Carl Albert. Name ring a bell?
In 1973-74, during Watergate, he was a Democratic congressman from Oklahoma. He was also the Speaker of the House. There are two other things you should know about the guy:
1. Nobody hated him. At least, he received no more than the usual amount of hatred directed against any politician.
2. He did NOT convene hearings into the impeachment of Richard Nixon, even though much of the country was screaming for Dick removal.
The anti-Nixon activists did not make Albert a prime target of their ire, even though, as far as Albert was concerned, impeachment was off the table. At least, off his table.
Why? Because he knew, and the country knew, that impeachment properly belonged on the table of Pete Rodino, the Chair -- or Chairman, as folks then said -- of the House Judiciary Committee. If you're old enough, that name should have a Quasimodo-esque ability to ring bells. Rodino's the one who held hearings looking into the crimes of Richard Nixon. When Nixon realized that Rodino's committee would recommend his impeachment, and when six Republican senators warned the President that the votes for removal existed, the Trickster caught a plane for California.
Perhaps my memory is failing, and perhaps my fellow Ancient Ones can improve my recollection. But I do not recall Carl Albert ever making any noteworthy anti-Nixon noises. In fact, he said that if the presidency should fall to him (he was the proverbial "heartbeat away" not once but twice), he would immediately resign in favor of a quickly-chosen Republican Vice President.
Can you imagine the reaction against any Democratic Speaker who made such an announcement nowadays?
Nevertheless, Democrats of that era did not hate Albert. Sure, a lot of people got pissed off at him later, when his name cropped up in the Tongsun Park scandal. But during Watergate, his televised image did not set Democrats screaming "Hate! Hate! Hate!" Nobody considered him a traitor to any "cause," nobody gave him any condescending lectures on the Constitution, nobody threatened to run against him unless he put impeachment on the table.
So why is the situation so different with Nancy Pelosi?
Why does she arouse such antipathy? Why does a widely-circulated petition scream that Pelosi has "actively blocked" the impeachment of Cheney and Bush? Can someone please tell me what action -- I'm looking for actions here, not mere verbiage -- she has taken to impede the impeachment movement?
Can anyone explain to me how her actions have differed in any truly significant way from Carl Albert's?
What I'm about to say will outrage many of you. But I think I know why so many progressives despise Pelosi with a rage more intense than their antipathy for Bush. It's the same reason why so many Republicans in the 1990s loathed Hillary with a deep-down volcanic hatred they never felt for Bill.
The Speaker ain't got no penis.
You say you're no misogynist? I say the same thing about myself, but I'm also honest enough to confess that the unconscious mind and the conscious mind play by different rules.
If my suggestion makes you furious, consider this: John Conyers now sits in Pete Rodino's chair. What stops Conyers from opening up impeachment hearings against Cheney or Bush?
Not a damned thing, as far as I can see.
Yet do you see a firestorm of Conyers-hate comparable to the Pelosi-hate raging through blogostan left? No, you do not.
I can certainly see why Pelosi would leave the job to the Judiciary Committee. First, there's the matter of precedent: That Committee got the I-ball rolling in 1973. Same thing in 1998. (I'm too lazy to look up the Andrew Johnson case.) The Judiciary Committee is where impeachment starts.
Also -- yes, I'm going to say it again -- we must consider the all-important fact of the line of succession. If Pelosi endorses impeachment, the national dialog will shift away from the administration's misdeeds to her perceived ambition. That's why I insist that everyone except Nancy Pelosi should screech to impeach. I want her to shut up about that topic until the last possible second, precisely because I want to see her sit in the oval office.
As I see it, the worst tactical blunder Pelosi could commit would be to make the announcement so many of you want to hear: "Let's hold hearings; let's get rid of these guys." The moment those words spill from her mouth, everyone from Leno to Limbaugh to Letterman will portray her as America's answer to Lady MacBeth.
But if Big John were to say the same words -- well, that idea makes a hell of a lot more sense to me, from both a tactical and a historical standpoint.
So why don't you people hate John Conyers the way you hate the Speaker?
And why do progressives hate her in a way they never hated Carl Albert?
You may insist that the answer has nothing to do with who owns which type of genitalia. You may so insist -- but don't expect me to believe you.
25 comments:
I'm so tempted to go post this in the Democratic Underground's General Discussion forum.
jen, I usually don't care about having my words carried in other forum. But in THIS case...I would appreciate the gesture.
As always, you have my gratitude.
Conyers has a history of introducing impeachment resolutions that go nowhere. He introduced two against Nixon in May 1972 for the bombing of North Vietnam -- before Watergate had even happened -- and one against Reagan for the invasion of Grenada.
So even for people who don't know his history, Conyers does have an air of someone who is comfortable with the idea of impeachment and is not afraid to consider it on its merits. Even if he's being over-cautious now -- and I don't know that he is -- it comes across as a personal decision and not a political one.
Pelosi, however, I think strikes people as someone who is doing far too much political calculation. In particular, there is a fear out there in the progressive blogosphere that the Democrats have decided that they can play it safe -- can aim for a landslide victory in 2008 based solely on popular hatred of the Bush administration and not have to do any of the really difficult things that are called for between now and then to earn it -- and that this would be disastrous.
That perception, I think, is why she's catching the flak.
in 1972 most of our politicians weren't owned by aipac/corporations
in 1972 most people also thought our politicians would never let the executive branch hijack democracy again. they were wrong and now they are severely pissed.
anon, that is horseshit. It's obvious you were not around then.
The same accusations you hear now were heard then. In fact, the apotheosis of the "Both parties are the same" argument was probably heard back in 1968, when some radical lefties were actually heard to shout "Sirhan power!" at demonstrations.
Hard to believe, I know, but it happened.
Kids like you remind me THOSE guys.
At any rate, what does this have to do with my point? What has Pelosi done that was any different than what Albert did? And why doesn't Conyers (whom I admire) convene impeachment hearings? And why don't you hate Conyers the way you hate Pelosi?
Staroute's explanation is interesting but does not, I think hold water. It certainly does not explain the vehemence I sense.
Sorry, but in my judgment, this situation has much to do with sexism. But most of you would rather drink lye than cop to sexism, hence the fake history and the strained rationalizations.
She publicly said, "Impeachment is off the table"; which of course is best thing she could have said, strategically/politically.
But correctly, or not, many Democrats took that to mean she would actively block impeachment.
Hence the undeserved and ill-advised ire directed towards Speaker Pelosi.
She being a "she" has nothing to do with my opinion of her, or of the fine job she is doing.
I do not call Pelosi names and don't think ill of her. Yes, I have sent her two emails urging her to impeach Cheney and Bush.
But I have also sent emails to, and left voice mail messages for, all my members of Congress and members of Congress from other states as well, urging them to impeach Cheney and Bush. I have called the White House a few times and called for impeachment, too.
Hell, I'd urge the local dog catcher to impeach those two misanthropes if I thought it would do any good.
Joseph - In the main I agree with you on this one, but I think it would have gone more smoothly if Nancy had coquettishly recused herself rather than authoritatively declaring the matter shelved. Just my thoughts...
I don't have any idea what game Pelosi is up to, though I agree she should be the last to call for impeachment.
I am curious, though, if Albert ever explicitly claimed impeachment was "off the table", or something like.
