a McGovern would replace him.

I probably should also have added a line about the idea that Bobby was convinced his brother's killing had been the result of conspiracy. He would have known who the likely suspects were, and where to look for them and their accomplices. That in itself may have put the target on his back.

HEY HEY LBJ, WHAT DID YOU DO 50 YEARS AGO TODAY?

It was a Sunday, the 31^st of March fifty years ago, 1968. I was in my last year of high school, already halfway out the door to college. The Vietnam war was a concern, but knowing I'd been offered scholarships, and would spend the next four years deferred from the draft, it was not an immediate worry. On that quiet spring evening President Lyndon B. Johnson was about to address the nation on television. I was watching it alone, but I began to shout to my family once the import of his now-famous words sank in. “...accordingly, I shall not seek and I will not accept the nomination of my party for another term as your president.”

'We' had toppled a president! Eugene McCarthy's strong second place finish in the New Hampshire primary, backed by Vietnam protesters dubbed 'the Children's Crusade', had shown LBJ he would have to endure a battle to get what should have been, as a sitting president, an automatic nomination. Though he spoke of unity and his concentrating on finding a solution for the Vietnam War, those words rang hollow. I was celebrating. LBJ was a favourite of my grandfather, who was a long-time Democratic party hack. Ten years earlier Grandpa had come back from a 'Jefferson-Jackson' fund-raiser at which then-Senator Johnson spoke, and given me an LBJ-autographed programme. 'This man will be president some day,' he told me. LBJ fulfilled my grandad's prophecy, but now change was coming. Johnson would be gone. A war would be over.

Of course, that did not happen. Change came, but in none of the ways I'd anticipated. Johnson's crowning achievements in his brief presidency were the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Even as he stood down to 'unite' America, just four days later, Martin Luther King was assassinated, and the ensuing riots harkened a new era in the fight for racial equality. Robert Kennedy would enter the presidential campaign, running like McCarthy on an anti-war platform, but also as a potential civil rights healer. At the time I saw RFK as the cynical opportunist he had always been. Over time, I've come to re-assess my opinion, believing his conversion was real, spurred by King's move toward wider social activism. What we lost to two assassinations was no less than an opportunity for a racially unified anti-war movement for social justice. After RFK's murder, Johnson's vice-president, Hubert Humphrey, won the Democratic nomination at Chicago's bloody convention, then he lost narrowly to Richard Nixon in November 1968. 

The convention brought changes in the Democratic party that enabled George McGovern to win the party's nomination in 1972. By then I was 21, and he was the first of many losing candidates for whom I would cast my vote; he's still the one I believed in most whole-heartedly. Despite the Vietnam War, now four years deeper in to tragedy, despite the Watergate scandal, which was still years from being taken seriously by the mainstream media, Nixon trounced McGovern.

Immediately after Johnson's speech I wrote an anti-war poem, which was published in our very conservative local paper, the New Haven Register; my first published poem. I went away to college, marched against the war, went on strike in 1970 following the invasion of Cambodia and the killings at Kent State and Jackson State. I protested against the war and for Black Panther leader Bobby Seale in New Haven, when Yale President Kingman Brewster proclaimed the impossibility of a black man receiving a fair trial in America. I became a conscientious objector, and the draft missed me. I moved to Montreal anyway. Watergate came and went, as did, eventually, the war, and finally Nixon himself. All triggered by Johnson's withdrawal from the Presidential campaign.

Today, with America mired in perpetual war for perpetual peace, needing a Black Lives Matter movement to combat an epidemic of killings by the police, and with a president as shifty as Nixon but with none of his wisdom or integrity, I went back and through the miracle of the internet watched Johnson's full speech for the first time in fifty years. He seemed a more sympathetic figure now, trapped in the quagmire of Vietnam after sacrificing his Democratic party in his quest to achieve racial justice. A few years ago, when I wrote a review of the film Selma, I questioned whether it was fair to make Johnson the villain of the piece, especially when so many less ambiguous villains were available, starting with J. Edgar Hoover. Johnson's relationship with King was an uneasy one, but as another movie,All The Way, showed, he had to burn bridges of his own to get his Civil Rights legislation passed. He played a big-stakes political game, knowing what was at risk if he won, probably more than if he lost, and he did what he thought was right anyway.

LBJ may not actually have said 'there goes the South' in 1964 as he signed the Civil Rights Act into law, but that is exactly what happened: by 1968 the drift of the racist, fundamentalist, conservative Dixiecrats to Nixon's Republican party had begun. By 1980, when Ronald Reagan took the White House from Jimmy Carter, the transformation was complete: allied with the far-right oil men, military contractors, and western tycoons, the southerners could squeeze the traditional Yankee moderates within the Republicans: compromise with the hated 'liberals' soon became impossible.

Watching anew, I realised LBJ's speech was primarily about the divisions he saw growing in America. He began by speaking of divisive partisanship. Later he said “I will not permit the Presidency to become involved in the partisan divisions that are developing”. I paid no attention to those words at the time, but five decades later, they sound more prophetic than “there goes the South”. Johnson had been a consummate arm-twister in his time as Senate majority leader, a master of bending those on both sides to achieve some sort of compromise. Today, Mitch McConnell is as ruthless as any Menshevik; the threat of Tea-Party purists backed by Koch and Mercer money being enough to keep all but the bravest or most foolhardy Republicans in partisan line. America enters new, undeclared, open-ended wars, with a bi-partisan monotony of rubber-stamped support behind them. Bernie Sanders' 2016 version of the “Children's Crusade”, like McCarthy's in 1968, merely confirmed the weaknesses of the Democrat's chosen candidate, who nevertheless nearly won.

