>Why would the CIA have wanted to depose Nixon?
Here's how Kevin Phillips made the case in his 1982 book, Post-Conservative America (an entity that hasn't arrived yet, despite Phillips' repeated promises). Connoisseurs of this thesis also point to Bob Woodward's background in Naval Intelligence.
Doug
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[from Kevin Phillips, Post-Conservative America, pp. 65-69]
Question One is technical but essential. What are the mechanical underpinnings of the famous break-in and burglary? Are they the stuff of future revisionism? Quite possibly. On its face, Watergate was a break-in and attempted burglary at the Democratic National Committee, one of a series of attempts at political espionage mounted by the Committee to Re-elect the President-CREEP, as the acronym went. The real objective of the break-in is more open to debate. Was it information the Democrats had on Nixon? Material linking the John F. Kennedy assassination to Cuba and the CIA-Mafia plot to kill Fidel Castro? Evidence of Cuban funds flowing into the Democratic presidential campaign of George McGovern? Opinions vary. But the pivotal question, central to any attempt at historical revisionism, is this: Was there just one Watergate operation, run by CREEP, or were there two, the second involving a parallel operation by the Central Intelligence Agency to infiltrate, "set up," sabotage and then slowly expose and unravel CREEP operations to undercut the Nixon White House? The Administration, by almost everyone's analysis, was at loggerheads with the agency and maneuvering to gain control of CIA secret files and operations.
The evidence here, while circumstantial, is more abundant. Since the mid-1970s, various the-CIA-was-up-to-something theses have been put forward by former Nixon officials, the Watergate burglars themselves, journalists and investigators. One of the most recent is also among the most compelling: a January 198o Harper's article, "The McCord File," by James Hougan, one of the magazine's Washington editors. Hougan's thesis, in a nutshell, is that James McCord, who led the Watergate burglar team, was not simply a retired CIA agent (chief of their technical security division as late as 1970) but an active double agent - a man who had earlier directed the agency's "infiltration" of the White House, and who in 1972 would insist on carrying out the June 16-17 break-in, sabotage that entry, and ultimately, the following March, send an explosive letter to Judge John Sirica alleging perjury, political pressure and White House involvement. In an exhaustive study, complete with new information, Hougan also suggests that it "seems likely" that "the [Washington] Post" and therefore Watergate - "was manipulated for political reasons."' His suspected manipulator: CIA Counterintelligence.
This being an inquiry into political circumstances, it is not the place to review the minutiae of the revisionist approaches taken by Hougan and others. But the conspiracy-as-literature outpourings of the last decade have called up an extraordinary array of linked plots, with Norman Mailer even suggesting that the CIA killed Marilyn Monroe to frame the Kennedy brothers with whom the actress was entangled. A full fat volume would be necessary to catalogue the various schemes and their alleged linkage. In historical terms, however, suffice it to say that not only is the more recently assembled evidence in the Watergate affair modestly revisionist, but the more important thing is that CIA plot charges have been made by reputable and well-placed journalists, and they have been taken up with various degrees of anger, belated comprehension and agreement by a number of the Watergate burglars and former senior Nixon White House officials. For purposes of politically charged revisionism, and considering that the CIA burned its relevant files almost immediately after Watergate (sending an agent to McCord's house to burn his, too), this is an adequate basis. The actual fact is another matter. The exact truth will obviously never be known.
The various allegations can be summed up by two of the Watergate burglars, Howard Hunt and Frank Sturgis, who think they were set up. Hunt maintains that James McCord deliberately fouled up the burglary and had the police waiting. Sturgis says that Watergate was hatched by the CIA because Nixon was becoming too powerful: "I believe Nixon would have uncovered the true facts in the assassination of President Kennedy, and that would have taken off the heat in Watergate. Because Nixon wanted files, the CIA felt they had to get rid of him."
The retrospective accounts of senior White House aides are even more extraordinary. Nixon's longtime chief of staff, H. R. Haldeman, has suggested that Alexander Butterfield, the presidential aide who disclosed the Oval Office taping system, might have been a CIA agent. "In retrospect," Haldeman observed, "I'm ambivalent about whether the agency was out to get Nixon. I don't dismiss it as an impossibility. I do believe there are a lot of unanswered questions about the break-in at Watergate."' Haldeman discusses the various possibilities at some length in his book The Ends of Power, saying
that as Of 1974, both Charles Colson and Richard Nixon himself appear to have been convinced of a CIA plot. Chief Nixon White House speechwriter Raymond Price, a moderate at odds with Nixon's Sun Belt tactical leanings, also embraces the CIA counterplot thesis in his book, With Nixon.' White House counsel John Dean, in Blind Ambition, recounts prison discussions with fellow aide Colson in which they, too, compared notes on how those with CIA connections seemed to come through Watergate unscathed." And Nixon White House counselor John Ehrlichman created a multi-scandal in his fascinating Watergate roman a clef in which a President seeks a CIA document explaining the murder of a previous President but is frustrated when the CIA stakes out an expected burglary site and photographs White House dirty-tricksters at work.
