The Watergate Scandal & the False Dawn of White Racial Consciousness

3,265 words

Geoff Shepard
The Real Watergate Scandal: Collusion, Conspiracy, and the Plot That Brought Nixon Down
Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing, 2015

America lost a great deal when President Richard Milhous Nixon resigned. A case can be made that after Nixon left, the Vietnam War ended in a worse way than it otherwise would have, and America was saddled with two less than stellar presidents: Ford and Carter. Furthermore, it is possible that the spiritual and economic nosedive that characterized the late 1970s was in no small part a result of Nixon’s resignation. And the political Left, even to this day, sees the Nixon resignation as a great victory.

However, Geoff Shepard, who was a young lawyer on Nixon’s defense team, argues that the Watergate Special Prosecution Force (WSPF) were not saintly patriots who cared about justice. Instead, “President Nixon was driven from office largely by the false representations of highly-partisan Democratic prosecutors.” Additionally, “Nixon’s aides were denied any semblance of a fair trial. The fix was in, the dice were loaded, the deck was stacked.”

White advocates should look at Nixon’s Watergate troubles and learn from them what to do and not to do. When I first started to write for Counter-Currents, I really thought that White Nationalism would win without much trouble. The arguments we make are logical, White Nationalism is the natural default setting of American society anyway, it’s obvious that Jewish influence on US foreign policy created debacles such as the Iraq War (among others), and that the “civil rights” movement failed to achieve its utopian promises. Indeed, it is objectively true that most white liberals live as far away from blacks as they possibly can. I thought we were about to see something like the end of Communism, where whites would pull down the idols to that moral and intellectual genius, the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King, Jr.

I didn’t anticipate the fanatical resistance to our ideas. Otherwise well-meaning whites are completely hostile to our ideas. I can only see their attitude as something like a religion. We have a very long way to go with metapolitics before we are going to win politically. And when we do win, it is very likely that something like a Special Prosecutor will bedevil our presidential champion as well as other elected officials. We can thus learn from Richard Nixon.

Nixon’s Rapid Rise & Vice Presidency

Few Americans have risen so far and so fast in their careers, and very few presidents have accomplished so much in the face of so much resistance as Richard Nixon did. George MacDonald Fraser wrote that Nixon’s physical build was a “perfect example” of the look of the Border Reivers: raiding clans on the border of Scotland and England, from which Nixon’s patrilineal family came. Fraser wrote:

The blunt, heavy features, the dark complexion, the burly body, and the whole air of dour hardness are as typical of the Anglo-Scottish frontier as the Roman Wall. Take thirty years off his age and you could put him straight into the front row of the Hawick scrum and hope to keep out of his way. It is difficult to think of any face that would better fit under a steel bonnet.[1]

The rest of Nixon’s ancestors originated among the Quakers who settled in the area of the old New Sweden Colony and were pioneers across the Midwest. Nixon was born and raised in Southern California, a product of the migration of Midwesterners with Quaker roots to that region.

Nixon attended Wittier College and served in the US Navy as a Lieutenant Commander.[2] In 1946, he ran for Congress as a Republican and defeated Democrat Jerry Voorhis. He joined the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) and investigated allegations of Communists in the federal government. While in the HUAC, he brought down the Soviet spy Alger Hiss (also a Quaker). Hiss was an Eastern liberal establishment darling, an Ivy League graduate, a clerk for Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, and a key Franklin Delano Roosevelt staffer. In 1950, Nixon ran for Senate against Helen Gahagan Douglas, an upper-class movie star and Leftist. It was Helen Douglas who coined Nixon’s nickname, “Tricky Dick,” and the nickname stuck.

Washington’s media elite hated Nixon from the start. The press had loved Voorhis, for reasons I don’t understand. The Alger Hiss case also frustrated the Democratic Party elite, as it showed just how deeply many of them had fallen for the Communist siren during the 1930s and early ‘40s. The Hiss case also involved a number of stunts, such as finding relevant documents in a pumpkin patch. This stunt did appear crude, silly, and paranoid, but the optics of the “Pumpkin Papers” were effective. Because of his achievements, General Eisenhower selected Nixon to be his running mate in the 1952 election.[3]