We know now that Nixon was conspiring with the likes of Henry Kissinger to sabotage the Paris Peace Talks to end the Vietnam War, on which Johnson was staking his withdrawal from partisan politics. We know Johnson knew about it, and thought it treasonous, but was afraid to take action against Nixon for fear he would be accused of doing just what he had sworn he would not do: play party politics with the war. The conflict in Vietnam would persist until 1975, when the ignominious abandonment of Saigon put paid to the whole false notion of 'peace with honour'.

By then, Lyndon Johnson was more than two years dead. It is hard not to conclude the failure of his sacrifice to achieve either peace or justice left him empty. What he would have made of America's electing a black president, then following by electing one who's facing accusations of presidential treason with Russia is beyond speculation. But thinking back to 1968, and watching Johnson's speech, so remarkably un-televisual, so devoid of spin in today's terms, is to see it in a different light. It rings true, with a sense of battered honesty about it. We don't get many politicians acting at all honourably these days. Thus history adds nuance my young self could not, makes LBJ a more sympathetic figure. I still have that autographed programme. I find it means more to me today. It holds up better than my poem.

ROGER AILES: THE GUARDIAN OBITUARY

My obituary of Roger Ailes went up at the Guardian online last night (link to it here). It is pretty much as written, but trimmed down somewhat; I wrote it on short-order, as it were. Had they given me more time, I would have made it shorter, to paraphrase Pascal (apparently; thanks to my friend Linda Arnold for pointing out he got there first).

One thing that should be noted: Ailes did not create Fix News; he created it as it now is, and he persuaded Rupert Murdoch to make the key business decision that propelled it forward: paying cable networks (which are generally monopolies in their areas in free market America) to carry Fox News. Instead of cable companies paying Fox per viewer, as was the case with most channels, Fox paid them to put the channel on air. Without that manoeuvre,  Fox News might have languished because cable operators figured CNN (and MSNBC) were all their subscribers needed.

This was an obituary, and not political analysis, but I would have liked to show a little more clearly the ways in which his influence is still felt, not only in the USA. In the UK, when we discuss the impact of Lynton Crosby on British politics, the chatterati always trot out his 'dead cat at the dinner table' quote. But years before, Ailes had explained what he called the 'Orchestra Pit' tactic: "If you have two guys on a stage and one guy says I have a solution to the Middle East problem and the other guys falls into the orchestra pit, who do you think is going to be on the evening news?" His faith in the shallowness of media was rarely, if ever, proven wrong; in a way the greatest irony of his career is that it began when he challenged Richard Nixon's assertion that television is a gimmick, yet he proved over and over again how right the Trickster was.

And of course when you watch Theresa May campaigning, as per Lynton, to small carefully selected crowds, answering vetted question from carefully selected journalists (Crosby trusts British journalists to be as clueless as Ailes felt the general public were in America), and repeating 'Make Britain Great Again', oh, wait, it's 'Strong And Stable' it's as if Ailes were driving the battle bus.

Which is not to lessen the impact he had on America. You can see it watching the coverage of Trump: television tends toward simplifying issues into a dichotomy: good/evil, black/white, but Ailes turned TV news into a zero/sum game. Viewpoints have their partisan networks (as long as they make money: post-Ailes MSNBC has danced around trying to place themselves at various times as opposition or not, 'liberal' or not) and the once-major network news programmes stand afraid to 'take sides' lest they alienate their shrinking audience, which is even older than Fox's. But Ailes brought them the attitude that fear attracts people to the safety of their screens: crime and natural disaster, once reserved for the local news in areas they affected, are now the stuff of network news, balanced by entertainment info-nuggets to keep you watching. Like most of those who influenced the true baby-boomer generation (born say 1946 through 53-4) Ailes was slightly older, and recognised the resentment at the heart of the majority of that generation who felt abandoned by the cultural changes that came as a result of various liberations.

They were not liberations Ailes fancied: he was very much of that previous era, and his harassment problems were very much an aspect of that. His America was Ronald Reagan's dreamy fantasy of 1950s television shows, stay at home moms in dresses and aprons, the relations between boys and girls being one of power and forbidden fruit. Because that was what he grew up in, and observed from a house-bound perch.

There is an exceptional bio-film to be made here. Would that Sidney Greenstreet were still alive to play the older Ailes. Young Roger is truly a sad story; when he bit through his tongue his father had to drive him in a panic to Akron, as Warren had no doctors able to deal with it. Ailes nearly died, not for the first time. His relation with his parents nevertheless seems distant, perhaps he was too much a burden, a disappointment. That he channeled this into creating a world that you could link to his childhood imagination, one in which those with power, like himself, were protected from all harm, is a powerful image.

None of this was new. We'd known the essence of the game plan ever since Joe McGinnis published The Selling Of The President in 1969, but we've pretended that the game plan doesn't exist, and the Beltway punditocracy has no reason to admit that it does. Political commentary in America now is all about performance art, the way politicians appear to deal with things. It is never about issues, because it doesn't understand those issues, and the last thing people who do understand what issues really mean want is for their audience to share that understanding.