If one goes back over the record, there seem to be two ways in which Nixon aides perceived CIA involvement. In late June 1972 the White House was not sure just what had happened at Watergateremember that Watergate prosecutor James Neat affirms that Nixon himself did not know of the break-in before the fact, nor, presumably, did his senior aides. There was a White House assumption, given the CIA background of the burglars, that the agency had been involved in some (benign for the White House) collateral fashion, and that if the episode could be laid at the doorstep of the CIA, that would solve the law-enforcement problem. Only in later years, as new documentation and evidence began accumulating and gaining publication, did aides' perception of the CIA role shift to a possible anti-Nixon counterplot.
A number of writers and political analysts, while not necessarily sharing any theory of a counterplot, agree that once the Watergate opportunity did materialize, Nixon's transgressions were grossly trumped up by an Eastern establishment-including the CIA, which very much wanted to tie Nixon's hands so that he could not proceed as expected during his second term. In The Yankee and Cowboy War - a book about the rivalry between the "old money of the Eastern Seaboard" and the new cowboy millionaires of the West-New Left activist and writer Carl Oglesby argued that "the arrest of the Watergate burglars was the result of a set up, that it was no more an accident that the Plumbers were caught than that they were in the offices of the Democratic National Committee to begin with, that there were actually two secret operations at Watergate, colliding invisibly as hunter and prey ... Watergate, like Dallas, was a coup d'état culminating in the installation of a new president and a new governing elite."
Others on the New Left point in a similar direction. Marcus Raskin, head of the Institute for Policy Studies, offered this embellishment:
<block quote> To forestall a politically revolutionary consciousness, it was necessary to develop a theory that Nixon and his activities were distinguishable from the System's usual operations ... Nixon had to be perceived by a majority in Congress and the media, as well as by the American audience, as a pathological occupant of the presidency ... If people decided that Nixon as a President was no different from others, it could result in greater instability and a possible internal upheaval against the elites who exercised broad control over the society... </block quote>
Raskin's analysis leads to the obvious, related issue: Did Nixon really do anything new, and did he even really do all that much? At the time, in 1973 and 1974, while Nixon was being portrayed as the American presidency's unique ugly frog, a minority of commentators said, Hey, wait a minute, this sort of stuff has gone on before: Remember Lyndon Johnson and Bobby Baker? Remember the Kennedys wiretapping Martin Luther King? But such parallels were ignored. The press, or at least the influential press, did not want any precedents to get in the way of the biggest story imaginable (or for those who are more Machiavellian, to get in the way of the firestorm consuming the Nixon presidency). Only in 1975 and 1976, and even later, did the history of pre-Nixon Nixonism come to light thanks to Senator Frank Church's committee's investigation of intelligence activities. A staff committee report showed that from Franklin D. Roosevelt on, every President used the FBI for quasi-political surveillance. Wiretaps were common stuff. And the committee proceedings make it quite evident that the Kennedy White House knew of the CIA's arrangement with the Mafia to kill Fidel Castro.
With Nixon back in San Clemente, evidence that his predecessors had used similar methods elicited scarcely a peep from the Washington political and journalistic establishment. Indeed, some academicians began to hint that Nixon's tactics had been a lot less effective than those of his predecessors. Consider an analysis by Seymour Martin Lipset and Earl Raab:
<block quote> The White House antics were nasty, but relatively ineffectual as an administrative game plan. A. Mitchell Palmer, attorney general after World War I, set up an extralegal intelligence agency, and promptly swept thousands of people into jail. Nixon's first attempt to set up an extralegal intelligence agency got shot down by one cross word from Hoover. The modified plumbers operation was neither massive nor very efficient. Second-story men all over the nation must still be chuckling over the Mack Sennett nature of the Watergate break-in itself.
The White House staff prepared lists of enemies, but for the most part they ended up in John Dean's files without being acted on. To harass people through their income tax, the White House staff sometimes had to resort to sending anonymous citizens letters to the IRS. And the results were scarcely impressive. They bugged the wrong phones. They tried to get something on Daniel Schorr of CBS, but only succeeded in annoying him. They produced little of the chilling effect that Senator McCarthy achieved in an essentially one-man operation. They found out nothing about Ellsberg, and indeed, managed only to guarantee his acquittal. </block quote>
For all that Nixon helped create his own problems, few Presidents were so surrounded by hostile capital elites, bureaucrats and journalists. Partly for that reason, his aides were simultaneously much less effective abusing civil liberties than other Administrations and much more likely to be brought to the bar for what they did attempt. Nicholas Von Hoffman, an iconoclastic columnist, has contended that Nixon was targeted by the establishment, impeached and destroyed because he was too much of a threat to the power structure. Conservatives are less inclined to voice that thesis so bluntly, but many share the suspicion.