Why did Woodward agree to take down Nixon?

[MoonRiver]

Was he so young and ambitious that the impulse to make a name for himself outweighed his rightwing ideology? Or was he a Dem then?

[nothingshocksmeanymore]

1. I think he was a Bushie then

Look at Ford's admin for clues.

[MoonRiver]

2. Why did he help Bernstein take Nixon down then?

[nothingshocksmeanymore]

4. Ford came to power and that is where Rummy and Cheney developed

their chops for power hungriness.

[AP]

3. Because the Bush family asked him to.

Don't get me wrong. Nixon was an anti-democratic bastard and a fascist abroad (thanks partly to Kissinger, but the far right salvaged him from the wreckage of the Nixon administration anyway).

A big part the reason he was paranoid and a control freak was because he was getting it from the far right and the left. Of course he had to go overboard.

But the fact is, the far right, which wanted to undo everything FDR did, and wanted to make AMERICA a fascist state, didn't like Nixon.

It's no coincidence that the end of the golden age of American economic progress was 1973 and not in 1968. Corporate profits were starting to trail off before Nixon was gone, but Nixon's response wasn't to turn the state over to the private sector. Nixon actually wanted to protect the environment and, because he came from a working class background, he was interested in protecting the worker and allowing some of the wealth created by society to be enjoyed by the people who created it -- the working class.

The Bush wing of the party didn't like that. They wanted to turn America into a welfare state for the oil industry and the militarty-industrial complex. Nixon didn't. Nixon had to go.

That's my theory.

Anyway, "Deep Throat" had to be poppy. Remember Poppy's voice?

[MoonRiver]

5. Wow! Thanks for the history lesson!

That puts a whole new light on Watergate.

[AP]

9. I should note that you have to believe -- especially after seeing...

...the Iran-Contra, Clarence Thomas, etc., "investigations" by the senate, that Nixon never would have had to leave office unless the Republicans wanted it too. And, subsequent history should also prove that what's "right" or "legal" is never a consideration and those issues alone never would have motivated Republicans to bring down Nixon white house.

Clearly, it had to do with power and who was going to get it -- the people or the corporations. And, in retrospect, Republicans must believe they made the right move. With Nixon gone, look what the got: they got Carter, who did alot of privatizing and deregulating for a Democrat, and then they got Poppy on the ticket in the very next administration, and almost got him to the top when Neal Bush's friend took a shot at Reagan in spring '81 (right?).

And if you look at the changes in the tax code and all the deregulation which have given corporations control of America, they all trace back to '73 -- to the Ford administration, and then the Carter administration continued the slide, and the Bush administrations really greased the skids. By the time Clinton rolled around, the best he could do was put a finger in the dyke. Bush II broke the damn though. We live in a society which ebbs a flows to the gravitational force of the moon of corporate profits for a half dozen or so very large corporations.

I don't think it's any coincidence that it seems like it was Nixon leaving office which opened the flood gates for some of the most dramatic changes in the way government interacts with corporations. I think '73 was a make or break moment for American fascism -- for the corporate control of American society. If Nixon stayed in office, corporations might have become too weakened to be able to control America. (They would have totally controlled South America, which Nixon didn't mind, but they weren't going to be able to run America if they didn't get a very friendly government in place.)

Well, they got their fascism-at-home ball rolling once Nixon was gone.

And Bob Woodward has been right there, acting as the royal scribe throughout the whole, long, sad descent of American democracy.

[sandnsea]

14. And Ford was on the Warren Commission

I don't remember who all was on the Warren Commission, but I remember looking at the people and being a little surprised at what had become of them afterwards.

[nothingshocksmeanymore]

6. I concur

For as whacked as Nixon was, he did have somewhat humble upbringing..thanks for taking the time to spell it out..I gave the short response above but I do agree with your assessment.

[MoonRiver]

8. Does * have a similar Achilles heel?

[Piperay]

19. Very interesting

THANKS! :thumbsup:

[freetobegay]

7. It was the right thing to do?

That would be my answer.

[LoZoccolo]

11. Yeah.

We're used to seeing so many partisan shills today that I think we forget there are right-wingers who will criticize people they share an ideology with, and that it seems like there was more of that thirty years ago.