Tina Brown tweeted yesterday that Ailes was a great producer and raconteur, and it was wrong to judge him solely on the sexual harassment charges. I agree. He should be judged on the impact the things he produced: political candidates (Nixon, Reagan, both Bushes, and behind the scenes, often with Giuliani, Trump) and political news. Though he was built like Goering, his legacy may well be as an American Goebbels, though luckily not in the service of a dictator.

ELECTION RIGGING IN AMERICA

Although Donald Trump's whining about a rigged election is obviously just a spoiled brat loser's ploy to play to his audience, and who knows, maybe incite armed rebellion. After all, most of the guns in America are owned by just a minority of Americans, and they overlap strongly with Trump supporters. Still it's hard to argue an election is being rigged before it even happens, unless of course you have some nefarious evidence. Which of course Trump doesn't have.

But while the punditariat waves the red white and banner of American democracy, it needs to be remembered that Election fraud is a tradition in American politics, going back at least as far as when the franchise was extended beyond land-owning white males (not to mention the disenfranchisement of slaves, while still counting as 3/5 of a person when determining the population, and thus representation, of a state. Big city machines, rural machines, intimidation by Jim Crow laws, gangs, klans, sheriffs and unions all influenced elections unduly. But I'll bet there isn't a TV pundit in America (under, say, 60) who's read either All The King's Men or The Last Hurrah. There isn't one under 40 who's seen either movie.

In 1960 Nixon did not challenge the incredibly close Presidential election result. We've heard that quoted repeatedly to point out the sanctity of 'the system'. However the Republican Party chairman John Sherman Cooper filed lawsuits challenging the results in 11 states. These were dropped when someone realised that whatever gains Kennedy had made in Chicago (thanks Mayor Daley) were actually surpassed by those favouring Nixon downstate. And that in most of other 10 states the challenge wouldn't hold up anyways.

Since 1960, aided by technology voter registration/polling has improved, and coupled with the decline of monolithic machine politics, that kind of fraud virtually disappeared. Well, until Florida in 2000. Again, Al Gore did not challenge the ultimate result--but Shrub Bush certainly did challenge it, in court, where his lawyers argued (and the Supreme Court, against all precedent and careful to ensure their decision could not alter that precedent, ruled by a 5-4 vote that Bush's right to be spared the uncertainty of not being President trumped the people's right to have their votes counted fully and honestly.Al Gore lacked the guts to challenge further, and note that after the election Gore was deemed to have 'won' Florida by every means of counting the ballots EXCEPT the one his lawyers were arguing be implemented! Note too the vote counting was actually stopped by a mob of Republican congressional staffers who stormed the offices where the recount was being held. But I digress...

Florida 2000 notwithstanding, the past 20 years have seen gerrymandering on a scale never contemplated in the 19th century. They have seen voting machines (Diebold) programmed to change votes, which is why most machines now must have a paper trail. They have seen systematic shedding of voters from the registration lists (55,000 in Florida in 2000 alone) under the guise of keeping convicted felons from voting. They have seen voter ID laws aimed at stopping the poor, racial minorities, and students from voting. They have seen voting machines removed from areas unlikely to vote for the party controlling the state government (Ohio, 2004).

That is the face of voter fraud in America. The actual number of cases of people voting illegally is in double figures. Literally...out of hundreds of millions.

And the guy who is running on behalf of the party that has accomplished most of the frauds listed above is going to complain the system is rigged against him? It's pure Karl Rove: attack the other side for what your own side's weakness might be. The guy who has received hundreds of millions of dollars worth of free publicity from the TV networks is going to complain the media is rigged against him? God bless Trump and God bless the United States of America.

THE CALIFORNIA PRIMARY: BACK TO THE FUTURE

It's the California primary! The Democratic party's nominee for President seems all but decided, with the votes of party insiders making the crucial difference. The insurgent faction of the party is being told to stand-down, to allow a candidate they see as part of the very problems they are protesting get down to battling a Republican candidate seen by many as a figure of revulsion. Yet the insurgents battle on, hoping that a big win in California might open up the party's convention, and their candidate might win were it contested. Ah, you think, Bernie Sanders' position is hopeless and he ought to quit before Tuesday's vote? But it's not Bernie Sanders I'm talking about, it's Bobby Kennedy. And today, of course, is the anniversary of his assassination in Los Angeles.

The analogy is not perfect, because it was not only Kennedy competing against the party's anointed candidate, he was competing also against fellow insurgent Senator Gene McCarthy. In those days primaries were few in number and not crucially important; even in some states that held them, the primary vote did not even bind the convention delegates who were chosen in the traditional manner, by each state's party 'machine'. Party delegates got to travel to the convention, carry signs, wear red and white and blue clothing, sing and cheer, and do what they were told by their state party chairmen. It was democracy in action.

Hillary Clinton, the party's presumptive choice now, is a good match for Vice-President Hubert H. Humphrey, the eventual Democratic candidate, while Richard Nixon was many things, but not many of them resembled the snake-oil hucksterism of Donald Trump. And it's highly unlikely that the eventual choice of a Democratic candidate this year will involve assassination or riot.

