Limited Hangout

Though it's widely agreed upon that DNC chairman Larry O'Brien was the de facto target of the Watergate burglary, it is not agreed upon why he was targeted or by whom. CRP deputy director Jeb Magruder and White House counsel John Dean both, at different times, have alleged that he was targeted because of his role in pushing the ITT scandal early in the spring of 1972, but as we shall see...

After John Mitchell turned down G Gordon Liddy's bonkers Gemstone proposal on January 27, 1972, John Dean passed the burden of getting the campaign intelligence program approved to Jeb Magruder. A second, more conservative proposal was then presented to Mitchell on February 4 but was once more deferred. Following these back-to-back failures to get Gemstone approved, Magruder found himself und...

The Committee to Re-elect the President got off to a disorganized start as Attorney General John Mitchell dragged his feet on his slow march over from the Justice Department to once more manage Nixon's presidential campaign. Running the committee in his boss's absence, deputy director Jeb Magruder quickly found himself overwhelmed by his newfound role atop the CRP as he faced unrelenting...

Nixon really flipped his lid in the summer of 1971. In response to the leak of the Pentagon Papers by Daniel Ellsberg, the increasingly paranoid president ranted about conspiracies and pushed for the development of an internal White House intelligence capability to deal with the leak problem. The first apparent development to result from this escalation was the proposed firebombing and burglary of...

Refusal by the FBI and CIA to accommodate Nixon’s many demands for intel –– on both domestic terrorists and his political enemies –– prompted the initial development of White House intelligence capabilities, as well as an attempted overhaul of the intelligence community as a whole. But a conflict with J Edgar Hoover sunk the president’s plans and insured that the intelligence community would remai...

In response to foreign policy leaks and other concerns early in his presidency, Nixon pushed his intelligence agencies, much like his predecessor once did, to produce intel through warrantless surveillance. This episode, we meet the president's inner circle –– Henry Kissinger, John Mitchell, Bob Haldeman, and John Ehrlichman –– and we examine how then recent scandals involving the FBI and CIA...

Watergate is the most infamous scandal in American history; yet in spite of its high name recognition, there is still an awful lot that we don't know about the bungled burglary that started it all –– namely, why was the Democratic National Committee even targeted in the first place? It's a simple question with no easy answers. In this series overview, I lay out what's missing from t...

Richard Nixon was not the first president to make questionable demands for political intelligence. Rather than a bug of his administration, espionage was a feature of the postwar presidency. In this episode, we explore how past presidents –– particularly LBJ –– made personal use of the FBI and CIA, we examine how escalating social unrest prompted a push to expand domestic surveillance, and we cons...