Joe wonders why people find a comparison of an orange to an apple inapt, and considers they have made a fetish of the stem? Hardly, for goodness sake!
The fact is, these two situations are so unparallel that they are nearly anti-parallel.
The differences in the predicates are legion, despite whatever surface comparisons can be made.
Nixon did not squeak into his re-election with the lowest margin of any war-time president, in a decision determined in the Electoral College by a single state with manifestly corrupt vote tampering by his state chairman, also the highest state election official as secretary of state (as was Bush). Instead, Nixon sailed in with a 48 state win romp, carrying every state but liberal flagship Massachusetts and McGovern's home state of SD.
Nixon wasn't sharply rebuked by the electorate in the next mid-term election, with no Republican winning any open seat they didn't already have, over the president's atrocious handling of the war issue or other, impeachable, actions. The most immediately past election was his record-setting 65%+ landslide re-election, and rather, a historically embarrassing REJECTION by the electorate of the Democratic Party's candidate, as had rarely been seen for any major party's candidate except when that party was disappearing from the national stage.
There was no impeachable offense known of Nixon as of Carl Albert's swearing in as Speaker in '73. That proof only developed later, beginning with Judge Sirica's trial of the WG burglers and their eventual talking under his severe sentencing, and eventually, the SCOTUS-forced release of the Oval Office tapes, the sine qua non of the later near-impeachment. Albert did not accede to his office in a change of party control of both houses of Congress, in a historic sweeping rejection of Nixon for the war or his impeachable actions. Instead, he probably was lucky to stay in the majority, given how much Nixon won by.
By contrast, Nancy Pelosi ONLY became Speaker, against virtually all odds of normally determinative factors such as incumbency's advantages and GOP money advantages, because of the illegitimacy of Bush's election(s), his wholesale criminality (much of it admitted, as in the NSA eavesdropping), his lies to start a war violative of the Nuremburg standards of the worst war crime (aggressive preventative war), and his insistence that the war continue so long as he remains in office. (And the Republicans marching in goose-step fashion to his marching orders).
That is, the Democrats were given the majorities in the Congress, and Pelosi became Speaker, to a) end the war, and maybe secondarily, b) effectively end the regime of so lawless and criminal a president. It could have been predicted that the Democrats couldn't end the war with Bush in office, and if that was ever in doubt, it has since become quite clear. And yet, Pelosi unilaterally foreswore use of the ultimate check and balance the Constitution provides, as the top elected official in the Democratic Party, leaving little or no leverage or effective brake on Bush's actions.
Did Carl Albert state that impeachment was off the table in January of '73? Of course not-- it wasn't even a question at that time. Once impeachable matters were found, did he THEN state that impeachment was off the table? Of course, he did not, to my knowledge.
It was HIS party, the Democratic Party, that had just been roundly rejected at historic levels by the people. And when he on two different occasions said he'd limit his service as president to an interim basis, until a Republican VP was sworn in, THAT was the backdrop of his decision. Plus the fact that when this came up twice, there already had been a nominee FOR the Vice Presidency, and the only question was whether he could be confirmed IN TIME.
Albert probably figured, rightly, that if in the eventuality that the two DEMOCRATIC PARTY MAJORITY houses of Congress failed to get the already then-extant GOP VP nominee approved in time, and therefore as a result, he (Albert) acceded to the office, it would be seen as an illegitimate coup against the will of the people, possibly orchestrated by those in charge of the scheduling in the two houses of Congress (i.e., the Democratic leadership).
Besides all that, the Speakership has since become a hyper-partisan position as never before. Ironically, that began to change in Albert's later Speakership, in '75, when the Speaker was given control of the Rules Committee and those great powers. That continued to grow ever more partisan since Albert's time, with figures like Tip O'Neill, Jim Wright and Newt Gingrich taking overtly lead partisan position against the other party's presidents, as the titular 'head' and spokesman of the party when they didn't have the White House.
So there is far more meaning to Pelosi's taking impeachment off the table than you are willing to admit. She and her party had a mandate to do something from the people, and she decided to pre-emptively lay down her greatest leverage and weapon. Worse, according to many accounts, she pressured Conyers to do the same as a condition of his gaining the chairmanship of the Judiciary Committee.
NOT conditionally, btw. They both could have said some anodyne response, such as unless something more than what we have evidence for appears, we do not contemplate impeachment hearings. They could have obliquely signaled that perhaps that could happen, while making a formal non-denial denial. They did not, instead implying that it was not only off the table, but would stay off the table. As much as I believe plentiful impeachment grounds existed before, further developments such as the apparent corrupt commutation of Libby's sentence, the information of the political packing of the US attorneys offices, maintenance in office of a perjurious Attorney General, and etc., all create further causes of that action.
The Conyers of the past would have already introduced several bills of impeachment himself. I believe that Pelosi and/or the DP's consultancy determining the leadership's actions have muzzled Conyers' normal pugnacious instincts, and therefore, in effect, have done exactly the blocking that you believe is a fabrication of the PPs. That is something that Albert never came close to doing.
sofla
sofla, this sophistry is unworthy of you.
Look, you still haven't addressed my issues. Impeachment is traditionally handled first by the Judiciary Committee, not by the Speaker, for reasons that make sense. Yet today progressives are angry at Pelosi, not Conyers.
The fact that Conyers made impeachment noises in the past -- when such a move was hopeless -- but not now, only makes his present inactivity look WORSE. Arguably.
I can vividly recall the fury against Nixon, which was just as palpable as the fury many now feel toward Bush. The ire was well-deserved, of course. Still, there were jokes about people blaming Nixon because their cars wouldn't start or because a ball game got rained out. That guy was HATED.
And at the height of hatred, Albert did not convene impeachment hearings or even say the magic words.
That was Rodino's job.
And the folks who were so furious at the Tricky one did not transfer their disaffection to Albert.
You can talk and talk about extraneous matters, but you cannot change the history.
I think most of my readers understand that Nancy Pelosi would not BE Speaker if she had uttered words other than that "off the table" remark. You have yet to take me up on my challenges. What ACTIONS against the impeachment movement has she taken? How has she done anything truly different than what Albert did?
I'm waaaiiiiiting...
I despair of ever hearing an answer to those questions. Should I offer a prize? How about a free pair of headphones? (They still work in one ear!)
The animus toward Hillary back in the 1990s genuinely mystified me. It really was worse than the animus toward Bill. I recall seeing a post on usenet that said something along the lines of "I could not hate her more if she ate live puppies."
I never could figure out what the woman had done to achieve that level of ire, aside from being a female perceived (incorrectly) to have some power.
And some of the most ire-filled folk were themselves female.
Cah-MON, sofla. Let's be ruthlessly honest with ourselves.
You know damn well that Nancy Pelosi has unilaterally foresworn nothing. (A statement about a present situation says nothing about a future situation; today's empty table might be filled tomorrow.) You know that her words were politically necessary, and are JUST words. You know that she has DONE nothing against impeachment. Not a thing.
Yet you treat her as the main stumbling block. You do not feel one iota of animus toward Conyers. I'm a Conyers admirer, but realistically speaking, I'd have to say that at this point he is the real stumbling block.
If the Speaker were named Nathaniel Pelosi, your feelings would be very different, I suspect.
One last unimportant thing, sofla. I never said anything about comparing apples and oranges. Despite common opinion, you CAN compare the two. You can compare anything to anything else.
