One of my favorite trails in our community is the one that leads to the Nixon Library and Museum in Yorba Linda. The Nixon family home is a few yards from the helicopter he took upon leaving office. There Nixon and his wife, Pat, are buried.
And as time goes on, and the more central events in American history continue to fade in the distance, the prescient words of President George W. Bush echo in their profundity: “History. We don’t know. We’ll all be dead,” the president intoned in response to Bob Woodward’s question of how history will judge the war in Iraq (Woodward, Plan of Attack, 2004).
Woodward is a prominent figure in Nick Bryant’s The Truth About Watergate: A Tale of Extraordinary Lies and Liars (2023, TrineDay). Bryant argues the acclaimed Washington Post duo Woodward and Bernstein were not the pillars of authentic Fourth Estate journalism that their reputation and legacy have suggested. But exposing this duplicity is only part of Bryant’s goal. In a succinct 170 pages, backed by over 2,300 citations and pages of bibliographic references, The Truth About Watergate does not overreach its ambitions, nor does it offer half-baked arguments. Rather — and Bryant makes this clear in the Prologue — he “conducted zero original research on Watergate to demonstrate that additional research is not required to declare the Watergate cover story a grand fabrication.”
Over the next twenty-nine chapters, Bryant crisply takes us through the bizarre events surrounding the inept break-in of the Democratic National Committee headquarters on June 17, 1972, and the subsequent two years that culminated in President Nixon’s resignation in August 1974. However, this is not a Wikipedia copy-and-paste job. With constant citation and not a little humor and a writing personality that engages the reader, Bryant makes the compelling case that the official story of Watergate as a shining example of the press exposing political scandal thus saving democracy is pious fiction. Bryant quotes one of the Watergate burglars, Frank Sturgis, in the book’s epigraph: “I mean, it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that Watergate was a C.I.A. setup. We were just pawns.”
Nor is Bryant is not simply rehashing events, but gradually bolstering his thesis: the break-in was a set-up job by the CIA.
The usual suspects pop up in all their 1970s glory, their names rolling off the tongue: G. Gordon Liddy, James McCord, Alexander Butterfield, H.L. Haldeman, Jeb Magruder, Judge John Sirica, and of course, E. Howard Hunt.
But I would be remiss not to mention perhaps The Truth About Watergate’s chief antagonist, Nixon’s final chief-of-staff, General Alexander “I’m in charge here” Haig. Bryant suggests Haig’s “happy to be here” strategic placement at the heights of power in the 1970s and early 1980s was entirely unjustified, a thoroughly undeserving four-star general (the youngest four-star general in history at that) who practically ran the country in Nixon’s final days, and whom Bryant argues was the architect behind Woodward and Bernstein’s bestseller followup to All the President’s Men, The Last Days. Haig later conveniently stepped in after President Reagan’s assassination attempt in 1981, and even managed a stint as Supreme Allied Commander of NATO.
In fact, while not mentioned in The Truth About Watergate, it should be noted that Haig and Nixon’s National Security Adviser and later Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, authorized Tuscan right wing financier Licio Gelli to “recruit four-hundred high ranking Italian and NATO officers into his lodge,” according to Daniele Ganser’s NATO’s Secret Armies. This was the illegal, secret Masonic lodge Propaganda Due (P2), a government-within-a government with tentacles that touched not only Haig and Gelli but also Nixon’s Treasury secretary, John Connally.
Nixon himself was not immune from Italian influence: his 1972 re-election campaign received generous backing from “God’s banker,” the Sicilian lawyer and Mafia-connected Michele Sindona. We’ll return to that link in a moment.
Bryant also deftly addresses Nixon’s both political talent and heart of darkness, a figure who saw a lot about how the world worked from his Congress days in the 1940s to his post-White House years as a freelance statesman (his final book, Beyond Peace, was completed two weeks before his death); Bryant does not paint Nixon in stark black or white. He certainly condemns the then-presidential candidate Nixon for his potentially treasonous actions during the 1968 campaign by allegedly interfering with the Vietnam War’s Paris Peace Accords through a backchannel with the South Vietnamese government via Anna Chennault (an issue that became known as the Chennault Affair) in order to delay the negotiations until after the ’68 election.
Tricky Dick’s schemings belied, Bryant argues, his genuine accomplishments: detente with the Soviets and China; his ambitious but rejected healthcare plan; his focus on education and creation of the Environmental Protection Agency. But there was a dark side to the genius that Watergate revealed.
There was “the whole Bay of Pigs thing.”
Here Bryant draws on passages from Jefferson Morley’s Scorpions’ Dance: The President, the Spymaster, and Watergate (2022, St. Martin’s Press), which itself directly quotes from the Nixon White House tapes. It was October 1971, just over a year from the 1972 re-election. Nixon wanted CIA documents on the murder of President Ngo Dinh Diem as well as on the Bay of Pigs from CIA director Richard Helms.
“I would remind all concerned that the way we got into Vietnam was through overthrowing Diem and the complicity in the murder of Diem,” Nixon had said at a press conference in the fall of 1971. The Nixon camp wanted to make the 1972 campaign about the origins of the Vietnam War. Howard Hunt was brought in to forge State Department cables “that would damn JFK by making it look like he refused to give asylum to Diem and Nhu,” Morley wrote.
JFK and RFK may have been dead, but Teddy Kennedy still appeared he might prove a formidable challenge to the incumbent president in 1972.
“I know what happened with the planning of the Bay of Pigs under Eisenhower and totally approved it,” Nixon said to White House counsel John Ehrlichman before meeting with Helms on October 8. “If he had just flown a couple of planes over that damn place,” Nixon remarked, referring to President Kennedy’s refusal to provide air support that never came during the failed Bay of Pigs invasion.