Historians such as the late Stephen E. Ambrose – who idolized Eisenhower so much that he exaggerated his connection to the man – argued that Ike and Nixon didn’t get along. This is not the case. In fact, Nixon was an active Vice President who greatly helped Eisenhower, and their relationship was quite cordial. For one thing, Nixon understood the Republican Party’s internal workings better than Eisenhower. Nixon also fought the inevitable partisan battles, while Eisenhower appeared to be the aloof senior statesman above the fray. Eisenhower sent Nixon on a great many sensitive foreign assignments. One was to inform the South Korean President that if they restarted the Korean War, the United States would cut South Korea loose – the type of actual America First policy that’s hard to find these days. These assignments were sometimes dangerous, too, as in Venezuela, Nixon was nearly killed by an angry Leftist mob. Nixon also aided Eisenhower during the administration’s conflict with Senator Joe McCarthy. He worked very well with other senior politicians in carrying out anti-Communist strategic actions.

Nixon altered the Vice Presidency in many ways. Prior to his tenure, Vice Presidents, such as Hannibal Hamlin, usually served only one term, and a new one would be fielded for the second term campaign based on the evolving needs of the President’s party. What set Nixon apart, aside from his capable role as Eisenhower’s executive officer, was that he had passionate supporters of his own. During the 1956 Republican Convention, these supporters rallied to keep him on the ticket.

Nixon had enemies, though; passionate enemies. Irwin F. Gellman,[4] who wrote an excellent book about Nixon’s Vice Presidency, noted several times that Jews, blacks, and other non-white minorities passionately hated Nixon. The Eisenhower/Nixon campaign won in 1952 and 1956 with very few black votes. In fact, they could have won with no black votes at all. The Eisenhower administration didn’t need to do anything for “civil rights.” However, in the late 1950s, Eisenhower sent troops to desegregate a school in Arkansas, and Nixon pushed the Civil Rights Act of 1957 through the Senate. Gellman argues that Nixon’s support for the bill was actually more important to its overall passage than Lyndon Johnson’s. The powerful metapolitical tool that was “civil rights” helped to force Eisenhower to do something he might not otherwise have done.

During the 1960 election, Nixon ran for President but lost to Kennedy, due in part to election fraud in Cook County, Illinois. The Democrats figured the situation had returned to normal, and indeed, between 1933 and 1968, the United States was essentially a one-party state. The Republicans during this time operated as something like a sect for stubborn New Englanders and anti-New Deal eccentrics. For Democrats, the Eisenhower presidency was an unnatural interregnum that only happened due to the fact Ike was a war hero. Thus, it appeared that Nixon’s career was finished when he lost the California Governor’s race in 1962.

Kennedy’s Death & The Breakup of the Left

The Kennedy assassination had an impact on the Democratic Party’s internal problems in particular and the breakup of the Left more generally. Kennedy was in fact visiting Dallas to heal a rift in the Democratic Party, mostly over the issue of “civil rights,” when he was killed. Kennedy’s assassin was what we would call today an antifa Leftist who would have felt at home in FDR’s Democratic Party during the 1930s, but he was totally out of step with the Democratic Party of 1963. Within months of the 1964 election, the Democratic Party would further divide over the Vietnam War. Meanwhile, whites in the Deep South were unhappy with the “civil rights” disaster. The 1968 Democratic Party convention was a train wreck televised on live TV. Nixon would go on to win a very narrow victory in 1968.

Democratic Party partisans viewed their 1968 defeat as an accident – they felt that the Vietnam War, the chaotic 1968 Democratic National Convention, and the 1968 MLK riots had led to defeat by shifting a small number of votes. They didn’t see 1968 as the major political realignment that it was. Thus, when Nixon went on to win again in a landslide in 1972, they were furious. Meanwhile, the Democrats captured both the Houses of Congress and still had passionate supporters in the federal bureaucracy. Additionally, the FBI was pursuing its own interests. As a policy, they worked to obtain as much incriminating evidence about rising politicians and their staff as they could so that they would be guaranteed continued funding and political support. And during Nixon’s second term, Mark Felt, the FBI’s Deputy Director, was passed over for promotion by Nixon, and he wanted to take revenge, which he did by leaking information regarding the Watergate break-in to reporters from The Washington Post: Carl Bernstein (a Jew) and Bob Woodward.

The Watergate Scandal

The Watergate scandal brought down President Nixon, and it set the pattern for the “Russia collusion” probe that attempted to bring down President Trump. It had two components. The first part was the crime. On the night of June 17, 1972, a group of burglars called “The Plumbers,” led by G. Gordon Liddy, were caught by police while attempting to wiretap the offices of the Democratic National Committee, which were located in the Watergate complex in Washington, DC. The Plumbers were part of a group called the Committee to Re-elect the President. Many had worked for the CIA.