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Right-wingers hate women. They also control the media, which they fill with their rampant misogyny.
Weak-minded people absorb some of this hatred. That's why you hear so much negativity directed against Hillary Clinton and Nancy Pelosi.
In all fairness, Joe, the current climate is much more polarized that it was in Nixon's time. The past 7 years of the republican congress running rough-shod over everything and everybody in its path has left a decidedly acrid taste in the mouths of progressives and democrats, in general. Nay, dare I say a taste for the blood of the enemy. Something about that which blinds one to the niceties of civilized society. And so it goes.
However, you have stolen one of my favorite lines. She has no penis. Alas, tis true. Although one could make a case that the world might be better off with a few less penises in power positions, the bare truth is there for all to see. She has no penis. That aside, I think that is why people hate Hillary, too. Here is a woman daring to run for the highest elective office and, by god, she doesn't even have a penis! Why, how dare she?!! Just who does she think she is??
Adding to this toxic mix, we have the biggest mouth on radio, who doesn't seem to know what to do with his own penis, blabbing daily his hatred of women in general and women in politics in particular. As Thom Hartmann has said, there seems to be a concerted effort to turn the unfocused anger of white (formerly) middle-class men away from the corporate establishment responsible for their plight, and towards women in general and women in politics in particular.
Yet another reason is that no one is taught civics or government or even history in school any more. People just don't know that much about how the government runs and thus where to focus their energies. That said, I do think Pelosi could have demurred the original question by simply stating that was not her job and was up to the Judiciary Comm. I think part of the shock factor that some have not yet recovered from is that she was so adamant in her statement and so close upon the election. The celebrations were still going on and she took away the champagne.
sofia makes a good point about the pressure that may be put on Conyers by the leadership. I would add also pressure from the Clinton camp. I doubt she wants the electorate to be reminded of the impeachment of her husband while she is running for office. From all I know of Conyers, he is neither reticent or shy. In fact, if there is such pressure on Conyers, I'd be willing to bet most of it is coming from the Clinton/Emanuel camp.
fallinglady
fallinglady, I really appreciated everything you said.
Well, there is one point of disagreement. I recall 1968-1974 as being the most polarized period in this nation's history. Folks on both the right and left were talking revolution.
As for what may be going on behind the scenes -- oh yes, of course. I hope everyone understands that one day we will read exposes of what went on behind the various curtains. And at that time we will have to rewrite of all our current analyses.
Right now, though, we have to deal with the facts we have. Supposition and surmise are fine in their places, as long as they come clearly labeled as such.
sofla is angry at Pelosi because Pelosi supposedly has pressured Conyers. But we have no evidence that Pelosi has done so. Maybe she has. Maybe she hasn't. We don't know.
On this occasion, I'm inclined to leave the "gut reaction" thang to Michael Chertoff.
I think this chess board is more complex than any of you imagine (sorry, Joseph).
This is an administration that is, well, crazy.
It will push every move into a constitutional showdown, to be decided by the Supremes, the Supremes that even in 2000 with its more liberal conservative swing justice APPOINTED George W. Bush in a very nonjudicial ruling it specified would apply only to George W. Bush and no future challenged presidential candidate.
That, alone, changes the game from anything played in 1972. That, alone, moves the chess board into another dimension, as well, IMHO. Who in their right mind can consider this SCOTUS an independent co-equal branch of government when 5 of them (in 2000) simply stopped the vote counting so no one would learn the real electoral decision (which later turned out, in fact, to be Gore's win, in any combination of chad, no-chad, dimple chads etc ... not even counting the Buchanan debacle in Dade County and other "black box" frauds)?
No one wants to face this fact -- I don't like the sounds of it, either, but think about it: This really isn't a presidency we're dealing with at all. It's an anarchy.
Even in the 2004 vote, hundreds of thousands of paper ballots not proved unviable remain uncounted in Ohio with a spread between Kerry-Bush of something like only 112,000 (last I read, and again, that's not even counting the black box frauds and lack of authentic recounts as Ohio law required).
There's no factual proof Bush ever has been elected president by legally appointed electors, yet he assumes "executive privilege" and "unitary executive authority," this Congress lets him and this Supreme Court is sure to insist on it.
We're not in Kansas anymore, Toto. What do the people do when the train is off the track altogether?
Joseph, I agree wholeheartedly with you that Pelosi is getting far too much anger, when she basically can do very little to engineer impeachment proceedings. But I do remember Carl Albert as a very self-effacing little big man who, whenever he was back in his district in eastern Oklahoma, would come to my town of Spiro (1000 people) and walk the streets shaking hands and bullshitting with the locals. He knew most by name. This from a Rhodes Scholar who, at the time, was the most powerful person in the House of Reps. He was well-loved by about 90% of his constituents for just that humbleness. Times are different now, but not too different. The idea of the female Speaker in a house of Good 'Ol Boys rings pretty true here. I just hope to hell the Democrats have some idea of what they're doing right now. It would sure be a good time for it.
Discussions like this are why I love Cannonfire. I've read a s---load of books, and articles on the "internets" hours a day for years, but there is no substitute for the collective life knowledge and informed civil discussions I find here. Thanks Joseph for the effort it take to run this site. Yeah, you're an ornery cuss sometimes -ain't we all - bless you, and your informed posters.
I am with Molly. When a Democratic is in the White House, I would like to see the whole fraudulent, GOP election rigging apparatus exposed and the corrupt SCOTUS members who appointed Bush compelled to resign, as well as the two new justices appointed by the illegit Bush admin, Alito and Roberts, under threat of impeachment by Congress. That may be an ambitious aim, but well worth shooting for and demanding from the next Dem administration, IMHO.
No more calls for "bipartisan harmony" are desired by most of the American people. We need to ruthlessly and aggressively crush the corrupt and criminal elements of the GOP (which I reckon to be about 80 to 90% of them) and ensure -- in our own self-defense -- that they can never, ever grab political power away from the American people again. There is no playing Mr. Nice Guy any more!
I don't hate Nancy Pelosi but I can understand why American working people might find her dreadful in the extreme. It has nothing to do with the fine city of San Francisco. It's this. She objects to having to abide by a majority of the Party on the issue of fast track trade legislation, screwing American workers. Now, she's a big voting machine proponent, she just loves them. So she has her own definition of "majority," i.e., "a majority is what I say it is."
From David Sirota:
http://tinyurl.com/yohxnp
"PELOSI SAYS SHE WILL IGNORE THE MAJORITY OF DEMS IF THEY OPPOSE THE SECRET DEAL: Rank and file Democrats, led by Reps. Brad Sherman (D-CA) and Marcy Kaptur (D-OH), are planning to push a Democratic caucus resolution barring the Speaker of the House from bringing the Bush administration's request for reauthorization of fast track to the House floor for a vote unless a majority of Democrats approve. -Snip- Pelosi balked, indicating she will ignore the resolution. "I would encourage my colleagues not to be proposing resolutions that say the majority of the majority does this or that," she said at a press conference, adding: "I have to take into consideration something broader than the majority of the majority of the Democratic Caucus." Currently, polls show the majority of Americans oppose the continuation of the current lobbyist-written trade policies that fast track advances"
-------------------------------
As for impeachment, how could anyone take Pelosi seriously after this type of behavior. She's working out secret trade deals that are anathema to most of us then she opposes majority rule. What a champion of oligarchy she is.
