CSI: American Carnage (Saturday, July 11, 2020)
NEW YORK – Chris says, Good evening Rachel. Rachel says, Good evening Chris. Thank you my friend. And thank all of you at home for joining us on a Friday evening, much appreciated. There’s a lot to get too, including the news that’s just breaking. You know, Friday evenings more than three years into the Trump administration, nearly four years, are like all you can eat nights at Bob Evans, the restaurant chain that specializes in all you can eat, mostly soup, but not always, but mostly. The Trump administration keeps doling out the soup and you try and slurp it up, but surprise! inevitably, it seams you fall behind, even as more soup keeps coming. It’s like a rising tide, and in this business, if you don’t keep up, if you don’t bail out your boat, if you don’t toss out all the ballast and roll with the waves as they come sloshing in, you are not going to do well, you are going to drown in your soup. That’s news on a Friday night in the Trump administration. News in July of 2020. Soup. Now, it didn’t always work that way. The Nixon administration liked Saturday. They used Friday too. But Saturday was their special day. In October of 1973, on a Saturday night, the news coming from the Justice Department in Washington rocked the nation and served as a foreshadowing of something else, something big, something that we are about to get to because I think given everything else that has happened tonight, all the breaking news, all the bombshells exploding up and down the east coast, all the electricity in the air, honestly, I think it has not received the attention it deserves. So it’s October of 1973, the war in Vietnam is raging, John Mitchell, Nixon’s first attorney general, had resigned in 1972 to return to running the president’s reelection campaign. In June of that year, 1972, an election year, some burglars were caught trying to bug the Democratic offices in the Watergate Hotel in the nation’s capital. Now the Nixon reelection campaign was being financed by something known as CREEP, the Committee to Reelect the President. It became known as CREEP. And several CREEP staffers, as it happened, turned out to be involved with this Watergate business. Now John Mitchell was not directly running CREEP at the time of the break-in, although as a practical matter, as campaign director, he was. CREEP was being run by Jeb Magruder, another Nixon White House operative. He had been one of Nixon’s special assistants. But then he went over to CREEP. Jeb Magruder was CREEP chairman. Mitchell was in charge of the campaign. But there was a lot of symbiosis between CREEP, with its gnomish finance chairman, Maurice Stans, and the campaign, which was run by Nixon’s long-time associate and former attorney general tough-guy John Mitchell. Pipe-smoking John Mitchell. For practical purposes they were one and the same. Nothing happened at CREEP without the go ahead of John Michell, Nixon’s long-time associate and campaign chairman. So with Mitchell running the campaign and no longer attorney general, Nixon needed a new attorney general and he chose his Defense Secretary for the job, Elliott Richardson. It was a fateful choice. A fateful choice because of one thing – Watergate. Watergate changed everything for Nixon. The president was cruising along, raising a lot of money, building a campaign juggernaut, flexing his muscles as president. But there was that one thing – Watergate. It changed everything. Once Watergate happened, the whole dynamic shifted. Just shifted. Everything was going one way before Watergate; another way after; a different way. Watergate was like a rock slide. It just came crashing across the road. One minute you’re winding your way around the curve, admiring the view. The next minute your slamming on the brakes, veering to the right and you’re off the cliff. That was Watergate. It was unpredictable and Elliott Richardson, who was not Nixon’s kind of guy to begin with, found himself completely caught up in it. For one thing, and it was a huge thing, there was Archie Cox, the bow-tied Harvard Law professor that Richardson appointed to investigate the growing scandal, what we now call Watergate, and actually, even then, they called it Watergate. Watergate then. Watergate now. When Cox was appointed, Mitchell is out of the government, Richardson is attorney general, and Nixon is president, and, I’ve got to say, increasingly agitated by all the attention focused on what was going on with Watergate. Reporters were raking over everything — who was involved in the reelection, what they were doing, where was all the money coming from and going to, who were the bagmen — all these things that Nixon looked at as just politics, something that occupied its own universe, its own dimension, something that did not adhere to the normal rules. Nor should it. So in October of 1973, on a Saturday night, it was cool in Washington, most reporters had gone home, because, honestly, that’s what you do, right? It’s Saturday, you’re home. Maybe you go out to dinner. Maybe you have some friends over. But if you’re Richard Nixon, you may be interested in something else, something that will exemplify your crushing power — you think — something that will resonate down through the years, right down to the present. Hold that thought. We’ll be right back. – Saturday, July 11, 2020