The 1968 Presidential race, like everything else in America then, was chaotic. Protests against the Vietnam war were reaching massive scale; the black inner cities were erupting in a series of riots, and the progress of de-segregation in the South, despite President Lyndon B. Johnson's steering the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act through Congress, was desperately slow. American politics itself was in a period of profound change, which Johnson recognised as he signed the Voting Rights Act into law: 'there goes the South.' he said. The Democratic Party had been maintained by an uneasy alliance of big city Northern machines and labor unions with so-called Dixiecrats, Southern segregationists whose states had, for a century, continued to fight the Civil War and ignored the Republicans, the party of Abraham Lincoln.

Johnson's landslide win over Barry Goldwater in 1964 had been based on his continuation of the legacy of John Kennedy, and the portrayal of Goldwater as a right-wing fanatic whose finger was not to be trusted on the nuclear button. The famous TV ad of the little girl picking flowers before a nuclear explosion ran only once, and didn't mention Goldwater by name, but it didn't have to. But Johnson's refusal to 'lose' the war in Vietnam saw him escalate the conflict and the American presence in it. In February 1968, Johnson watched TV news anchor Walter Cronkite report on Vietnam, highly critical of our involvement. 'If I've lost Cronkite I've lost Middle America,' Johnson told his aides. On March 12, in the New Hampshire primary, McCarthy's army of college students and anti-war activists emerged with 42 per cent of the vote. Johnson 'won' the state with 49 per cent, but the McCarthy faction had also lured 20 of the 24 delegates available. For a sitting President, this was a disaster.

Sensing LBJ's vulnerability, four days later Bobby Kennedy entered the race. Many McCarthy supporters never forgave RFK his opportunism; they pointed to Kennedy's similar behaviour in appropriating a Senate seat in New York, when everyone knew the Kennedys came from Massachusetts. Years later, Hilary Clinton faced similar accusations when she traded in her Chicago Cubs baseball cap for a New York Yankees one while winning a Senate seat in her newly-adopted state.

On 31 March in a speech suspending American bombing in Vietnam, LBJ shocked the country by announcing 'I shall not seek and I will not accept the nomination of my party to run for President.' I was in my last year of high school; just turned 17. I leaped from my seat in excitement: it was as if we had driven Johnson from office.

Vice President Hubert H Humphrey now became the presumptive nominee, with the backing of party bosses. Known as 'the Happy Warrior,' Humphrey, a textbook 'liberal' and party loyalist, was trapped in his support of the Vietnam war. He did not contest any primaries: in some states 'favourite son' candidates stood on behalf of delegations controlled by the party machines. And the battle between the insurgents became fierce. Kennedy's civil rights record helped him with minority voters, especially after the assassination of Martin Luther King on 4 April; he had the charisma and the Kennedy name to give black voters hope. Plus McCarthy was no tireless Bernie Sanders; lacking the drive to take his campaign on the road, his appeal was more to reason. Even so, going into the California vote McCarthy had won four primaries (Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts and Oregon) while Kennedy had taken two (Indiana and Nebraska), though McCarthy would take New Jersey and Kennedy South Dakota on the same day as California. Only in Oregon, Indiana and Nebraska had the two gone head to head.

But California on 5 June was the big prize and when the vote was counted Kennedy won with 46%, to McCarthy's 42. Despite having taken far fewer popular votes around the country, he now led McCarthy in committed delegates (393-258) though Humphrey and his surrogates still had a comfortable lead. Then in the early hours of 6 June, after a victory speech and a cry of 'on to Illinois' Kennedy was shot dead at the Ambassador hotel.

McCarthy would win Illinois, but the Democrats were now split into four pieces, and the insurgents' delegates won in primaries would never have been enough to out-vote Humphrey's, even had they been united. Perhaps Kennedy, riding a wave of primary support, might have convinced the convention that he had a better chance of defeating Nixon. But by the time the convention opened in Chicago on 26 August, Kennedy's support was split, only some of it sticking after Senator George McGovern picked up his standard. The Dixiecrats, who could back LBJ but were more suspicious of HHH, were facing challenges on the floor to their own delegations, many of which were still segregated. Meanwhile, outside the convention, the Youth International Party (Yippies) and Mobilization Against The War were organising a festival which soon turned into a riot, triggered when Chicago police beat a man who'd lowered the American flag in Grant Park.

The ensuing scenes of violence shocked America, as Chicago police seemed to run amok, even assaulting press on the convention floor. When Abraham Ribicoff, Senator from my state, Connecticut, rose to nominate McGovern, he said that with a man like him as president 'we wouldn't need Gestapo tactics in the streets of Chicago'. The television cameras caught Chicago mayor Richard Daley, hand cupped like a megaphone around his mouth, shouting at Ribicoff, and lip readers claimed he yelled 'sit down you Jew bastard'. In the end, Humphrey won the nomination by a wide margin, and went on to lose the election to Nixon, by a narrow margin in the popular vote but a wide one in the electoral college. This was thanks to Alabama governor George Wallace, running as an Independent, winning five states in the South away from Humphrey. Nixon's 'southern strategy' had been born, and soon the so-called 'solid south' would switch from being solidly Democrat to solidly Republican. Humphrey's only chance would have been a success in the Paris peace talks being held with the Vietnamese. But in what became known as the first 'October surprise,' Nixon's team, with help from Henry Kissinger, sabotaged the negotiations, promising the South Vietnamese they would get a better deal once Nixon was President. The Vietnamese were surprised when it turned out they were lying.

