A favorite saying of Official Washington is that \u201cthe cover-up is worse than the crime.\u201d But that presupposes you accurately understand what the crime was. And, in the case of the two major U.S. government scandals of the last third of the Twentieth Century \u2013 Watergate and Iran-Contra \u2013 that doesn\u2019t seem to be the case.<\/p>\n
Indeed, newly disclosed documents have put old evidence into a sharply different light and suggest that history has substantially miswritten the two scandals by failing to understand that they actually were sequels to earlier scandals that were far worse. Watergate and Iran-Contra were, in part at least, extensions of the original crimes, which involved dirty dealings to secure the immense power of the presidency.<\/p>\n
Shortly after Nixon took office in 1969, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover informed him of the existence of the file containing national security wiretaps documenting how Nixon\u2019s emissaries had gone behind President Lyndon Johnson\u2019s back to convince the South Vietnamese government to boycott the Paris Peace Talks, which were close to ending the Vietnam War in fall 1968.In the case of Watergate \u2013 the foiled Republican break-in at the Democratic National Committee in June 1972 and Richard Nixon\u2019s botched cover-up leading to his resignation in August 1974 \u2013 the evidence is now clear that Nixon created the Watergate burglars out of his panic that the Democrats might possess a file on his sabotage of Vietnam peace talks in 1968.<\/p>\n
The disruption of Johnson\u2019s peace talks then enabled Nixon to hang on for a narrow victory over Democrat Hubert Humphrey. However, as the new President was taking steps in 1969 to extend the war another four-plus years, he sensed the threat from the wiretap file and ordered two of his top aides, chief of staff H.R. \u201cBob\u201d Haldeman and National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger, to locate it. But they couldn\u2019t find the file. <\/p>\n