Silent Coup, by Len Colodny and Robert Gettlin
Meyer, Herbert E.
o many self-proclaimed "investigative reporters" have written books during the last few years that the formula for this kind of book is now down pat: Pick a well-known public scandal, expose what...
...John Mitchell, attorney general and then head of Nixon's re-election committee, was innocent of the crimes and was duped by Dean into believing that a cover-up was necessary to protect the President who, Dean told Mitchell, was involved...
...Indeed, the tape suggestspowerfully that Nixon personally was involved up to his elbows—which, if true, demolishes Silent Coup's central thesis that an innocent Nixon was done in by his various subordinates...
...In sum, Nixon, and to a lesser extent Attorney General John Mitchell, were the victims of a double-whammy: Haig SILENT COUP: THE REMOVAL OF A PRESIDENT Len Colodny and Robert Gettlin/St...
...But to call what they did "spying" is to reveal an appalling ignorance of just how bureaucratic hardball gets played in Washington's major league...
...In a conversation on April 26, 1973, H. R. Haldeman spelled out for Nixon—for Nixon—how money moved from Mitchell to E. Howard Hunt's lawyer...
...This may well be because the public no longer thinks the Nixon years are worth very much attention...
...To which Colson replies: "Well, apparently we did, of course, at Watergate, mainly on Hughes...
...Writing in the New York Times Book Review on June 23, Ambrose concludes: To call Mr...
...I don't...
...In fact, the book's sensational charges have generated less controversy than, say, the question of whether to exhume Zachary Taylor's body in hopes of learning whether that poor devil died of natural causes or was poisoned...
...Ambrose supports his view by citing the transcripts of Watergate tapes released by the National Archives on June 4 of this year, one month after the publication of Silent Coup...
...Watergate was a John Dean operation all the way, spawned by his efforts to advance his career by obtaining sexual dirt on Democrats and made possible by his girlfriend's relationship with the aforementioned madam...
...In any case, future historians looking back at the Nixon years likely will focus not on Watergate but on Vietnam, and on how an administration led by a President purported to be such a hard-headed, global-minded geo-strategist—and supported by a national security adviser/secretary of state with an equally exalted reputation—somehow led the world's most powerful nation to military defeat...
...N o question about it, this is an attention-grabbing collection of allegations and judgments...
...The two Watergate break-ins were the brainchild of John Dean, as part of an unauthorized investigation to determine whether any high-level Democrats patronized a call-girl ring headquartered across the street from the Democratic National Committee's offices...
...Working separately but along parallel tracks, Haig and Dean forced Nixon to resign the Presidency two years after his 1972 landslide re-election...
...Some may hold up—I vote for the Woodward-Haig connection—but ultimately the whole thing crashes into a wall of contrary evidence and common sense...
...Nixon an innocent victim of plots engendered, directed and carried out by two men who were not even in communication with each other, grossly distorts the politics of Watergate and displays a stunning ignorance of how the government under Mr...
...So much for Silent Coup's core allegation that the Watergate break-ins were a John Dean operation with the sole intention of gathering sexual dirt on top level Democrats...
...And in a taped conversation on January 8, 1973, Ambrose reports, Nixon complains to Charles Colson, his special counsel, that they failed to get any information from the many bugs placed by G. Gordon Liddy and Hunt around Washington...
...The problem with books like these is that it is utterly beyond a reader's capacity—even one who dutifully tracked the scandal as it unfolded—to evaluate the author's revelations and conclusions...
...They won't learn much from Silent Coup.0 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 1991 39...
...The book is chock-full of allegations and judgments, of which these seem to be the most important: • President Nixon's "obsessive secrecy," his decision to cut the military out of major decisions on the Vietnam war, and his plan to sign antis treaties and improve relations with the Soviet Union and China, caused the Joint Chiefs of Staff to view Nixon as "out of control" and led to a military spying operation inside the White House...
...The reader's dilemma is whether to wait for the experts' judgments—by which time the book may no longer be hot, or even available—or to succumb to the publisher's hype, buy a copy, then jump in and wallow in the scandal one more time for the sheer fun of it, without any hope of seriously coming to grips with the authors' claims...
...And Dean may well have acted on his idiotic idea to provide the Republicans with political advantage by finding information that would compromise leading Democrats, based on his knowledge of that call-girl ring with whose madam Dean's girlfriend and later wife sometimes roomed...
...For despite its fleeting commercial success Silent Coup has failed to trigger anything even remotely resembling a national flap...
...The generally held view, that the break-ins were ordered to get information on an alleged relationship between DNC Chairman Lawrence O'Brien and Howard Hughes, is simply false...
...In sum, Silent Coup is a mess, with allegations and judgments flying all over the place...
...24.95 Herbert E. Meyer 38 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 1991 working to protect himself and the military, along with Dean maneuvering to protect himself and his bride...
...Bob Woodward, who with Carl Bernstein led the Washington Post's Watergate team and later authored All The President's Men, served as a naval officer during the 1960s and in 1970 under some of the same senior officers later involved in the spy ring, and during this time he routinely briefed Haig at the White House...