[Merlin]

10. Because Woodward is ONI intelligence. He worked with Al Haig.

ONI is Office of Naval Intelligence. There is an old saying in intel circles: "Once ONI, always ONI."

While a young navy officer, Woodward served as attache to Gen Al Haig during Haig's 6-month "fact finding" "tour" of Vietnam in the LBJ years. When Haig became Chief of Staff to Nixon, he requested that Woodward, then working in the Pentagon, be the Pentagon's daily White House briefer, which he was for many months. At some point, Woodward "resigned" from his promising career, and took a job as a cub reporter with the WaPo. A few weeks later, he "stumbled" upon deep throat. Draw your own conclusions.

US intelligence--and the Pentagon right wingers of the time--wanted Nixon out because of (a) his "rapproachment" with the USSR, and (b) his "Opening" to China. Both were engineered by Kissinger using private, "back channel" communications and secret visits. They were kept secret even from the WH staff. This violatd the long standing tradition that a copy of every Presidential communique with any foreign government--ESPECIALLY the USSR and China--must go to the State Dept and the Pentagon. Nixon knew if he complied, he'd never get the China thing off the ground, and never be able to keep it a secret until the day before he left--critical to not allowing a firestorm of opposition to develop.

Haig was one of the pentagon cabal that wanted Nixon out. (Ironically it was much the same cabal that wanted JFK out for much the same reason--because JFK was talking to Kruschev back channel {through private letters} about ending the cold war--but the cabal handled that one differently.)

Woodward is now acting as a tool for US intelligence once again. BUT, this time, he's on our side. Why? Because US intelligence has had it up to their eyeballs with Bush. They want him out bigtime. They always get their man.

Think of the things Bush has done to harm the intelligence establishment in this country. They were telling him the truth about the WMDs. But Bush's boys decided to open a new department in the pentagon (the OSP) to "stovepipe" phony intelligence to the WH. Then when it turned out to be wrong, they put the blame on the CIA. That's just one of their many offenses. Think about the reaction among CIA pros to the outing of Valerie Plame. Think about Powell's UN speech, the yellow cake, the aluminum tubes, the "portable weapons labs" that turned out to be Brit supplied meteorological balloon trailers, and on and on.

I'm on the side of the spooks in this one.

[AP]

12. I don't think intelligence cares about the integrity of intelligence.

I think they care about what the fascists care about -- corporate profits, especially for the military industrial complex and the financiers who make money off of them on Wall St.

Bush is giving that sector riches beyond their wildest dreams, and easy profits at that.

And that's what Nixon threatened by ending the cold war.

Why would the intelligence community object to Bush now? Because he has made the intelliegence community look bad? I doubt it.

[Merlin]

13. Wrong. There are many very dedicated public servants in US intelligence

Valerie Plame was just one of them.

Most of these people are fanatical about keeping politics out of intelligence assessments. They want the info to be as objective and straight as possible, because they know critical decisions are usually dependent upon honest information (though not so in this admin).

The intel establishment of this country runs close to about $50 billion a year. That's twice as big as the airline industry in the US. It's huge. Unfortunately an inordinate percentage of the $$$ have gone into electronic surveillance schemes instead of human intelligence, a situation they're now trying desperately to remedy.

[AP]

15. Valerie Plame et al don't get to decide who the president is going to be.

Al Haig and Poppy Bush and the people at the top get to decide. And Woodward is their court scribe. He's not Valerie Plame's court scribe.

And even if all the footsoldiers in intelligence want a different president, nine times out of ten they're still going to get the president the people at the top want as president. (That one time is ten is why Diebold is so important to them.)

[Merlin]

16. They have their ways. Witness what Woodward is now doing to Bush.

Also witness a story breaking on LBN, at this link about another leak of critical info from a US intelligence source:

http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1000491093

[AP]

17. They can leak all they want, but I doubt it's going to determine the

winner of the next election.

However, I think that Woodward is probably connected to people more powerful than Plame who want Bush to remain president.

I think money and power is a more powerful organizing principle than hurt feelings about your profession.

[ngGale]

18. From what I remember Woodward and...

Bernstein were two cub reporters that had a story of a lifetime dropped in their lap. Read their book and get some history. We still don't know who 'Deep Throat' is. Someone inside the Nixon administration, I would think.