I'm a bit jaded right after watching the disgraceful Senators like Sessions and Snowe (who is working with the Democrats!) mumble on with their incoherent blather that contains neither fact nor logic. Many of these people wouldn't get out of a good college English or Logic course, freshman level. Yet they rule, the worst ruling class in the history of the world because their stupidity might just end that history.
Nancy's not special, she's just another nihilist, fiddling while the planet burns; pretending she's what she's not - concerned about her fellow humans.
If these authors of the Iraq war, the Bush tax cuts, the bankruptcy bill, the repeal of habeas corpus, the enabling of what is quite literally the destruction of the human habitat - had one single ounce of shame, they would resign and confess entirely the many crimes against the people they have committed.
But I don't hate any of them. I'd just like to see them exposed for what they are
...Vitters of the body politic.
Joe, I'm sure that my memory is no better, and probably more faulty, than yours. But I think the difference between then and now is that then, we still had the feeling, the hope perhaps, that we could make changes, that things would get better. The anti-war movement was having an effect. Today, we are left wondering whether we can even save the country or is it already too late. Especially in view of the great one's edict today. There is an insanity at the top levels and everyone is terrified of pissing them off and making it worse.
I can remember following each uncovering in the plot during "watergate" and following the impeachment proceedings avidly. More with curiosity and a sense that Nixon was finally getting the comeuppance that he so long deserved. Today, I'm struck with awe and fear each day mixed with mounting anger at what these criminals have done to our country. If there are others who share these feelings, perhaps that is the cause of the frustration with leaders who they believed had the ability to get us out of this mess. In a sense, it's the helplessness that takes the form of anger at democrats they see as not behaving rationally in an insane world.
Hope this makes sense......
fallinglady
Not only was it Nancy Pelosi who first said "impeachment is off the table" == she said it in MAY 2006, when she was still House Minority Leader, phrased as a hypothetical... "A Democratic-controlled House wouldn't impeach," is what she said.
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2006/05/13/MNG94IRGOO1.DTL
This is remarkable, considering how much had not yet happened then. It makes me suspect it was part of a deal, that IF she wanted to be Speaker of the House, she had to say this publicly. I don't see anything nefarious in this, just that Democrats were already clear on a strategy, which was to put the emphasis on investigation -- which actually paves the way toward impeachment, and is well within the Democrats' power, as long as they stick with the doctrine of Inherent Contempt.
I think Joe may be confusing two different things. The argument that Conyers, not Pelosi, would be the one to bring impeachment charges forward certainly holds water. But he would have to get Pelosi's okay to do that, and she has insisted so far, publicly at least, that she's not ready for that.
My argument is a little different. I think she can say, or at least accept, that impeachment is ON the table, and will do so, but only if and when the votes are actually there; because the Dems can't afford to go for it and fail.
In this connection I want to call attention to an interesting little comment made by Congressman Maurice Hinchey (D-NY) on Peter Collins' radio program the other day --
http://www.peterbcollins.com/archive
-- but this particular program is not yet archived at the time of this writing -- for written excerpt see:
http://impeachforpeace.org/impeach_bush_blog/?p=2661
When asked what might be done to encourage House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to put Impeachment "back on the table," Hinchey replied that he felt it already was, but that Pelosi "doesn't have the votes to do it."
Hmmm... Hinchey feels it already is on the table... interesting.
The hostility to Pelosi on the part of Democrats has mystified me as well. But I suspect it's more due to the highly polarized and somewhat paranoid atmosphere in the Democratic camp, a lot of it justified by the realization that many Democrats, like Lieberman, but also Hillary in my opinion, were really Republican Light. I think it's also true, as Perry said, that we have weak-minded Democrats that absorb some of the Repug propaganda w/o realizing it. Maybe mysogyny is part of it too.
What a lot of people fail to realize is, the public revelation of how bad things really are is usually a sign that we have now figured out how the bastards operate, which is actually in itself a sign that things are beginning to improve and that a counteract is under way.
But please do not blame mysogyny for all the hostility to Hillary. I genuinely dislike her for her overweening ambition and calculated triangulation, both what she thinks and how she gets there. I don't trust her. I don't see how it is mysogyny. I happen to think Pelosi, who is at least as much a woman as Hillary, is an excellent leader and very smart politician.
Actually, what I wrote was entirely on point. You ask why was it that Carl Albert got no scorn from the party regulars for his silence on Nixon's impeachment, while Pelosi has for hers on Bush's, improbably suggesting the key difference was his genitalia and unconscious reactions to them and their lack in the instant case.
I pointed out the grossly different circumstances between the two cases, arguing that the details of the historical situations were so incomparable as to fully justify the differing reactions from the leftward of the party.
Imagine Nixon had somehow lasted in office through the mid-term elections, and control of the Congress passed to the Democrats because of his then-evident criminality. Imagine Albert stating impeachment was off the table. I think many in the party would have been highly critical in such a circumstance.
What Pelosi has done to halt this effort is to exercise dilatory tactics. She doesn't want it, party leadership doesn't want it, and they control the floor business schedules, committee assignments, and the like. For impeachment to be at all practical, it had to get going right away, perhaps even on multiple fronts in many committees and subcommittees, to get the supportive facts on record. Such an effort would need leadership support. Without developing the rich mine of evidence, or leaving it until too late, you've effectively killed the effort just by calendar considerations. We've already seen 7 months of very little, just now getting this subpoena skirmish. It is simply too much to ask Conyers to try doing this without leadership support, and perhaps against their active opposition, whipping the other members of the committee they assigned there to get in line with the leadership position.
My take is that the leadership has decided not to impeach Bush, so as to leave him the issue in the next election, rather than what the Democrats were doing in the impeachment. I think they got the prior agreement of Conyers to support that position, and are thus entirely responsible for the whole situation.
Given the hostile media, I'm not sure that strategic choice is wrong at all, as an electoral consideration. I am not mad at Speaker Pelosi. She may be right. They may never get their subpoenas answered, and when appealed to the current Supreme Court, may lose a balancing of powers test, making a roiling inconclusive mess of the charges and actually Constitutionally empowering Bush still more. If that's the calculation of the likely outcome, it may be better not to do it. And it would be proper for the leadership to make that policy stick.
But those who would judge her as a principle roadblock, and chiefly responsible, are nonetheless still correct. We've already seen how it's done in this partisan Speaker era, when Gingrich ordered every committee to look for crimes to add into the impeachment effort, and promised to always mention Clinton's and his administration's crimes whenever he made public remarks. He got the impeachment, even though he needed to use the lame duck Congress to do it-- unusually for the mid-term election, the incumbent president's party had picked up seats in the House, making enough difference that the impeachment resolutions would have failed passage. Because even though he achieved the impeachment, it backfired, and Gingrich's career was ended.
If Pelosi secretly supported an impeachment try, it would already be developing. She apparently doesn't, and the fact that it isn't developing is not unrelated. It is highly related.
