cover-ups

"In the post-Vietnam War era the need for Communist abuses has been no less pressing than before. More facts have come to light on the scope of U.S. violence in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, the extent of which U.S. officials lied to the public with regard to their programs and methods, and the brazenness with which these officials defied treaty obligations and international law. Much as the government and the media tried to isolate the scoundrelism of Watergate from the much more profound immorality of the “secret” devastation of Cambodia, the linkage between the two could not be entirely concealed and therefore tended to discredit still further the campaign to bring “freedom” to South Vietnam. Counterrevolution, torture and official murder in Argentina, Guatemala, Chile, and other U.S. satellites was also reaching new peaks. Thus, if Cambodian terror did not exist, the Western propaganda systems would have had to invent it, and in certain respects it did […]."

"As a young man, Bill Clinton was one of thousands of leftist students who benefited from KGB funds, earning one of those trips to the USSR which were the preferred means for the recruitment of Soviet agents in the universities of the West. In the 60s, that would be deterrent enough for any application for town mayor of the interior. In the 90s, after three decades of Gramscian cultural revolution, the dangerous links did not prevent Clinton from being elected US president with the support of the American Communist Party. Thanks to a well-calculated "politically correct" speech, the new ruler became an idol of the left, which moved heaven and earth to keep him in office despite a range of charges, including sexual frivolities, financial imbroglios and a multitude of small Watergates, including something perfectly serious and terrifying: the suspicion of favoring Chinese nuclear espionage. The well-thinking press resisted any investigation of the matter."

"We were sure that ours was a nation of the ballot, not the bullet, until the murders of John Kennedy and Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. We were taught that our armies were always invincible and our causes were always just, only to suffer the agony of Vietnam. We respected the Presidency as a place of honor until the shock of Watergate."

"Each time our nation has made a serious mistake, the American people have been excluded from the process. The tragedy of Vietnam and Cambodia, the disgrace of Watergate, and the embarrassment of the CIA revelations could have been avoided if our government had simply reflected the sound judgment and the good common sense and the high moral character of the American people. It’s time for us to take a new look at our own government, to strip away the secrecy, to expose the unwarranted pressure of lobbyists, to eliminate waste, to release our civil servants from bureaucratic chaos, to provide tough management, and always to remember that in any town or city the mayor, the governor, and the President represent exactly the same constituents."

"If we try to keep a sense of balance, the exposures of the past several months are analogous to the discovery that the directors of Murder, Inc. were also cheating on their income tax. Reprehensible, to be sure, but hardly the main point."

"What an age of innocence it was, the Watergate era... way back in the halcyon days when the US could be contrasted with totalitarian regimes on matters of surveillance."

"A journalist for the Nation, Greg Mitchell, who has also written about us, wrote a book about the mainstream media called So Wrong for So Long. And that title is basically it. Yes we have these heroic moments with Watergate and so on, but actually, come on, the press has never been very good. It has always been very bad. Fine journalists are an exception to the rule. When you are involved in something yourself, like I am with Wikileaks, and you know every facet of it, you look to see what is reported about it in the mainstream press and you see naked lie after naked lie. You know that the journalist knows it's a lie, it is not a simple mistake. Then people repeat lies and so on. The condition of the mainstream press nowadays is so appalling I don't think it can be reformed. I don't think that is possible. I think it has to be eliminated, and replaced with something better."

"Now the leaders are more deadlocked. If they can’t decide, nothing happens. In America, if you’re corrupt you have to resign. Look at Nixon. He had Watergate and had to resign. In China does that happen? No. Why? Because everyone is in one boat. If that boat turns over, everyone ends up in the water. When I say “everyone” of course I mean the people in power. So in China everyone helps each other out. If you are in trouble, I’ll help you out and if I’m in trouble you help me out. So only in an extreme case like Bo Xilai can someone be pushed out."