The most likely reason for the break-in was intelligence gathering by the Nixon campaign. There are a number of conspiratorial theories that go beyond that, though, such as speculation that the Democrats were seeking to blackmail their own, that a prostitution ring was being protected, that the CIA was up to something, that Nixon was attempting to hide “treason” related to the accusation that he sabotaged LBJ’s 1968 peace talks in Vietnam, or that it was part of an alleged Nelson Rockefeller-inspired globalist scheme.

One thing that is known for certain is that the person who approved and masterminded the break-in was John Dean, the White House counsel. Under normal circumstances, the burglars would have been sentenced and the matter would have been finished, but because “The Plumbers” were so close to the White House and because Nixon had so many enemies in the press, the bureaucracy, the Democratic Party, and what we now call the Deep State kept on digging. This led to the second part of the scandal, the cover-up.

The break-in was a rogue operation. Nixon discovered that it occurred at the same time everyone else did. The problem was that John Dean hadn’t come clean about his complicity. This meant that anything Dean said to Nixon could be interpreted as a conspiracy to “obstruct justice.” Dean eventually turned on the Nixon administration, and Shepard shows how he was given easy treatment by the Special Prosecutor throughout the process.

There is a cruel irony in the Watergate scandal. The Johnson administration had used dirty tactics all the time. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover admitted to Nixon that Nixon had been bugged on Johnson’s orders throughout the 1960s, and that the JFK and LBJ administrations had ordered the IRS to audit Nixon’s taxes every year. Nixon also felt he’d been bugged while preparing for the televised TV debates against Kennedy in 1960, since Kennedy seemed to know what Nixon was going to say. Ultimately, President Nixon and the senior members of the staff didn’t know how to handle the matter. In retrospect, they should have simply fired John Dean shortly after the break-in.

Nixon’s Enemies

Geoff Shepard writes that the real Watergate scandal was that Nixon’s enemies – especially the Watergate Special Prosecution Force – included Nixon’s political rivals, and they had unlimited resources and ability to attack him without any accountability. Additionally, the prosecutors moving against Nixon’s senior staffers met in secret with Judge John Sirica in advance to give themselves an advantage against the Nixon defense team:

Nixon was done in by officers of the court, the very people sworn to uphold the law and the constitution – federal judges and federal prosecutors, who met in secret and reached back-room deals on how best to take him down and secure convictions of his senior aides.[5]

Judge Sirica was not the only one out to get Nixon. Judge David Bazelon (a Jew) also “stacked the appeals court panels to assure that Judge Sirica was not reversed.”[6] After Nixon resigned, President Ford preemptively pardoned Nixon, but his senior aides were convicted by this Kangaroo court.

The partisan nature of Richard Nixon’s enemies is shown in this chart. Essentially, the WSPF, the House Judiciary Committee, and the US Senate’s Ervin Committee were made up of people from JFK/LBJ’s Justice Department and Nixon’s enemies. Nixon and his staff faced an unelected, unaccountable group with infinite resources and absolute power.

Why Nixon Matters

President Nixon matters to white advocates because the political realignment between Democrats and Republicans in the 1968 election was a far more serious polarization of American politics than most people might realize. On this topic, John Beaty’s The Iron Curtain Over America (1951) deserves to be quoted:

In the first three decades of the twentieth century, few of the several million non-Christian immigrants [i.e., Jews] from Eastern Europe were attracted to the Republican Party, which was a majority party with no need to bargain for recruits. The Democratic Party, on the contrary, was in bad need of additional voters . . . it is seen that on the average, the Democrats, except under extraordinary circumstances, could not in the first three decades of the twentieth century count on as much as 45% of the votes.

In addition to its need for more votes, the Democratic Party had another characteristic which appealed to the politically minded Eastern European newcomers and drew to its ranks all but a handful of those who did not join a leftist splinter party. Unlike the Republican Party, which still had a fairly homogeneous membership, the Democratic Party was a collection of several groups. “The Democratic Party is not a political party at all; it’s a marriage of convenience among assorted bedfellows, each of whom hates most of the others” (William Bradford Huie in an article, “Truman’s Plan to Make Eisenhower President,” Cosmopolitan, July, 1951, p. 31).