Maybe because you need to do two of them, and handle the VP replacement nomination issue as well, it never was possible in the first place. But remember, the leadership and committee chairs also know that anthrax was sent to then-Senate Majority Leader Daschle and Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Leahy. They remember losing Mel Carnahan, Paul Wellstone, John Tower and John Heinz on consecutive days iirc, Hale Boggs, and more, in small plane accidents, and they all need to fly in campaign season.
sofla
cool Pelosi video
http://thehermitwithdavisfleetwood.blogspot.com/2007/07/55-have-you-called-nancy-today.html
I wonder if there is going to be a striing of unusual deaths connected to Bush's Watergate?
30 Watergate Witnesses
Have Met Violent Deaths
(From Midnight, July 12, 1976)
What are the odds of 30 people — all involved in the same horrible scandal — dying within four years?
Because that's what happened with Watergate.
Since the break-in at the Democratic National Headquarters on June 17, 1972, there have been 30 deaths — many of them violent — all of people involved in one way or another.
The odds are at least 100,000,000,000,000,000 to one. (One hundred million billion to one.)
An actuary of the London Sunday Times worked out that figure after witnesses in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy died within four years of his death.
Now Watergate has surpassed even that violence.
MAE BRUSSELL
By MALCOLM ABRAMS
MIDNIGHT Staff Writer
The CIA is behind it all. That's the conclusion of Mae Brussell — one of America's foremost assassination experts — a researcher who has collected every pertinent newspaper story, every book, every document since the Watergate break-in four years ago on the night of June 17, 1972.
Miss Brussell is the only person in America who perceived the gruesome string of deaths that stretches from Watergate to now.
She believes that a faction within the Central Intelligence Agency is responsible not only for Watergate, but for the assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy.
She believes, as President Nixon stated on the Watergate tapes, that everything horrible that's happened in American politics is connected, starting with the Bay of Pigs.
Some of the 30 people who died, she says, knew only about CIA involvement in Watergate. Some of them knew much, much more.
A few of the dead, like Martha Mitchell, Lyndon Johnson, Congressman Hale Boggs and Mafia hoodlum Sam Giancana, are well-known. Others might have been — if they had lived and told their stories.
But 30 are dead. And there's no reason to believe that there won't be more.
1. Beverly Kaye, 42, died of a "massive stroke" in December, 1973, while riding in the White House elevator. She was Secret Service agent John Bull's secretary and her job included the actual storing and preservation of the White House tapes.
It is almost without question, says Mae Brussell, that she knew what was on those tapes, including the 18 minutes of recorded conversations which were mysteriously erased.
As reported in the West Coast news service, "Earth News," on June 5, 1974, from the stories she told her friends and neighbors, she was convinced that the president and his aides were involved in the Watergate bugging and cover-up.
2. Murray Chotiner, a long-time friend of Nixon's was killed when a government truck ran into his car on January 23, 1974. At first it was reported that Chotiner suffered only a broken leg, but he died a week later.
According to a March 31, 1973 article in the Los Angeles Times, Chotiner may have been one of the people who received the tape recordings made inside the Democratic campaign headquarters in the Watergate building.
3. William Mills, the Congressman from Maryland, was found shot to death — an apparent suicide — one day after it was disclosed that he failed to report a $25,000 campaign contribution given to him by President Nixon's re-election finance committee. Mills, 48, was discovered with a 12-gauge shotgun by his feet and an "alleged suicide note" pinned to his body. In all, seven such notes were found, apparently written by Mills, although this was never verified.
According to Miss Brussell, the $25,000 came from the $1.7 million dollar secret fund for "dirty tricks" used by the Committee to Re-Elect the President.
4. and 5. James Webster and James Glover, key men in Congressman Mills' campaign, were killed in a car accident in February of 1972. Another campaign worker stated in the Washington Post on May 23, 1973, that the illegal $25,000 contribution was delivered to Mills' campaign manager James Webster.
6. Hale Boggs, the Congressman from Louisiana and a member of the Warren Commission, died in July of 1972, one month after the Watergate arrests. Boggs and two other men disappeared when the light aircraft in which they were flying crashed in Alaska.
The Los Angeles Star, on November 22, 1973, reported that "Boggs had startling revelations on Watergate and the assassination of President Kennedy."
Richard Nixon made some unintelligible remarks about Congressman Boggs which were recorded on the White House tapes, just seven days after the Watergate break-in.
7. Dorothy Hunt, the wife of convicted White House "plumber" E. Howard Hunt, was killed, along with 41 other people, when United Airlines Flight 553 crashed near Chicago's Midway Airport on Dec. 8, 1972.
Mrs. Hunt, who, like her husband, had worked for the CIA, was allegedly carrying $100,000 in "hush" money so her husband would not implicate White House officials in Watergate.
The day after the crash, White House aide Egil (Bud) Krogh was appointed Undersecretary of Transportation, supervising the National Transportation Safety Board and the Federal Aviation Association — the two agencies charged with investigating the airline crash.
A week later, Nixon's deputy assistant Alexander Butterfield was made the new head of the FAA, and five weeks later Dwight Chapin, the president's appointment secretary, was dispatched to Chicago to become a top executive with United Airlines.
The airplane crash was blamed on equipment malfunctions.
8. and 9. Ralph Blodgett and James Krueger, attorneys for Northern Natural Gas Co., were killed in the same airplane as Mrs. Hunt.
The two men, Miss Brussell contends, had documents linking Attorney General John Mitchell to Watergate, and documents of a secret transfer of El Paso Natural Gas Co. stock made to Mitchell after the Justice Department dropped a $300 million anti-trust suit against the company.
The money from these stocks may have been used for political espionage.
Blodgett told friends before boarding the plane in Washington that he would "never live to get to Chicago."
10. and 11. Dr. and Mrs. Gary Morris died in March of 1972 when their boat mysteriously disappeared off the Caribbean Island of St. Lucia. Their bodies were never found. But their names were on the dead body of Mrs. Dorothy Hunt, according to an article in the Oct. 3, 1975 Washington Post.
"The plane crash that killed Mrs. Hunt in Chicago has now been officially ruled an accident," the story stated. "But there's one bizarre coincidence that may never be explained.
"Her red wallet at the time of her death had a slip of paper with the name of a Washington psychiatrist, Dr. Gary Morris, on it."
Neither Howard Hunt nor his wife were patients of the doctor, who was already dead at the time of the plane crash.
It is interesting to note, Mae Brussell says, that Dr. Morris was an expert in hypnosis and that Mr. Hunt used "mind control" in his espionage work.
12. J. Edgar Hoover, head of the FBI, died on May 1, 1972, a month before Watergate. There is considerable evidence that he may have known about the White House "dirty tricks."
An article in the Harvard Crimson quotes Felipe De Diego, a Cuban exile who took part in the break-in at psychiatrist Daniel Ellsberg's office, as saying:
"Two burglaries took place at Hoover's Washington home. The first was in the winter of 1972 to retrieve documents that might be used for blackmail against the White House.
"After the first burglary," according to Diego, "a second burglary was carried out; this time, whether by design or misunderstanding, a poison, thyonphosphate genre, was placed in Hoover's personal toilet articles. Hoover died shortly after that."
Thyonphosphate genre is a drug that induces heart seizures. Its presence in a corpse is undetectable without an autopsy. No autopsy was ever performed on the body of J. Edgar Hoover.
13. Sam Giancana, the Mafia chief, was murdered on June 22, 1975, as he was about to testify before Sen. Frank Church's Senate Committee, investigating the use of underworld figures by the CIA, for the purpose of assassinating foreign leaders. Giancana had ties to E. Howard Hunt and the CIA.