"The most positive thing that is happening in this country is Watergate... Because white Americans-you see, there was a period when white Americans were marching in Selma and marching to Washington, for the blacks they thought, you see. But the struggle due to Watergate is for the whites. It's for their morality, for their integrity. It's the first time since the early part of the nineteenth century that a great mass of whites have really been concerned about their own morality. In the early part of the nineteenth century there were whites who became Abolitionists and supported the Underground Railroad, not because they loved blacks but because they loved truth. And not since that time-I mean all the World War II business, where we all got together and balled up string, and so forth, was for somebody else. It was for the Jews and Europe. But suddenly-not so suddenly in the United States the people are concerned about their own morality, their own continuation. And it's very, very-and that, I believe, will reflect in turn and in time on the black American struggle. I think that white Americans will freely, once they clear up their own backyards, will be able to-that is to say their own internal selves about integrity and honesty, will have no out, no recourse, except to deal with the race question, which, as Dr. Du Bois said at the turn of the century, "The problem for the Twentieth Century will be the problem of the color line." And that will be dealt with not from a paternalistic point of view, I hope. This is what I expect. Not at the sufferance of their time, their energy, or when they have-at somebody's whim, but because it is right to do. And if the country is to continue, if it is to continue to grow to be what it hopes to be, then certainly people will move because it is right to do so."

"In 1972, Americans watched in disbelief as the Nixon Presidency was virtually brought to collapse, not because of the Watergate "break-in," but by the cover-up and its entanglements. What if the Watergate Scandal had been handled differently? The illegal activities of a few bungling second-story men pale in comparison to the colossal management blunders by the White House inner circle."

"The American Dream has run out of gas. The car has stopped. It no longer supplies the world with its images, its dreams, its fantasies. No more. It's over. It supplies the world with its nightmares now: the Kennedy assassination, Watergate, Vietnam."

"So let me turn now to how the Executive is presently faring in these inter-branch battles. I'm concerned that the deck has become stacked against the Executive, and that since the mid-60s, there's been a steady grinding down of the Executive Branch’s authority, that accelerated after Watergate. More and more, the President’s ability to act in areas in which he has discretion has become smothered by the encroachments of the other branches."

"Watergate was thus nothing but a lure held out by the system to catch its adversaries - a simulation of scandal for regenerative ends."

"After Watergate, I never expected another impeachment investigation of a president in my lifetime, let alone an actual impeachment and a Senate trial. Nixon's successors, I thought, would recognize the price of scandal and learn the two fundamental lessons of Watergate. First, if there is questionable activity, release the facts, whatever they are, as early and completely as possible. Second, do not allow outside inquiries, whether conducted by prosecutors, congressmen or reporters, to harden into a permanent state of suspicion and warfare. But the overwhelming evidence is that five presidents after Nixon didn't understand these lessons. It wasn't that they lacked the political skill. Four of these presidents had mastered American electoral politics to win political power, and Ford almost did. Of the five, Reagan managed his problems best, although belatedly, when, after three months of Iran-contra, he permitted a broad internal White House investigation of his own actions. Why did they not see that they would be held fully accountable for their exercise of power?"

"Richard Nixon's resignation abruptly ended the nation's gravest constitutional and political crisis since the Civil War and Reconstruction. The misdeeds collectively known as Watergate had no precedent in their scope and severity. The actual break-in at Democratic Party headquarters at the Watergate complex in 1972, the associated campaign ethics, and the effort to cover them up, were the least of it—although Nixon's own former speechwriter, the conservative columnist William Safire, would describe, many years later, those "evil" offenses alone as "a serious assault on the foundations of democracy" which "rightly resulted in the resignation of the President." Systematically, and with full knowledge, Nixon had also used the machinery of government to spy on, or prepare to spy on, domestic radicals, mainstream critics, and dozens of other citizens who he imagined had conspired against him. (The White House's "enemies list" included well-known journalists; congressional leaders of both parties; the presidents of Yale, Harvard, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; the actor Steve McQueen; and the author Judith Martin, better known as "Miss Manners.") Nixon had underlings fabricate official documents, while he secretly conducted foreign policy, including the coup in Chile and the bombing of Cambodia, and prepared for a more dramatic expansion of federal power, to be completed after his reelection. By reorganizing the federal bureaucracy from the cabinet level down, replacing career professionals with political loyalists, and reducing their independent power, Nixon would thoroughly politicize the executive branch and federal agencies. (Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, one of the few cabinet members spared in the abrupt second-term shakeup after Nixon's landslide victory, was horrified by "the frenzied, almost maniacal sense of urgency about this political butchery.") Nixon later boasted: "I have thrown down a gauntlet to Congress, the bureaucracy, the media, and the Washington establishment and challenged them to an epic battle.""

