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McCord's CIA Confession: The Sentence That Made Watergate Inevitable
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
When James McCord told a federal judge he'd worked for the CIA, a botched break-in became a constitutional crisis. This chapter traces the Watergate scandal from Frank Wills's flashlight to Deep Throat's parking garage.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Here's what made James McCord different from the other four men arrested that night. He didn't panic.
Let's go back to the beginning. June seventeenth, nineteen seventy-two.
The five men arrested that night weren't acting alone. They were part of a secret White House unit that Nixon had created in nineteen seventy-one after Daniel Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers, a classified government study on the Vietnam War, to the press.
While the Nixon administration worked to bottle the story, two reporters at the Washington Post were doing the opposite. Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein were not the most senior journalists in Washington.
The Senate Watergate Committee began its televised hearings in the summer of nineteen seventy-three. Millions of Americans watched.
Before the tapes became the central issue, there was testimony. John Dean had been White House counsel.
The Supreme Court ruled unanimously in July of nineteen seventy-four that Nixon had to hand over the tapes. Executive privilege did not protect him from a criminal subpoena.
Return for a moment to that courthouse, to McCord and his four words: Central Intelligence Agency. What that disclosure did, in practical terms, was force every subsequent question to be a bigger question.
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