Essentially, Nixon wanted to know what the CIA knew. About Cuba, about JFK. If and when the press would scoop him, damage him, not unlike Daniel Ellsberg and The Pentagon Papers. He needed ammo to combat Teddy Kennedy. Morley writes:
“The tape of Nixon and Helms’ tete-a-tete confirms Haldeman’s belief that when Nixon spoke of “the whole Bay of Pigs thing,” he was making a coded allusion to the assassination of JFK. It was, Haldeman wrote, ‘the president’s way of reminding Helms, not so gently, of the cover-up of the CIA assassination attempts on the hero of the Bay of Pigs, Fidel Castro, a CIA operation that may have triggered the Kennedy tragedy and which Helms desperately wanted to hide.”
Morley goes on:
“Nixon just wanted to know how the Mafia plots related to Kennedy’s assassination. ‘If I don’t know then, then what do you have?’”
But what else was Nixon worried about, should “the whole Bay of Pigs thing” be brought to the forefront? Could he have been worried about his own past…and what he knew?
For Don Fulsom, former White House Press corps member and author of The Mafia’s President: Nixon and the Mob (2017, Thomas Dunne books), Nixon’s ties to organized crime were extensive and, ultimately, detrimental.
Fulsom believes that Nixon won the ’68 campaign “with near-solid support from the Teamsters union and the Mob.” Fulsom’s timeline in the book also states Nixon first met Howard Hunt sometime in 1947, a year after his successful election to the House, which Fulsom states was won by Nixon “with financial help from Meyer Lansky and other Mob leaders.” Murray Chotiner was Nixon’s campaign manager in ’46, an individual with connections to Carlos Marcello and Jimmy Hoffa, according to Jim Marrs.
All of this begs the question: was Nixon trying to blackmail Helms?
As President Eisenhower’s VP, Nixon was reputedly head of Operation 40, the Allen Dulles-established and possibly privately-funded operation to assassinate Fidel Castro. Fabian Escalante claimed Nixon recruited an “important group of businessmen headed by George Bush and Jack Crichton, both Texas oilmen, to gather the necessary funds for the operation” (Escalante, The Secret War: CIA Covert Operations Against Cuba, 1959–62). In this role, Nixon must have known of the CIA’s collaboration with the likes of John Roselli, Sam Giancana, Santos Trafficante, let alone the gunrunning efforts by Cuban exiles like Carlos Prio Socarras, who was aided by soldiers-of-fortune Frank Sturgis, Marion Finley, Enrique Ernesto Pugibet, Norman Rothman, and his associate, one Jack “Sparky Rubenstein” Ruby.
“The whole Bay of Pigs thing” was still on the president’s mind in May 1973. Nixon to his press secretary, Ron Ziegler:
“Now, look, I want the Diem and the Bay of Pigs [documents] totally declassified and I want it done in 48 hours…This is ten years old. Declassify it.”
Diem was deposed and murdered more than 2 ½ years after the Bay of Pigs, but only three weeks before JFK was gunned down in Dallas. Three heads of state…Diem, Kennedy, Castro. Two assassinated. The whole Bay of Pigs thing revolved around assassination, one way or another. It so affected the executive branch of the U.S. government that it brought about more than ten years of tumult: JFK forced out by death in 1963; LBJ forced out after only one full term; Nixon forced out by resignation; unelected Ford forced out by the 1976 election.
Finally, let us return to the scene of the crime. The DNC had occupied the sixth floor of the Watergate Office Building since the building opened in 1967. The developer of the Watergate complex was Italy’s real estate and construction giant Societa Generale Immobiliare (SGI). According to Joseph Rodota, author of The Watergate: Inside America’s Most Infamous Address, the 10-acre project off the Potomac was SGI’s “first massive project in North America.”
According to Nick Tosches, author of Power on Earth, it was Michele Sindona who “transformed SGI into one of the world’s most prosperous and important real-estate corporations.”
Dubbed “God’s banker” for being Pope Paul’s chief banker for the Roman Curia, Sindona allegedly funneled $1 million from the bank’s coffers — reserves stemming from the Vatican’s $89 million deal with Mussolini in 1929, the Lateran Accords, which recognized the Vatican as a city-state — to the Nixon campaign (though Sindona was told by Maurice Stans such a large donation was a violation of campaign finance laws). In 1969, the Vatican had a controlling interest in Societa Generale Immobiliare. The incoming Italian government revoked the Vatican Bank’s tax-exempt status, and the Vatican was looking to offload many of its interests. Sindona merely bought out the Vatican’s controlling interests in SGI, sold 16% to Gulf + Western, kept 40% controlling interest for himself, while kicking back 5% to the Vatican. Sindona sat on SGI’s board along with G+W’s chairman, Charlie Bluhdorn.
However, Sindona’s star shattered at the same time Nixon resigned from office. The collapse of Sindona’s Franklin National Bank on October 8, 1974 was the largest bank failure in American history at the time. Sindona was the bank’s largest stockholder. He defrauded the bank by $30 million to cover his own losses in the foreign financial exchange markets.
In 1981, federal prison looming, Sindona lobbied a pardon from President Reagan by way of his friend David Kennedy, Nixon’s former secretary of treasury. Sindona also attempted to contact Nixon himself for assistance. “There was no reply at all,” Nick Tosches wrote in Power on Earth. “Sindona asked Randolph Guthrie, Nixon’s former partner, to speak to him. Nixon told Guthrie that he was afraid to help Sindona, as it might further harm his image.”
Sindona died of cyanide poisoning in an Italian prison in 1986. As for Nixon, his funeral in 1994 was held on the grounds of his presidential library in his hometown of Yorba Linda. The eulogies of President Clinton and Bob Dole and Henry Kissinger revealed just how rehabilitated Nixon had become in the two decades since his ignominious fall in 1974.
