AMERICAN CAPITALISM BEGAN TO FAIL IN ABOUT 1973---- Episode 2

     THE WATERGATE BURGLARS GOT CAUGHT IN JUNE
   1972

   Two of those implicated, E. Howard Hunt, and James McCord, had worked for many years for the CIA. Hunt had been the CIA man in charge of the invasion of Cuba in 1961, and three of the Watergate burglars were veterans of the invasion. McCord, as CREEP security man, worked for the chief of CREEP, John Mitchell, the Attorney General of the United States. 

Thus, due to an unforeseen arrest by police unaware of the high-level connections of the burglars, information was out to the public before anyone could stop it, linking the burglars to important officials in Nixon's campaign committee, to the CIA and to Nixon's Attorney General. Mitchell denied any connection with the burglary, and Nixon, in a press conference five days after the event, said, "the White House has had no involvement whatever in this particular incident." 

What followed the next year, after a grand jury in September indicted the Watergate burglars----plus Howard Hunt and G. Gordon Liddy --- was that, one after another, lesser officials in the Nixon administration, fearing prosecution, began to talk. They gave information in judicial proceedings, to a Senate investigating committee, to the press. They implicated not only John Mitchell, but Robert Haldeman and John Erlichman, Nixon's highest White House aides, and finally Richard Nixon himself----in not only the Watergate burglaries, but a whole series of illegal actions against political opponents and antiwar activists. Nixon and his aides lied again and again as they tried to cover up their involvement. 

These facts came out in the various testimonies : 

1. Attorney General John Mitchell controlled a secret fund of $350,000to $700,000 ---- to be used against the Democratic party --- for forging letters, leaking false news items to the press, stealing campaign files. 

2. Gulf Oil Corporation, ITT [ International Telephone &telegraph ] , American Airlines, and other huge American corporations had made illegal contributions, running into millions of dollars, to the Nixon campaign. 

3. In September of 1971, shortly after the New York Times printed Daniel Ellsberg's copies of the top-secret Pentagon Papers, the administration planned and carried out---Howard Hunt and Gordon Liddly themselves doing it ----the burglary of the office of Ellsberg's psychiatrist, looking for Ellsberg's records. 

4. After the Watergate burglars were caught, Nixon secretly pledged to give them executive clemency if they were imprisoned, and suggested that up to a million dollars be given them to keep them quiet.  In fact, $450,000 was given to them, on Erlichman's orders. 

5. Nixon's nominee for head of the FBI [ J. Edgar Hoover had recently died ] , L. Patrick Gray, revealed that he had turned over the FBI records on its investigation  the Watergate burglary to Nixon's legal assistant, John Dean, and that Attorney General Richard Kleindienst [Mitchell had just resigned, saying he wanted to pursue his private life ] had ordered him not to discuss Watergate with the Senate Judiciary Committee. 

6.  Two former members of Nixon's cabinet---John Mitchell and Maurice Stans ---were charged with taking $250,000 from a financier named Robert Vesco in return for their help with a Securities and Exchange Commission investigation of Vesco's activities. 

7. It turned out that certain material had disappeared from FBI files --- material from a series of illegal wiretaps ordered by Henry Kissinger, placed on telephones of four journalists and thirteen government officials ---and was in the White House safe of Nixon's adviser John Erlichman. 

8. One of the Watergate burglars, Bernard Barker, told the Senate committee that he had also been involved in a plan to physically attack Daniel Ellsberg while Ellsberg spoke at an antiwar rally in Washington. 

9. A deputy director of the CIA testified that Haldeman and Ehrlichman told him it was Nixon's wish that the CIA tell the FBI not to pursue its investigation beyond the Watergate burglary. 

10. Almost by accident, Alexander Butterfield, a witness before the Senate committee, told the Senate committee that President Nixon had tapes of all personal conversations and phone conversations at the White House. Nixon at first refused to turn over the tapes, and when he finally did, they had been tampered with : eighteen and a half minutes of one tape had been erased. 

11. In the midst of all this, Nixon's Vice-President, Spiro Agnew, was indicted in Maryland for receiving bribes from Maryland contractors in return for political favors, and resigned from the vice-presidency in October 1973. Nixon appointed Congressman Gerald Ford to take Agnew's place. 

12. Over $10 million in government money had been used by Nixon on his private homes in San Clemente and Key Biscayne on grounds of "security," and he had illegally taken ---with the aid of a bit of forgery ----a $576,000 tax deduction for some of his papers. 

13. It was disclosed that for over a year in1969--1970 the U.S. had engaged in a secret, massive bombing of Cambodia, which it kept from the American public and even from Congress.