His murder is unsolved, although police say "it didn't look like a Mafia hit." His former girlfriend, Judith Campbell Exner recently revealed her secret romance with JFK.
14. Lyndon Baines Johnson, the former president, died on January 20, 1973, in a helicopter ambulance en route to San Antonio, Tex.
Three months before his death, Johnson was quoted in the San Francisco Chronicle as saying, "We've been running a damn Murder Inc. in the Caribbean." This was two years before Sen. Church's committee revealed the plots to assassinate foreign leaders.
"Coincidentally," Mae Brussell says, "Johnson died in the arms of a secret service agent Mike Howard, who in 1963 had been assigned to protect Marina Oswald after her husband was killed."
15. George Bell, assistant to Charles Colson, special counsel to the White House, died of unreported causes on June 30, 1973. When questioned about President Nixon's infamous "enemies list," Colson told the House Subcommittee Investigating Watergate that the "late George Bell" was responsible for the list of 200 celebrities and politicians whom the President considered dangerous.
16. Lee Pennington, Jr., a CIA agent, died of an apparent heart attack in October of 1974. Immediately after the Watergate arrests two years earlier, he had been sent to ransack burglar James McCord's home. Richard Helms, the CIA chief at the time, did not reveal this fact to any investigators.
It was not until June 28, 1974, four months before Pennington's death, that the new CIA director, William Colby, reported to Sen. Howard Baker:
"The results of our investigation clearly show that the CIA had in its possession, as early as June, 1972, information that one of its paid operatives, Lee R. Pennington, Jr., had entered the James McCord residence shortly after the Watergate break-in and destroyed documents which might show a link between McCord and the CIA."
17. J. Clifford Dieterich, a 28-year-old secret service agent assigned to Nixon, was killed when the president's helicopter crashed off the Bahamas in May of 1973.
Dieterich was one of seven men in the helicopter, but the only one to die. Miss Brussell believes that in guarding Richard Nixon, he may have come to know too much.
18. Clay Shaw, who years earlier had been acquitted of conspiracy to kill John F. Kennedy, died of a heart attack, on August 16, 1974.
His death came just weeks after Victor Marchetti, author of "The Cult of Intelligence," revealed that Shaw had worked for the CIA. He had been on assignment in Mexico in 1963 at the same time as CIA agent E. Howard Hunt and Lee Harvey Oswald.
Shaw was cremated. There was no autopsy.
19. Merle D. Baumgart, an aide to Rep. Peter Rodino of the House Judiciary Committee on Impeachment, was killed in a traffic accident on May 20, 1975. Washington police described his death as "a routine traffic accident" — until they received an anonymous call to "look into it."
According to the Portland Oregonian of June 30, 1975, U.S. agents joined the probe but kept it secret because of the "stature of some individuals who might be involved."
Miss Brussell speculates that in his work to impeach Nixon, Baumgart may have come across some dangerous information.
20. Nikos J. Vardinoyiannis, a Greek shipowner who contributed funds to Nixon's presidential campaign, died of undisclosed causes in 1973. Watergate prosecutor Leon Jaworski was investigating Vardinoyiannis when the Justice Department declared that the Greek's contribution of $27,000 was not illegal.
The Department reached this conclusion, Mae Brussell says, even though the contribution was made after one of Vardinoyiannis' companies was contracted to supply fuel for the U.S. 6th Fleet, and even though federal law bars foreign contractors from contributing to U.S. political campaigns.
21. Joseph Tomassi, the 24-year-old head of the American Nazi Party in California was shot to death on the front steps of his Los Angeles headquarters, on August 15, 1975.
Two years earlier, the Los Angeles Times had reported that "the Committee to Re-Elect the President gave $10,000 in undisclosed funds to finance a surreptitious campaign to remove George Wallace's American Independent Party from the 1972 California ballot."
The Times went on to say that "$1,200 of the fund found its way to Joe Tomassi, head of the Nazi Party in California."
22. Mrs. Louise Boyer, Nelson Rockefeller's assistant for 30 years, fell to her death from a 10th story New York apartment on July 3, 1974.
At the time, as a consequence of Watergate, Rockefeller was being considered for the vice-presidency. Accusations had been made that he had been involved in the illegal removal of gold from Ft. Knox. It's believed that Mrs. Boyer supplied the investigators with this information.
23. Jose Joaquin Sangenis Perdimo, a Cuban exile who worked with the CIA at the Bay of Pigs, died mysteriously in 1974. Code-named "Felix," he had worked with Watergate plummers Hunt and Barker. In 1972 he was awarded a secret merit medal by the CIA.
24. Rolando Masferrer, another Cuban exile employed by the CIA, was blown blown to bits when his car exploded on October 5, 1975. Masferrer had worked with "plummers" Hunt, Sturgis and Barker.
According to Miss Brussell, "He would have been investigated for his activities in connection with assassination attempts on foreign leaders, had he not been killed."
25. Lou Russell, an old friend of Nixon's from the "Red Scare" days, died of natural causes on July 31, 1973.
In testimony before the Senate Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities, Nixon's secretary Rosemary Wood stated: "I met Lou Russell once when he came to the office. He said he worked on the old House Un-American Activity Committee and that he needed a job."
Russell found a job alright, with "McCord Associates," a CIA front run by Watergater James McCord.
26. Jack Cleveland, a partner of the president's brother Donald Nixon, died in Canada in November of 1973. At the time he was wanted for questioning in connection with a possible government pay-off to Howard Hughes.
Cleveland was suspected of being a go-between in a deal whereby Nixon's brother gained an interest in a large Nevada ranch allegedly in exchange for the president's clearing the way for the billionaire's takeover of Air West.
"When Watergate came apart," Miss Brussell says, "this deal came under investigation."
27. Richard Lavoie, chief of security for International Telegraph and Telephone, died of a heart attack on December 27, 1972.
At the time Lavoie was guarding Ditta Beard, an ITT secretary who claimed she had a memo that her company had contributed $400,000 to Nixon's campaign fund so that John Mitchell would not bust up some of ITT's holdings.
When columnist Jack Anderson broke this story, Miss Beard was moved from Washington to Denver, Colo., where she was hospitalized for an apparent heart attack. She was whisked away, Anderson claimed, so that she couldn't testify.
Miss Brussell suspects that Lovoie may have heard too much from Dita Beard.
28. Mrs. Andrew Topping, the wife of a man arrested for plotting to kill Nixon, died of gunshot wounds on April 6, 1972, two weeks after the Watergate break-in. Her death was declared a suicide.
Andrew Topping told police that "pro-rightist forces" beyond his control caused his wife's death.
29. James Morton was President Gerald Ford's campaign treasurer. According to a New York Times report of November 2, 1973, Ford was being questioned by a senate committee prior to his appointment as vice president, and was asked about a secret sum of $38,000 used in his campaign for the House of Representatives.
The Times story stated, "Ford confirmed under questioning that a committee organized in Washington raised $38,216 for his re-election in 1972... but Ford said he did not know the names of the donors because the committee treasurer, James G. Morton is now dead."
Like so much of the Watergate money, Miss Brussell notes, no records were kept.
30. Martha Mitchell, estranged wife of the former attorney general, died on Memorial30 Watergate Witnesses
Have Met Violent Deaths
(From Midnight, July 12, 1976)
What are the odds of 30 people — all involved in the same horrible scandal — dying within four years?