"What made Stone stand out in that tawdry scene was his utter shamelessness. He bragged about being a 19-year-old bit player in the Watergate scandal and about his friendship with , Joe McCarthy’s notorious henchman. Along with his partners, among them Trump adviser Paul Manafort, he engaged in campaign tactics no one else would admit to and took lobbying clients no one else would represent, including murderous foreign dictators."

"In the wake of the US defeat in Vietnam comes an unprecedented governmental crisis. Watergate is a magnificent victory of the struggle of the 60's, a reflection of the war coming home. Crisis chases crisis as state leaders search for a consolidating strategy. The turmoil is indicative of serious and fatal weakness in the system. It offers an unparalleled opportunity for revolutionary and popular movements."

"How low has President Obama gone to tapp [sic] my phones during the very sacred election process. This is Nixon/Watergate. Bad (or sick) guy!"

"The slow-rising central horror of "Watergate" is not that it might grind down to the reluctant impeachment of a vengeful thug of a president whose entire political career has been a monument to the same kind of cheap shots and treachery he finally got nailed for, but that we might somehow fail to learn something from it."

"In Birmingham, they love the governor (Boo boo boo) Now we all did what we could do Now Watergate does not bother me Does your conscience bother you? Tell the truth"

"I think what's happening now is people want to forget. There was Vietnam, there was Watergate, there was Iran – we were beaten, we were hustled, and then we were humiliated. And I think people got a need to feel good about the country they live in. But what's happening, I think, is that that need – which is a good thing – is gettin' manipulated and exploited. And you see the Reagan reelection ads on TV – you know: "It's morning in America." And you say, well, it's not morning in Pittsburgh. It's not morning above 125th Street in New York. It's midnight, and, like, there's a bad moon risin'. And that's why when Reagan mentioned my name in New Jersey, I felt it was another manipulation, and I had to disassociate myself from the president's kind words."

"It should also be clear to us by now who the real criminals are. Nixon and his crime partners have murdered hundreds of Third World brothers and sisters in Vietnam, Cambodia, Mozambique, Angola, and South Africa. As was proved by Watergate, the top law enforcement officials in this country are a lying bunch of criminals. The president, two attorney generals, the head of the FBI, the head of the CIA, and half the white house staff have been implicated in the Watergate crimes."

"When I meet people who say, "Oh, there's no hope, Peter, look at the things that are going wrong, and those stupid people in Bosnia, there are going to be things like that all around the world, power-hungry people says I know how to handle this, just give me the bomb. There's no hope." But I say to them, I said, "Did you ever think that our great Watergate president would leave office the way he did?" "No, I guess I didn't think that." I said, "Did you think that the Berlin Wall would come down so peacefully?" "No, I didn't think that would happen, yeah." I said, "Did you think Mandela would be president of South Africa?" "No, I didn't predict that." "Well, if you couldn't predict those three things, then don't be so confident that there's no hope." And I give them a bumper sticker. It says, "There's No Hope, But I May Be Wrong.""