I still recall some former McCarthy supporters refusing to support Humphrey, arguing a Nixon win would bring the country to its senses. Instead, four years later, McGovern won the nomination as a result of a more democratic primary-driven process which he had been chosen by the party to develop. Even so, despite the deepening of the Vietnam quagmire, and the Watergate burglary, Nixon beat McGovern in a landslide even bigger than Johnson's over Goldwater just 8 years earlier. The country had turned full circle, but many would say the worst was yet to come.

Almost 50 years later, the process has been democratized even further, to the point where independent voters who don't identify as Democrats have a say in the choice of candidate. This may be unfair to the party faithful, or it may be a better gauge of how a candidate will fare in November with the independent voters who decide national elections. This is why the party bosses still hold the so-called 'super delegates' in the hole, to ensure an insurgent like a McGovern, whom they believe will lose, or worse, believe might win without their support, cannot get the nomination. The system, deeply entrenched, is designed to work, and after California Hillary Clinton seems likely to be declared the nominee. A Sanders shock in California, however, might persuade some super-delegates to question Hillary's electability, and consider whether the Democratic convention should actually be an open affair.

There has not been a seriously contested party convention since the Republicans in 1976, when Ronald Reagan narrowly lost a challenge to incumbent (but unelected) President Gerald Ford. Ford would go on to lose the election to Jimmy Carter, but much as I searched for parallels between them and Clinton/Sanders, I defy anyone else to find them either.

RICHARD SCHWEIKER, LIBERAL REPUBLICANS, AND JFK

Last week I couldn't get any papers here to take an obituary of Richard Schweiker, best-known as a liberal Republican Senator from Pennsylvania, but his career is fascinating for two reasons.First, he represents the last-gasp of the now virtually extinct 'liberal' wing of the Republican party. That wing, which was largely eastern, and which you might argue represented old Yankee money, was dominant in the party up until after the JFK assassination. They were the ones Time magazine idolised, and hence got a lot of respect in the household where I grew up, even though my parents were strict FDR Democrats.

Even the Republican rabid right, represented by Robert Taft of Ohio, was relatively moderate on social issues despite being vehemently anti-union and pro-business, while always pushing a militaristic foreign policy. The Republicans could occupy this political middle ground because the Dixiecrats, southern Democrats, were the far-right on social issues, specifically civil rights.

Goldwater's nomination in 1964 was the first break-through of the 'Cowboy', new-money: a more triumphalist greedy, defense-industry-dominated turn right. He lost heavily to LBJ, but Richard Nixon, basically an older-style Republican at heart, was brought along by that very new breed from California, and realised the southern states were there for the taking after LBJ got the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts passed. He approached this 'southern strategy' with coded reference to states rights, and by the time Reagan sought a second term, the 'solid south' was solidly GOP.

Schweiker was the prototype liberal Republican swimming against this flow. Although he inherited his family wealth (his liberal Republican counterpart in the state house in Pennsylvania, William Scranton, was also a child of inherited privilege) he possessed a keen social conscience, what the British might think of as noblesse oblige. The Republicans were full of them: Rockefellers, Chaffees, Cabots and Lodges, even Bushes. Representing some very wealthy Philadelphia suburbs as a congressman, then out-polling his party to win a Senate seat, he supported civil rights and Medicare, opposed Vietnam, and voted against Nixon's Supreme Court nominations of Haynesworth and Carswell, the Alito and Thomas of the 60s.

In 1976 Reagan, looking to balance the prospective Republican presidential ticket, announced Schweiker as his potential running mate. In this too-long running age of Don Ron's hagiography we forget Reagan started out as a 'liberal' and went with the flow of money and power to the right. Looking at Schweiker and the Great Prevaricator exchanging a reverse Republican high-five makes me think Richard Dreyfuss would play Schweiker in a bio-pic (with Will Ferrell or Dan Ackroyd as Reagan). But Reagan actually remained committed to some New Deal social programmes, just as Nixon had, which today's greed-is-good upwardly mobile tea partiers have pledged to destroy. They forget about his raising taxes, and his major recession too, but memory isn't a strong point with the wingnut right, fast becoming America's de facto centre. More on this in a moment.

The second key thing about Schweiker was that he and Gary Hart headed the Senate's Church Committee's investigation in the role of the CIA and FBI in the investigation of the JFK assassination, and their conclusions, that the agencies had deliberately lied to, withheld information from, misled and misdirected the Warren Commission, created a firestorm. I'd recommend reading Gaeton Fonzi's The Last Investigation (here's a link to my obit of Fonzi from the Independent in 2012). Schweizer had hired Fonzi, a Philadelphia journalist, as an investigator for the Church Committee; the book details among other things the interference by the intelligence agencies in the House Select Committee's JFK investigation which sprung from the Church and Pike reports. 

In May and June of 1976 Schweiker went public with his and Hart's conclusions. A few months later Vice President Gerald Ford, a Warren Commission member who was later shown to have been leaking the commission's workings to the intelligence agencies, managed to hang on to his party's nomination; he lost to Jimmy Carter and four years later when Reagan ran, Bob Dole was his VP. I'm not suggesting a conspiracy, though we all know what happened to Gary Hart's presidential aspirations.