Because that's what happened with Watergate.
Since the break-in at the Democratic National Headquarters on June 17, 1972, there have been 30 deaths — many of them violent — all of people involved in one way or another.
The odds are at least 100,000,000,000,000,000 to one. (One hundred million billion to one.)
An actuary of the London Sunday Times worked out that figure after witnesses in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy died within four years of his death.
Now Watergate has surpassed even that violence.
MAE BRUSSELL
By MALCOLM ABRAMS
MIDNIGHT Staff Writer
The CIA is behind it all. That's the conclusion of Mae Brussell — one of America's foremost assassination experts — a researcher who has collected every pertinent newspaper story, every book, every document since the Watergate break-in four years ago on the night of June 17, 1972.
Miss Brussell is the only person in America who perceived the gruesome string of deaths that stretches from Watergate to now.
She believes that a faction within the Central Intelligence Agency is responsible not only for Watergate, but for the assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy.
She believes, as President Nixon stated on the Watergate tapes, that everything horrible that's happened in American politics is connected, starting with the Bay of Pigs.
Some of the 30 people who died, she says, knew only about CIA involvement in Watergate. Some of them knew much, much more.
A few of the dead, like Martha Mitchell, Lyndon Johnson, Congressman Hale Boggs and Mafia hoodlum Sam Giancana, are well-known. Others might have been — if they had lived and told their stories.
But 30 are dead. And there's no reason to believe that there won't be more.
1. Beverly Kaye, 42, died of a "massive stroke" in December, 1973, while riding in the White House elevator. She was Secret Service agent John Bull's secretary and her job included the actual storing and preservation of the White House tapes.
It is almost without question, says Mae Brussell, that she knew what was on those tapes, including the 18 minutes of recorded conversations which were mysteriously erased.
As reported in the West Coast news service, "Earth News," on June 5, 1974, from the stories she told her friends and neighbors, she was convinced that the president and his aides were involved in the Watergate bugging and cover-up.
2. Murray Chotiner, a long-time friend of Nixon's was killed when a government truck ran into his car on January 23, 1974. At first it was reported that Chotiner suffered only a broken leg, but he died a week later.
According to a March 31, 1973 article in the Los Angeles Times, Chotiner may have been one of the people who received the tape recordings made inside the Democratic campaign headquarters in the Watergate building.
3. William Mills, the Congressman from Maryland, was found shot to death — an apparent suicide — one day after it was disclosed that he failed to report a $25,000 campaign contribution given to him by President Nixon's re-election finance committee. Mills, 48, was discovered with a 12-gauge shotgun by his feet and an "alleged suicide note" pinned to his body. In all, seven such notes were found, apparently written by Mills, although this was never verified.
According to Miss Brussell, the $25,000 came from the $1.7 million dollar secret fund for "dirty tricks" used by the Committee to Re-Elect the President.
4. and 5. James Webster and James Glover, key men in Congressman Mills' campaign, were killed in a car accident in February of 1972. Another campaign worker stated in the Washington Post on May 23, 1973, that the illegal $25,000 contribution was delivered to Mills' campaign manager James Webster.
6. Hale Boggs, the Congressman from Louisiana and a member of the Warren Commission, died in July of 1972, one month after the Watergate arrests. Boggs and two other men disappeared when the light aircraft in which they were flying crashed in Alaska.
The Los Angeles Star, on November 22, 1973, reported that "Boggs had startling revelations on Watergate and the assassination of President Kennedy."
Richard Nixon made some unintelligible remarks about Congressman Boggs which were recorded on the White House tapes, just seven days after the Watergate break-in.
7. Dorothy Hunt, the wife of convicted White House "plumber" E. Howard Hunt, was killed, along with 41 other people, when United Airlines Flight 553 crashed near Chicago's Midway Airport on Dec. 8, 1972.
Mrs. Hunt, who, like her husband, had worked for the CIA, was allegedly carrying $100,000 in "hush" money so her husband would not implicate White House officials in Watergate.
The day after the crash, White House aide Egil (Bud) Krogh was appointed Undersecretary of Transportation, supervising the National Transportation Safety Board and the Federal Aviation Association — the two agencies charged with investigating the airline crash.
A week later, Nixon's deputy assistant Alexander Butterfield was made the new head of the FAA, and five weeks later Dwight Chapin, the president's appointment secretary, was dispatched to Chicago to become a top executive with United Airlines.
The airplane crash was blamed on equipment malfunctions.
8. and 9. Ralph Blodgett and James Krueger, attorneys for Northern Natural Gas Co., were killed in the same airplane as Mrs. Hunt.
The two men, Miss Brussell contends, had documents linking Attorney General John Mitchell to Watergate, and documents of a secret transfer of El Paso Natural Gas Co. stock made to Mitchell after the Justice Department dropped a $300 million anti-trust suit against the company.
The money from these stocks may have been used for political espionage.
Blodgett told friends before boarding the plane in Washington that he would "never live to get to Chicago."
10. and 11. Dr. and Mrs. Gary Morris died in March of 1972 when their boat mysteriously disappeared off the Caribbean Island of St. Lucia. Their bodies were never found. But their names were on the dead body of Mrs. Dorothy Hunt, according to an article in the Oct. 3, 1975 Washington Post.
"The plane crash that killed Mrs. Hunt in Chicago has now been officially ruled an accident," the story stated. "But there's one bizarre coincidence that may never be explained.
"Her red wallet at the time of her death had a slip of paper with the name of a Washington psychiatrist, Dr. Gary Morris, on it."
Neither Howard Hunt nor his wife were patients of the doctor, who was already dead at the time of the plane crash.
It is interesting to note, Mae Brussell says, that Dr. Morris was an expert in hypnosis and that Mr. Hunt used "mind control" in his espionage work.
12. J. Edgar Hoover, head of the FBI, died on May 1, 1972, a month before Watergate. There is considerable evidence that he may have known about the White House "dirty tricks."
An article in the Harvard Crimson quotes Felipe De Diego, a Cuban exile who took part in the break-in at psychiatrist Daniel Ellsberg's office, as saying:
"Two burglaries took place at Hoover's Washington home. The first was in the winter of 1972 to retrieve documents that might be used for blackmail against the White House.
"After the first burglary," according to Diego, "a second burglary was carried out; this time, whether by design or misunderstanding, a poison, thyonphosphate genre, was placed in Hoover's personal toilet articles. Hoover died shortly after that."
Thyonphosphate genre is a drug that induces heart seizures. Its presence in a corpse is undetectable without an autopsy. No autopsy was ever performed on the body of J. Edgar Hoover.
13. Sam Giancana, the Mafia chief, was murdered on June 22, 1975, as he was about to testify before Sen. Frank Church's Senate Committee, investigating the use of underworld figures by the CIA, for the purpose of assassinating foreign leaders. Giancana had ties to E. Howard Hunt and the CIA.
His murder is unsolved, although police say "it didn't look like a Mafia hit." His former girlfriend, Judith Campbell Exner recently revealed her secret romance with JFK.
14. Lyndon Baines Johnson, the former president, died on January 20, 1973, in a helicopter ambulance en route to San Antonio, Tex.