"Assassinations, cover-ups, political blackmail, public relations image-making, are all examples of para-politics; they all represent deviations from the model of constitutional government in which public affairs are handled by public debate and rational analysis. The cumulative effect of this government by hidden process can be to demoralize the average citizen, who may simply accept that the world, and even the universe, will be dominated by occult and capricious powers. [...] For to us who are spectators, the events of Dallas and of Watergate have appeared like meteors in a night sky, suddenly and without warning. Not even the events themselves have been always discernible, only the trail they leave behind in our sometimes cloudy media. It is not easy from the ground to pick out the true shape of a meteor. Nevertheless, as they become more frequent, one can begin to discern in what quadrant of the sky they find their origin. [...] [W]e should not be terrified by meteors, even if the night sky reminds us of our frailty and ignorance. For to scientists meteors are no longer symbols of mystery or portents of disaster: they are needed clues to the nature of the physical universe. And as Socrates remarked so long ago, if we can find reason behind the phenomena of the skies, we should look for no less in the affairs of men."

"Maybe [Watergate] is like the Old Testament. It was visited upon us and maybe we're going to benefit from it."

"When the commander in chief of a nation finds it necessary to order employees of the government or agencies of the government to do things that would technically break the law, he has to be able to declare it legal in order for them to do that."

"From the Teapot Dome to Watergate, history tells us we should always be vigilant and demand that our public servants follow the highest ethical standards. But the truth is that the kind of corruption that is blatant, of the sort that we saw in the past, is much less likely in today’s politics. And the Justice Department and the media work hard to keep it that way. And that’s a very good thing. So we don’t want to romanticize the past and think somehow it’s a difference in the people being elected."

"From the discussions I have had with Congressional and other leaders, I have concluded that because of the Watergate matter I might not have the support of the Congress that I would consider necessary to back the very difficult decisions and carry out the duties of this office in the way the interests of the Nation would require. I have never been a quitter. To leave office before my term is completed is abhorrent to every instinct in my body. But as President, I must put the interest of America first. America needs a full-time President and a full-time Congress, particularly at this time with problems we face at home and abroad. To continue to fight through the months ahead for my personal vindication would almost totally absorb the time and attention of both the President and the Congress in a period when our entire focus should be on the great issues of peace abroad and prosperity without inflation at home. Therefore, I shall resign the Presidency effective at noon tomorrow. Vice President Ford will be sworn in as President at that hour in this office."

"In all the decisions I have made in my public life, I have always tried to do what was best for the Nation. Throughout the long and difficult period of Watergate, I have felt it was my duty to persevere, to make every possible effort to complete the term of office to which you elected me. In the past few days, however, it has become evident to me that I no longer have a strong enough political base in the Congress to justify continuing that effort. As long as there was such a base, I felt strongly that it was necessary to see the constitutional process through to its conclusion, that to do otherwise would be unfaithful to the spirit of that deliberately difficult process and a dangerously destabilizing precedent for the future. But with the disappearance of that base, I now believe that the constitutional purpose has been served, and there is no longer a need for the process to be prolonged. I would have preferred to carry through to the finish whatever the personal agony it would have involved, and my family unanimously urged me to do so. But the interest of the Nation must always come before any personal considerations."

"Mr. Speaker, and Mr. President, and my distinguished colleagues and our guests: I would like to add a personal word with regard to an issue that has been of great concern to all Americans over the past year. I refer, of course, to the investigations of the so-called Watergate affair. As you know, I have provided to the Special Prosecutor voluntarily a great deal of material. I believe that I have provided all the material that he needs to conclude his investigations and to proceed to prosecute the guilty and to clear the innocent. I believe the time has come to bring that investigation and the other investigations of this matter to an end. One year of Watergate is enough."

"There are these and other great causes that we were elected overwhelmingly to carry forward in November of 1972. And what we were elected to do, we are going to do, and let others wallow in Watergate, we are going to do our job."

"We must maintain the integrity of the White House, and that integrity must be real, not transparent. There can be no whitewash at the White House."