In the early part of the twentieth century the two largest components of the Democratic Party were the rural Protestant Southerners and the urban Catholic Northerners, who stood as a matter of course for the cardinal principles of Western Christian civilization, but otherwise had little in common politically except an opposition, chiefly because of vanished issues, to the Republican Party. The third group, which had been increasing rapidly after 1880, consisted of Eastern Europeans and other “liberals,” best exemplified perhaps by the distinguished Harvard Jew, of Prague stock, Louis Dembitz Brandeis, whom President Woodrow Wilson, for reasons not yet fully known by the people, named to the United States Supreme Court.

Bearing what Beaty wrote in mind, and looking backwards from four decades later, one can see that one aspect of Nixon’s career was his being a white champion against Jewish and non-white interests, rather than only as a champion of Americanism against Communism. Indeed, Wilmot Robertson used Nixon-era language (the Silent Majority) to describe a racial clash: that of the American majority (with a background in Northern and Western Europe, and with roots in the original colonial settlers) and minorities (Jews and other non-whites). Nixon was a false dawn for a white political resurgence in the same way that Trump might be a truer dawn for such a nationalist rebirth.

Nixon played by the rules of his enemies, but the deck was stacked against him in more ways than just having an unaccountable Special Prosecution Force made up of his political enemies. When Nixon was President, there were two major newspapers: The New York Times and The Washington Post; two news magazines, Time and Newsweek; and three TV stations, CBS, NBC, and ABC. Today, social media has made everyone a potential journalist, and other narratives can be developed and broadcast to a wide audience.

Thus, the following needs to be kept in mind in order to protect a future white advocate from a Watergate-style attack:

• Special Prosecutors are bad for American no matter who is in office. Ideas for reform include appointing a Special Prosecutor through a procedure involving both Houses of Congress, and not only the Deputy Director (acting) for whatever. The Special Prosecutor must have a narrow scope, a limited budget, and a strictly-defined time limit.
• If applicable, name the Jew in these matters. Nixon could not do this as easily, but Trump’s Special Prosecution team and the current (September 2019) US House Judiciary Committee are filled with Jews. Why not hypothetically enter comments like the following into the Congressional record: “The Jew Nadler, it cries about treason even when it only cares about Israel.”
• Identify who is on the Special Prosecutor’s staff and expose their biases.
• Identify the judge and, if applicable, expose his biases.
• Remark on any assumed impropriety on the part of the Special Prosecutor.
• Demand a change of venue for any trials. DC is a political town, but Baltimore or Richmond might be fairer.
• Hire good people. John Dean actually had a checkered career prior to joining the White House staff.
• Demand a standard of behavior that avoids even the appearance of impropriety – early and often.
• Work with the system. The abolitionist movement might not have won if the Slave Power had made use of a Special Prosecutor against Lincoln rather than go to war.

Notes

[1] George MacDonald Fraser, The Steel Bonnets: The Story of the Anglo-Scottish Border Reivers (New York: Skyhorse Publishing, 2008), p. 1.

[2] Nixon was not a supporter of “civil rights” in the same way as Hubert Humphrey or Lyndon Johnson, but he did support the Civil Rights act of 1957 as Vice President. He matches the profile of those critical white supporters of “civil rights,” however: He was born between 1907 and 1918, and served as a Field Grade-level officer (O-4 to O-6) during the Second World War.

[3] Liberals often point to Nixon’s “Checkers speech” as further proof of his dishonesty. In fact, this is a misreading of the event, the issues in the 1952 election, and the problems in the Truman administration. Nixon had a fund to meet his campaign expenses. Nixon’s rival Adlai Stevenson had the exact same sort of fund. Additionally, President Truman had a large number of cronies and hangers-on who caused a number of financial scandals. The attack on Nixon and his “Checkers Speech” was seen at the time as a successful response to a cheap political attack by the Stevenson campaign. It is only in the retelling of the incident that the “Checkers Speech” becomes a scandal.

[4] Irwin F. Gellman, The President and the Apprentice: Eisenhower and Nixon, 1952-1961 (New Haven, Ct.: Yale University Press, 2015).

[5] Geoff Shepard, The Real Watergate Scandal: Collusion, Conspiracy, and the Plot That Brought Nixon Down (Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing, 2015), p. 30.

[6] Ibid., p. 37.