Three months before his death, Johnson was quoted in the San Francisco Chronicle as saying, "We've been running a damn Murder Inc. in the Caribbean." This was two years before Sen. Church's committee revealed the plots to assassinate foreign leaders.
"Coincidentally," Mae Brussell says, "Johnson died in the arms of a secret service agent Mike Howard, who in 1963 had been assigned to protect Marina Oswald after her husband was killed."
15. George Bell, assistant to Charles Colson, special counsel to the White House, died of unreported causes on June 30, 1973. When questioned about President Nixon's infamous "enemies list," Colson told the House Subcommittee Investigating Watergate that the "late George Bell" was responsible for the list of 200 celebrities and politicians whom the President considered dangerous.
16. Lee Pennington, Jr., a CIA agent, died of an apparent heart attack in October of 1974. Immediately after the Watergate arrests two years earlier, he had been sent to ransack burglar James McCord's home. Richard Helms, the CIA chief at the time, did not reveal this fact to any investigators.
It was not until June 28, 1974, four months before Pennington's death, that the new CIA director, William Colby, reported to Sen. Howard Baker:
"The results of our investigation clearly show that the CIA had in its possession, as early as June, 1972, information that one of its paid operatives, Lee R. Pennington, Jr., had entered the James McCord residence shortly after the Watergate break-in and destroyed documents which might show a link between McCord and the CIA."
17. J. Clifford Dieterich, a 28-year-old secret service agent assigned to Nixon, was killed when the president's helicopter crashed off the Bahamas in May of 1973.
Dieterich was one of seven men in the helicopter, but the only one to die. Miss Brussell believes that in guarding Richard Nixon, he may have come to know too much.
18. Clay Shaw, who years earlier had been acquitted of conspiracy to kill John F. Kennedy, died of a heart attack, on August 16, 1974.
His death came just weeks after Victor Marchetti, author of "The Cult of Intelligence," revealed that Shaw had worked for the CIA. He had been on assignment in Mexico in 1963 at the same time as CIA agent E. Howard Hunt and Lee Harvey Oswald.
Shaw was cremated. There was no autopsy.
19. Merle D. Baumgart, an aide to Rep. Peter Rodino of the House Judiciary Committee on Impeachment, was killed in a traffic accident on May 20, 1975. Washington police described his death as "a routine traffic accident" — until they received an anonymous call to "look into it."
According to the Portland Oregonian of June 30, 1975, U.S. agents joined the probe but kept it secret because of the "stature of some individuals who might be involved."
Miss Brussell speculates that in his work to impeach Nixon, Baumgart may have come across some dangerous information.
20. Nikos J. Vardinoyiannis, a Greek shipowner who contributed funds to Nixon's presidential campaign, died of undisclosed causes in 1973. Watergate prosecutor Leon Jaworski was investigating Vardinoyiannis when the Justice Department declared that the Greek's contribution of $27,000 was not illegal.
The Department reached this conclusion, Mae Brussell says, even though the contribution was made after one of Vardinoyiannis' companies was contracted to supply fuel for the U.S. 6th Fleet, and even though federal law bars foreign contractors from contributing to U.S. political campaigns.
21. Joseph Tomassi, the 24-year-old head of the American Nazi Party in California was shot to death on the front steps of his Los Angeles headquarters, on August 15, 1975.
Two years earlier, the Los Angeles Times had reported that "the Committee to Re-Elect the President gave $10,000 in undisclosed funds to finance a surreptitious campaign to remove George Wallace's American Independent Party from the 1972 California ballot."
The Times went on to say that "$1,200 of the fund found its way to Joe Tomassi, head of the Nazi Party in California."
22. Mrs. Louise Boyer, Nelson Rockefeller's assistant for 30 years, fell to her death from a 10th story New York apartment on July 3, 1974.
At the time, as a consequence of Watergate, Rockefeller was being considered for the vice-presidency. Accusations had been made that he had been involved in the illegal removal of gold from Ft. Knox. It's believed that Mrs. Boyer supplied the investigators with this information.
23. Jose Joaquin Sangenis Perdimo, a Cuban exile who worked with the CIA at the Bay of Pigs, died mysteriously in 1974. Code-named "Felix," he had worked with Watergate plummers Hunt and Barker. In 1972 he was awarded a secret merit medal by the CIA.
24. Rolando Masferrer, another Cuban exile employed by the CIA, was blown blown to bits when his car exploded on October 5, 1975. Masferrer had worked with "plummers" Hunt, Sturgis and Barker.
According to Miss Brussell, "He would have been investigated for his activities in connection with assassination attempts on foreign leaders, had he not been killed."
25. Lou Russell, an old friend of Nixon's from the "Red Scare" days, died of natural causes on July 31, 1973.
In testimony before the Senate Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities, Nixon's secretary Rosemary Wood stated: "I met Lou Russell once when he came to the office. He said he worked on the old House Un-American Activity Committee and that he needed a job."
Russell found a job alright, with "McCord Associates," a CIA front run by Watergater James McCord.
26. Jack Cleveland, a partner of the president's brother Donald Nixon, died in Canada in November of 1973. At the time he was wanted for questioning in connection with a possible government pay-off to Howard Hughes.
Cleveland was suspected of being a go-between in a deal whereby Nixon's brother gained an interest in a large Nevada ranch allegedly in exchange for the president's clearing the way for the billionaire's takeover of Air West.
"When Watergate came apart," Miss Brussell says, "this deal came under investigation."
27. Richard Lavoie, chief of security for International Telegraph and Telephone, died of a heart attack on December 27, 1972.
At the time Lavoie was guarding Ditta Beard, an ITT secretary who claimed she had a memo that her company had contributed $400,000 to Nixon's campaign fund so that John Mitchell would not bust up some of ITT's holdings.
When columnist Jack Anderson broke this story, Miss Beard was moved from Washington to Denver, Colo., where she was hospitalized for an apparent heart attack. She was whisked away, Anderson claimed, so that she couldn't testify.
Miss Brussell suspects that Lovoie may have heard too much from Dita Beard.
28. Mrs. Andrew Topping, the wife of a man arrested for plotting to kill Nixon, died of gunshot wounds on April 6, 1972, two weeks after the Watergate break-in. Her death was declared a suicide.
Andrew Topping told police that "pro-rightist forces" beyond his control caused his wife's death.
29. James Morton was President Gerald Ford's campaign treasurer. According to a New York Times report of November 2, 1973, Ford was being questioned by a senate committee prior to his appointment as vice president, and was asked about a secret sum of $38,000 used in his campaign for the House of Representatives.
The Times story stated, "Ford confirmed under questioning that a committee organized in Washington raised $38,216 for his re-election in 1972... but Ford said he did not know the names of the donors because the committee treasurer, James G. Morton is now dead."
Like so much of the Watergate money, Miss Brussell notes, no records were kept.
30. Martha Mitchell, estranged wife of the former attorney general, died on Memorial Day, 1976. A constant "pain in the side" of the Watergate conspirators, she was the first person to point the finger at Richard Nixon and suggest he resign.
Homehttp://thehermitwithdavisfleetwood.blogspot.com/2007/07/55-have-you-called-nancy-today.htmlside" of the Watergate conspirators, she was the first person to point the finger at Richard Nixon and suggest he resign.
Homehttp://thehermitwithdavisfleetwood.blogspot.com/2007/07/55-have-you-called-nancy-today.html
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