"Americans saw Watergate as a threat to their republic. They countered by following constitutional and legal procedure to the letter. In [[South Korea|[South] Korea]], many people appear unwilling to separate the political system from the wrongdoings of politicians."

"Senior officers in Vietnam and later in Washington did their best to cover the incident up. In 1969 one of America’s most respected journalists, Mike Wallace, interviewed Paul Meadlo, one of the soldiers responsible, who admitted freely that he had fired at point-blank range into helpless civilians. ‘And you killed how many?’ asked Wallace. It was hard to tell, replied Meadlo, because with an automatic rifle you just spray the bullets about. Possibly, he added, ten or fifteen. ‘Men, women, and children?’ Yes, said Meadlo. ‘And babies?’ said Wallace. ‘And babies.’ Meadlo’s mother, who was interviewed by Seymour Hersh, who had first broken the story, said of her son, ‘I gave them a good boy and they sent me back a murderer."

"Would an alien outsider judge America's performance by My Lai and Wounded Knee or by Lincoln and Jefferson?"

"After nearly four hours of gunfire, there was silence. There was silence, even though the order only applied to American soldiers. There was silence because none of the in the village were firing back. There was silence because the Viet Cong had never fired on US troops that day. There was silence because there were no Viet Cong in the village that day. There was silence because most of the people who were in the village that day were dead."

"The My Lai killings weren’t indiscriminate. The GIs weren’t killing just anyone. They were killing everyone. They were killing everything: chickens, pigs, dogs, rabbits, cows, water buffalo, grandmothers, and children. Young girls, wounded boys, toddlers, infants. More than half of the 504 people murdered in Pinkville that morning were minors. The GIs were following orders and the orders were: to kill everything. Kill everything that breathes. Kill everything that moves."

"It was terrible. They were slaughtering villagers like so many sheep"

"As it happened, the fifth anniversary of the My Lai massacre in Vietnam occurred at the time of the 1973 siege of Wounded Knee. It was difficult to miss the analogy between the 1890 Wounded Knee massacre and My Lai, 1968. Alongside the front-page news and photographs of the Wounded Knee siege that was taking place in real time were features with photos of the scene of mutilation and death at My Lai. Lieutenant William "Rusty" Calley was then serving his twenty-year sentence under house arrest in luxurious officers' quarters at Fort Benning, Georgia, near his hometown. Yet he remained a national hero who received hundreds of support letters weekly, who was lauded by some as a POW being held by the US military. One of Calley's most ardent defenders was Jimmy Carter, then governor of Georgia. In 1974, President Richard Nixon would pardon Calley."

"That day it was just a massacre. Just plain right out, wiping out people."

"We found also that all too often American men were dying in those rice paddies for want of support from their allies. We saw first hand how monies from American taxes was used for a corrupt dictatorial regime. We saw that many people in this country had a one-sided idea of who was kept free by our flag, as blacks provided the highest percentage of casualties. We saw Vietnam ravaged equally by American bombs as well as by search and destroy missions, as well as by Vietcong terrorism; and yet we listened while this country tried to blame all of the havoc on the Vietcong. We rationalized destroying villages in order to save them. We saw America lose her sense of morality as she accepted very coolly a My Lai and refused to give up the image of American soldiers that hand out chocolate bars and chewing gum. We learned the meaning of "free-fire zones," "shoot anything that moves," and we watched while America placed a cheapness on the lives of Orientals. We watched the United States' falsification of body counts, in fact the glorification of body counts. We listened while month after month we were told the back of the enemy was about to break. We fought using weapons against “oriental human beings,” with quotation marks around that. We fought using weapons against those people which I do not believe this country would dream of using were we fighting in a European theater -- or let us say a non-third-world people theater."