By coincidence, or not, Schweiker's voting record moved significantly to the right for the next four years, and in 1980 he did not contest his Senate seat. In 1981 Reagan appointed Schweiker secretary of Health and Human Resources; for the next two years he enacted many of the cuts Reagan had promised to Social Security, welfare, Medicare and the like, but can be said to have held them back from the draconian measures Reagan's backers were expecting. He left in 1983 to become head of the American Council of Life Insurance, a typical game-keeper to poacher move in the Beltway.

Ironically, Schweiker's Senate seat was taken by Arlen Specter, on the surface another 'liberal' Republican (he switched from Democrat to Republican in 1965, then switched back at the end of his career in 2009 while facing severe threats from the right--he then failed to get the Democrat nomination for the Senate in 2010). Specter's voting record had always been firmly on the Republican spectrum; you might say he played a liberal to placate an electorate used to voting for liberals. But more telling, given Schweiker's principled stance on the JFK assassination and the intelligence community, Specter's greatest claim to fame is that as counsel to the Warren Commission he invented the 'magic bullet' theory to explain away the idea that Kennedy and John Connally were hit, as Connally believed, and as the Zapruder film strongly suggests, by separate shots. If that were the case, there would be too many bullets for one assassin to have fired. Specter's stroke of genius saved Warren and has sparked criticism and argument for the past six decades. You might argue, in our post-Santorum era, the Keystone State deserves another Schweiker.

JOE MCGINNISS: THE GUARDIAN OBITUARY

My obituary of the journalist Joe McGinnis is in today's Guardian, and online (you can link to it here). McGinnis is an important figure on two fronts: The Selling Of The President 1968 might be said to have iniated the era where politics morphed into a dog and pony show for television, and where political journalism (particularly that of broadcasters) became dedicated to showing politicians were not as good at performing as the so-called commentators. Obviously this was not necessarily McGinnis' intention, and the moves to 'democratise' the system, moving it away from bosses in smoke-filled rooms to primaries and
'super Tuesdays' exacerbated this. But the sad truth is the revelations in McGinniss' book did nothing to stop the Nixon landslide in 1972, and the '72 campaign produced a number of classic bits of political new journalism, not least Hunter Thompson's Fear And Loathing On The Campaign Trail.

I would have liked to go into more detail (I did slightly, but I over-wrote the piece and it did need to be trimmed somewhere) about McGinniss actual path as a journalist. To an extent he followed the classic romantic path--huge success young followed by leaving the trade to write a novel. Dream Team was very revealing, not least in terms of the breakdown of his first marriage, a topic he returned to more journalistically in Heroes.

The move to true crime may have come about by chance, but again he was ahead of the curve, and Fatal Vision can be said accurately to have opened the floodgates for true crime genre. It became a sort of mini-franchise for McGinniss: the similar titles, the accumulation of access, the sometimes controversial conclusions (in Cruel Doubt, for example, the step son and his two friends accused of the murder were said to have been influenced by an addiction to playing Dungeons and Dragons).

I never bought Janet Malcolm's theses, first that McGinnis was somehow beyond the moral pale--but it is easy to look at The Last Brother as some kind of revenge against Teddy Kennedy for having been McGinnis' hero back in the Seventies. In that he reminds me Boston sportswriters, from Ted Williams' nemesis Dave Egan to today's Dan Shaugnessy, who possess a kind of urge to cut heroes down to size coupled with a very Irish sort of revenge gene.

The other side of Malcolm's argument was that there wasn't any definitive truth, a sort of structuralist excuse that doesn't quite work in the case of a murder trial. McGinniss may well have betrayed Jeffrey MacDonald's trust--was he justified by a honest belief in his guilt, or did he, as Erroll Morris suggests, try to bend things toconvince himself and us of that guilt? One thing that was lost in the obituary was the suggestion that MacDonald's story of a hippie house invasion was very similar to the Manson family's Tate-LaBianca killings, which had just happened.

Finally, as I mention, McGinniss came full circle with Rogue, whose major point may be that today politicians are somewhat smarter about allowing access. Its subtitle was Searching For Sarah Palin, and in a way it was another kind of return, if you look at his fourth book, Going To Extremes, as being a self for himself. But in writing Rogue, McGinniss became almost a parody of himself: he knew full well that Palin was a marketing construct whose selling would put Nixon's to shame, but he was denied the kind of access that had made his career in both The Selling Of The President and Fatal Vision. So he rented the house next door, and in effect issued an invitation to Sarah Palin to welcome him in. That, of course, never happened, and McGinniss was reduced to repeating the same kind of gossip that passes for online journalism in today's politics.

Of course the main irony was that Palin's selling to America was being orchestrated by Roger Ailes, now head of the 'fair and balanced' Fox News, the same Ailes who built Nixon in 1968, and whose cynicism and contempt for the electorate were made clear in that book. It makes you wonder what might have happened had not McGinniss instinct and Leonard Garment's naievite not come together, or Jeffrey MacDonald's trust not been so misplaced, or had the OJ Simpson trial, in which Simpson's defense was another exercise in marketing, but one to whose access McGinniss was denied, not turned out differently. Would McGinniss have been a different, or better political columnist, or a superior sports writer, as he later books suggest he could easily have been? Or indeed something more?

