Did Nixon really order the Watergate break-in? [View all]

[deminks]

http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/nixon-40th-anniversary-order-the-watergate-break

Did Richard Nixon, who resigned 40 years ago today, order the burglary of the Democratic National Committee’s offices in June 1972?

Amid the tapestry of scandal surrounding Watergate, we still don’t know who dreamed up the tawdry crime at its center. The evidence that forced Nixon to resign – the famous “smoking gun” conversation (transcript, audio) – proved he’d tried to prevent the FBI from investigating the matter by lying about it. He’d also approved giving hush money to Watergate conspirators. That’s obstruction of justice. But how high White House involvement went in planning the break-in was never established. Watergate is a juicy, sprawling story with the richness of a great novel or a great TV serial like “The Sopranos.” But as with “The Sopranos,” you have to supply your own final resolution to the story.

(snip)

Who ordered it? “There is no evidence,” Dean writes, “in all the Nixon-Watergate-related conversations that anyone in the White House had advance knowledge that Liddy was going into the Watergate.” By “evidence” Dean must mean “definitive evidence,” because he quotes Haldeman saying that setting up the espionage team for Nixon’s re-election had been the idea of campaign chief and former attorney general John Mitchell. “Mitchell,” Haldeman told Nixon several months later, “was pushing” for “(s)ecret papers, and financial data that O’Brien had, that he was going to get.” That, too, is straight out of Dean’s book.

(snip)

But the most important believer in the Hughes motive is Jeb Stuart Magruder. Magruder, who died this past May, was Mitchell’s deputy at Nixon’s re-election campaign. Magruder didn’t merely speculate that the Hughes transactions were the reason for the break-in; he affirmatively stated it. His source, assuming he was speaking truthfully, was impeccable. In a 2003 interview Magruder said for the first time that he’d heard Nixon tell Mitchell, “John, we we need to get the information on Larry O’Brien, and the only way we can do that is through Liddy’s plan. And you need to do that.” Previously, Magruder had never identified anyone higher than Mitchell to have known about the break-in in advance. Now he was saying that Nixon ordered it.

(snip)

A final consideration is this. Put yourself in the shoes of Mitchell and Magruder. Would you give Liddy a green light on burgling the DNC if you didn’t know for sure that your ultimate boss wanted it done? On the Watergate tapes, Nixon never admits knowing how the break-in came about, and he questions its wisdom. But he never expresses the slightest shock that anybody in his employ would commit such a crime.

(end snip)

My answer - yes, IMHO.