...More important, neither does Stephen E. Ambrose, the distinguished historian and author of highly regarded multi-volume biographies both of Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon...
...ilent Coup's fast rise onto the best-1.3 seller lists is less a reflection on the public's continuing interest in Watergate than a result of the publisher's hype job to draw readers before the book's flaws could emerge...
...Whether what he did was sufficiently awful to justify his resignation, and whether the media and the Democratic-controlled Congress used Watergate to destroy a President whose politics they despised, are questions that Silent Coup ignores...
...But are the allegations true...
...Nixonhimself is settling into a minor niche in history, and were it not for his resignation, he would become as obscure to future generations as, well, Zachary Taylor...
...Haldeman goes on to quote Mitchell saying, in reference to Hunt's demand for money, "It's taken care of...
...Haig did all this in part to hide the truth about the Joint Chiefs' spy ring and his connection to it...
...author of Real-World Intelligencq served during the Reagan Administration as special assistant to the director of central intelligence and vice chairman of the CIA's National Intelligence Council before the experts have had a chance to pronounce on it and, perhaps, buy it...
...Martin's Press/507 pp...
...Shortly before the second, ill-fated Watergate break-in, Dean used a pretext to bring federal prosecutors to the White House so he could copy an address book they had seized from a young lawyer involved in the call-girl ring...
...Thus Woodward and Haig had a close relationship never before known by the public...
...The madam of this call-girl ring was the friend and sometime roommate of Maureen Biner, then Dean's girlfriend and later his wife...
...But if the usual pattern of books like these prevails—Bob Woodward's own Veil is a classic example—exposure of these flaws will send Silent Coup's sales plummeting...
...No doubt the Nixon White House harbored more than a few unscrupulous political operatives, not to mention an unusually high quotient of creeps, weirdos, jerks, idiots, and fools...
...T he latest such book is Silent I Coup, Len Colodny and Robert Gettlin's version of the 1972 Watergate break-in, its cover-up, and the ensuing political avalanche that buried President Nixon in August 1974...
...Woodward and Haig may well have had a long-standing and hitherto secret professional relationship...
...Between 1970 and 1971 this espionage operation funneled information to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Admiral Thomas Moorer, in an effort to uncover the secret actions of both Nixon and Henry Kissinger, at the time Nixon's national security adviser...
...The material itself is always so complicated and presented so breathlessly, and the author's interpretations based so extensively on the substance and nuance of every previously published account, that only an acknowledged, impartial authority on this particular scandal could begin to sort it all out...
...You can believe this if you want to...
...The book contained Dean's girlfriend's name and her call-girl ring code name: Clout...
...Match that against Ronald Reagan's extraordinary domestic and foreign achievements, and against George Bush's great military victory in the Persian Gulf...
...As Ambrose points out, this demolishes Silent Coup's allegation that Nixon and Mitchell were not involved in raising money to buy silence from the Watergate burglars...
...Alexander Haig, at the time Kissinger's NSC deputy, had "important relationships" with the spy ring's participants and helped facilitate the flow of information to the Joint Chiefs...
...When Nixon learned that he and Kissinger woe targets of a military spy ring, the President decided to do nothing about it—a decision the authors claim later contributed "directly and substantially" to Nixon's resignation...
...These are the presidenciesthat will be studied and argued about for generations to come...
...After all, irrespective of Watergate, the Nixon years were marked by social stress, economic weakness, and military defeat...
...o many self-proclaimed "investigative reporters" have written books during the last few years that the formula for this kind of book is now down pat: Pick a well-known public scandal, expose what everyone thinks happened as a tissue of lies, then reveal the astonishing but true story behind the headlines...
...And as the hours and hours of Oval Office tapes make clear, this President knew very well what was going on...
...The publisher's dilemma is how to stampede readers into buying the book Herbert E. Meyer...
...Haig himself was "Deep Throat...
...To be sure, some of Silent Coup's allegations may turn out to be accurate...
...And are the judgments that flow from them valid...
...Certainly Silent Coup's allegation is true that top-level military officers were going nuts back in 1970 and 1971 to find out what Nixon and Kissinger were up to...
...Nixon operated...
...The author's tone should be dogged, righteous, tough-as-nails but with a soft spot for the one protagonist who was thought to have been a villain but who—surprise!—turns out not to have been so bad after all...
...Overall, Silent Coup rests on the hypothesis that Richard Nixon was an innocent, befuddled chief executive who was hopelessly out of his depth in Washington and thoroughly out-maneuvered by Al Haig and all those military sharpies at the Pentagon, who themselves got an unexpected boost from an ambitious little creep of a White House lawyer, who also ran political and legal circles around Nixon...
...But every single one of these men was there at the pleasure of the President...
...As the Watergate affair began to unravel, Haig repeatedly concealed critical information from the President and "took other actions" that seriously damaged Nixon...
Vol. 24 • September 1991 • No. 9