THE LONE CRAZED PRESIDENT: POST CELEBRATES WATERGATE'S 40TH ANNIVERSARY

The Washington Post had scooped the world's press on next Sunday's 40th anniversary of the Watergate break-in, just as they did with the story itself 40 years ago. Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward offer a fascinating catalogue of some of the ways they conclude that 'Richard Nixon was even worse than we thought'; you can link to that piece here.

But the retrospective is even more interesting for what it doesn't discuss, which is motivation. Exactly what was it that made Richard Nixon so sensitive to leaks and things that might slip out of the White House and be revealed? What were the things Nixon needed to protect? And who ordered the break-in?Answers come there none.

At the risk of being labelled a conspiracy theorist, which is about the worst thing the mainstream media can call someone suggesting larger forces might be at work in American politics (remember the derision of Hilary Clinton's reference to a 'vast right-wing conspiracy' against her husband? That sure proved far-fetched!). But Woodward and Bernstein (and even more so Woodward in his series of insider books about American politics) have always avoided any consideration of 'deep politics'-- something particularly unusual given Woodward's own background in Naval Intelligence. Now Robert Redford has announced he's going to make a documentary about Watergate, with Woodward (whom he played in the movie) and Bernstein coorperating, and I can only think that this Woodward thesis is about to be reinforced for the post-literate among us.

Of course the 'great man' approach to history remains a valid one,within its limitations. But what Woodstein are presenting, 40 years on, is an even more graphic account of Richard Nixon as the presidential equivalent of the 'lone crazed assassins' who have stalked American politics for at least the past 150 years. As I pointed out in my book about Oliver Stone, it's irony at the highest level that America's highest-profile conspiracy theorist should make a movie remarkably sympathetic to Nixon and his psychological flaws; the difference being that Stone never took his eyes off the bigger picture, and was thus better prepared to see him in the context of forces operating around, if not beyond, his control.

The Post article makes much mention of Nixon's anti-Semitism, and the ambiguous place of Henry Kissinger in his administration. But it contains zero discussion of Kissinger's role in Nixon's October Surprise. Nor is there any mention of, among others, Howard Hughes, Donald Nixon, the Mafia, Bebe Rebozo, Cartha DeLoach, or Pepsico. And what exactly was his concern about 'the whole Bay of Pigs thing' which the White House tapes reveal? Exactly what were the Watergate burglars looking for?

Beyond Nixon himself, there are still basic questions about the whole Watergate affair, and even more about the Post's coverage. What was the true role, and motivation, of Deep Throat? Was Mark Felt the only source, or was DT an amalgam for others? What role did Woodward's own history with Naval Intelligence play? And let us not forget that, although Nixon did eventually resign (leading to that wonderful cover of Rolling Stone, headlined cuttingly: The Quitter) the whole Watergate issue was swept under the carpet by the media during the 1972 election campaign, which was an almost total sweep of America for Nixon. That is the legacy we need to remember.

COLSON REDUX: THE DOROTHY HUNT KILLING

When I wrote Charles Colson's obituary for the Guardian (link here, or check the IT piece linking to it last month), I had mentioned to them a few conspiracy theories I avoided for their benefit, the most prominent of which was the death in a plane crash of Dorothy Hunt, wife of Colson's college friend E. Howard Hunt. Dorothy was carrying cash which CREEP was paying to ensure the silence of the Plumbers and some of the other characters attached to the CIA and the Cuban exile movements who keep turning up whenever the boulders of conspiracy theory get rolled over.

As it happened, I'd forgotten this when, Sunday morning, I picked up Carl Oglesby's book, The Yankee And Cowboy War, which I'd referenced while writing his obituary for the Independent (link to that here, or check the IT link 29 September 2011 to it) intending to return it to its shelf. I opened it at random, to the first page of Chapter 7, 'The Watergate Plane Crash' and found this quote staring back at me:

'I don't say this to my people. They'd think I'm nuts. I think the CIA killed Dorothy Hunt'.

 -Charles Colson, Time, July 8, 1974

Dorothy Hunt, on behalf of her husband, and the operatives for whom he felt responsible, had been threatening (blackmail is such a nasty word, but it's the one Nixon and his aides use on the White House tapes) the Nixon administration to the effect that their silence had to be bought at the right price. Watergate burglar James McCord, who by the autumn of 1972 had disassociated himself with the payoffs from the White House, to leave himself free to bargain with the Watergate prosecutors, said in November that Dorothy told him her husband had dictated to his lawyers a letter which would 'blow the White House out of the water'. On Saturday, December 2, Nixon and Bebe Robozo met, while Dorothy Hunt continued to try to get through to Colson, who appears to have been dodging her. Just as John Sirica was telling America he wanted to find out who was behind Watergate, CREEP made either $250,000 or $350,000 available to pay for silence. On Friday December 8, United 553 from Washington to Chicago crashed. Dorothy Hunt, carrying $10,000 in case to give to one of Hunt's Cuban operatives, died.

There were a number of suspicious occurrences around the crash of United 553, and even more in how the investigation was handled, particularly in the quick way the FBI flooded the crash site before any other investigators could arrive. But I couldn't recall what precise role Colson had played in it, merely that part of the Nixon Tapes show Nixon and John Dean doing a very peculiar kind of tap dance which appears to be his way of disavowing any involvement before (and without) its being suggested.