"War has its own laws and one of the oldest and most persistent is that those who have surrendered and civilians, where possible, should be spared. Yet we all know the stories or have seen pictures of the sacking of cities, the execution of prisoners of war, the shelling of churches filled with refugees, or the farm buildings deliberately set on fire, and we remember names such as Oradour or Wounded Knee or Nanjing. For any American who lived through the Vietnam War the incident at My Lai, when a representative group of ordinary American soldiers rampaged through a village, has come to represent the barbarism of much of that war. (The Vietnamese forces committed their own atrocities, but Vietnam has been slow to come to terms with them.) In 1968 American reporters in the country started to hear stories about the murder in cold blood of some 500 villagers, of all ages, by an American patrol. One courageous helicopter pilot who was there did his best to save the Vietnamese and later filed a report with his superiors, who did nothing."

"The first martyr in the American national war of liberation against the British colonialists in the eighteenth century was an African descendant, ; and both slave and free Africans played a key role in Washington’s armies. And yet, the American Constitution sanctioned the continued enslavement of Africans. In recent times, it has become an object of concern to some liberals that the U.S.A. is capable of war crimes of the order of My Lai in Vietnam. But the fact of the matter is that the My Lais began with the enslavement of Africans and American Indians. Racism, violence, and brutality were the concomitants of the capitalist system when it extended itself abroad in the early centuries of international trade."

"It may look amazing, but the reality that what happened in 1915 was a mass murder was accepted by everybody having lived in that period, and was never the object of an argument. Of course the word soykirim [genocide] (being a term belonging to the post World War II period) was not used in those days. To describe what had happened in 1915, words such as "katliam" [massacre], "taktil" [killings], "teb'id" [taking away, expulsion, expelling], "kital" [massacre] were used. Mustafa Kemal has dozens of speeches in which he defines the treatments reserved to Armenians as "cowardice", or "barbarity", and names these treatments "massacre". In September 1919, the American General Harbord, who visited Mustafa Kemal in Sivas, says "he, too, disapproved the Armenian Massacre." According to Mustafa Kemal, "the massacre and deportation of Armenians was the work of a small committee who had seized the power.""

"In 1982, I refuse to take part in a colloquium whose subject is close to my heart. Organized by two Israeli professors of psychiatry, this symposium on genocide, which I am to chair, is scheduled for early June in Tel Aviv. Everything is set. Scholars and historians from several continents have accepted our invitation, among them Armenians. After all, they have ideas on this subject which has touched them closely. How could one forget the massacre of their parents and grandparents at the hands of the Turkish army? At the last moment, we encounter a major hurdle. Under pressure from Turkey, the Israelis urge me to revoke our invitation to the Armenians. I refuse. It would be too humiliating. And to humiliate is to blaspheme. The pressure increases. I am given to understand that if a single Armenian participates in the conference, Israeli-Turkish relations will suffer. And that there would be consequences for Jews in certain Arab countries. Jewish emissaries from Istanbul confirm this to me with documents. No matter, I will not offend our Armenian guests. I resign as chairman... 'A human life weighs more than all the books written about human life.'"

"[When asked what Turkish people think about the Armenian Genocide] — Sadly, young people in Turkey know nothing about the subject, All they know is nationalist things written in school textbooks. And because they lack that knowledge, they believe that the Armenians plot bad things against their country. … maybe future generations will address the subject in a more reasonable and calm manner."

"The Turkish denial [of the Armenian Genocide] is probably the foremost example of historical perversion. With a mix of academic sophistication and diplomatic thuggery -- of which we at Macquarie University have been targets -- the Turks have put both memory and history into reverse gear.""

"The manner in which the matter of relocation is being handled demonstrate that the government is in fact pursuing the goal of annihialating the Armenian race in Turkey."

"It is evident that deportations of Armenians is not motivated by military considerations, the minister of the Interior Talaat Bey recently in a conversation with Dr. Mortsmann presently in the Imperial Service, declared openly that the Porte wants to profit from the World War for radically finishing their internal enemies – the Christians before the intervention of outside powers."

"The Turks are vigorously carrying through their cruel intention, to exterminate the Armenian people,"