One problem with the facts of the case is that the bulk of the research was done by a Chicago private investigator named Sherman Skolnick, odd even by the flexible standards of assassination theories. He was the kind of figure whose methodology could leave even viable discoveries obscured by the question-marks raised by his own character, a man whose scatter-shot attacks and whose often free-form leaps from assertion to validation are dangerous to take at face value. Among the question marks with the crash were the elevated levels of cyanide found in the post-mortems in the pilot and six passengers; the switching of the plane to a shorter runaway at Midway Airport, with less sophisticated landing devices, the damage to the altimeter, and the failure by the pilot to respond to a stall warning.

As usual with conspiracies, however, it is the possibility of a cover-up which generates more interest than the by-now unprovable 'facts' of the crash itself. The FBI presence was explained away by the acting director, William Ruckelshaus. He had moved from the Nixon Justice Dept to head the Environmental Protection Agency before Nixon brought him back after his appointee to replace J Edgar Hoover, L Patrick Gray, had to resign after passing FBI investigations into Watergate over to the White House. Ironically, Ruckelshaus would later resign his post as Deputy Attorney General, rather than fire Watergate Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox, after his boss, Elliott Richardson had already refused to do Nixon's bidding. Luckily the darling theorist of the right-wing, Robert Bork, as Solicitor General, was willing to do the deed.

But the White House presence in the United 533 investigation was more sinister than that. Not only did the FBI show up all over the crash site, but Nixon's Plumbers soon showed up all over the investigation, all names that would become familiar to those following the Watergate hearings. Egil 'Bud' Krogh was appointed an undersecretary at the Department of Transportation on Saturday, 9 December, the day after the crash. The National Transportation Safety Board, who investigate crashes, falls under the DOT, and Krogh allegedly spent much time pressuring their investigation. Alex Butterfield, who set up the White House taping system, and whose testimony would finally reveal it, was appointed to a post in the Federal Aviation Administration—an appointment delayed only because Butterfield was still a commissioned military man. And Dwight Chapin, one of the bagmen for CREEP, left the White House to join United Airlines as a 'director of market planning' in their Chicago office, from which he attended every day of the NTSB hearings. Another Nixon appointee to the NTSB, Richard Spear, took advantage of the absence of the head of their Bureau of Aviation Safety to rewrite the very definition of 'probable cause' in the BAS handbook, and also pressured BAS investigators to close down the 533 investigation.

I doubt we will ever get a definitive answer whether or not Dorothy Hunt was murdered. As with the JFK assassination, I suspect that even if the perepetrators walked in and confessed, researchers would find problems with the confession, and the vested powers of disinformation would somehow discredit it. Remember, confusion is often the best enemy of conclusion in the murky world of conspiracy investigation.

But I now wonder about Colson and his statement to Time. Not that I suspect him of being involved in Dorothy Hunt's murder, and obviously he believed it was murder. I find it hard to credit his acting against his old friend Hunt that way. But when he attempts to blame the CIA, I ask myself 'why?'. Yes, Hunt, McCord et al were CIA people, and their underlings had CIA ties. McCord, in fact, was widely suspected of having been a CIA plant, and deliberately bungling the Watergate break-in. Martha Mitchell, for one, thought so. But McCord denied it, specifically rebutting Colson's assertion to Time, and saying Colson was simply trying to divert attention away from the White House.

Apart from getting rid of Nixon, the CIA's only motive might be to stop the release of information about past deeds more heinous than the Watergate burglaries: the stuff Nixon referred to famously in the Watergate tapes as 'the whole Bay of Pigs thing'. This makes some sense to me, but it also seems like overkill. Hunt was probably more loyal to the agency than he was to Richard Nixon, and, as Jim Hougan showed years ago in Secret Agenda, you can make a good case that the CIA was interested in getting rid of Nixon. But there is a difference between the institution of the CIA and the murky world of agents, assets, contacts, hirelings, mafia partners, Cuban exiles and the like who swarm in and out of the axis of events from the JFK assassination to the fall of Nixon: arguably the 12 most chaotic years in American government since the Civil War.

What makes more sense is that the White House, its plumbers, and FBI itself were involved. I say the FBI partly because Nixon's grip on this organisation was firmer (through the likes of Cartha DeLoach, for example, as opposed to Mark Felt, who revealed himself as Deep Throat—and whose motivation might have been Nixon's giving the top job to Gray after Hoover died) and partly because they appear to have been central to whatever coverup may have occurred.

As I like to remind people in sports, coincidence does not imply causality. Skolnick's shotgun approach to theories muddied the waters, but it is easier to explain the FBI's sudden presence, and the Nixon regime's efforts to control the investigation at being more concerned with stopping Dorothy Hunt from speaking, had she survived, and if she didn't, making sure she wasn't carrying incriminating evidence that would become public.

What I think was going on in Colson's mind was a bit of disassociation, from a possible murder, but more importantly for the whole mess Dorothy represented. He wanted to remove himself and his colleagues from what, if his supposition were correct, was a low point for the Nixon administration. To that point. We saw in Colson's born-again life the way that fundamentalist Christian can embrace very non-Christian ideas, and we now how those reborn, like Colson, can, shall we say, embrace ambiguities and turn them into recitable facts. I'm sorry now I didn't mention Dorothy Hunt in my obituary of Colson—it's like shining a bright light on the murky shadows of the inner man.