Thoughts about Richard Nixon

[piqaboo]

Gravity is just a theory, on a par with the theory of intelligent falling.

ROTFLMAO !!!!

Brilliant, barfle, absolutely brill!

[OperaTenor]

Will the U.S. press and the Politician who praised the Viet Cong and the Khmer Rouge come around as well?

Citations?

[Shapley]

Citations?

TImes Reporter, Vietcong Spy, Dies

Peter Arnett Strikes Out

Dan Rather Should Apologize

An Unflinching Look: Henry Kamm Discusses Cambodia's Past, Present, and Future
This is a long piece, here is the pertinent entry:

Q: Fenton discussed, somewhat defensively, Bizot’s anger at Western journalists who, at the time, were sympathetic to the Khmer Rouge. Since that is a category to which he might have been included, do you think Fenton was being vindictive?
A: Anybody who has observed Cambodia as dispassionately as possible will have a view of those who defended the Pol Pot regime as another “liberation movement.” There was some totally wrongheaded universal support among some Westerners for all the “liberation movements” in Southeast Asia.
I have neither admiration for the US, nor the regimes they supported, and equally spare sympathy for those who so fully embraced those “liberation movements.”

Mr. Kamm spent 50 years as a reporter for the New York TImes, mostly in Cambodia and Vietnam.

I could go on, but there is little point. If, 30 years after Vietnam, you have not yet recognized the bias of the reporting that came out of there, you're not likely to in the next few days.....

[dai bread]

Our Govt. at the time put us in the very embarrassing position of supporting Pol Pot at the United Nations against the Vietnamese who tossed him out. That was a very embarrassing stance, and the Govt. of the day at least had the grace to admit it, though not to overseas audiences.

[Shapley]

The Men Who Spied On Nixon: New Details Reveal Extent of 'Moorer-Radford Affair'

Just because you're paranoid, doesn't mean people really aren't out to get you.....

Under intensive polygraph testing in late 1971, Radford denied having leaked the India-Pakistan documents to the columnist. (Anderson died in 2005 without ever disclosing who had been his source, but he told author Len Colodny in November 1986: "You don't get those kind of secrets from enlisted men. You only get them from generals and admirals.") However, the young stenographer did eventually break down and tearfully admit to Nixon's investigators that he had been stealing NSC documents and routing them to his Pentagon superiors. Radford later estimated he had stolen 5,000 documents within a 13-month period.

Radford's stunning admission presented President Nixon with an unprecedented challenge to his wartime authority by the military's top uniformed commanders -- and with a delicate political situation. According to White House tapes released by the National Archives in 2000, and first published by this author in the Atlantic Monthly magazine in April 2002, Nixon wanted to prosecute Moorer for espionage but was convinced by Attorney General John N. Mitchell that the ensuing controversy would imperil Nixon's secret foreign policy initiatives and do grave damage to the armed forces. Instead, Mitchell was sent to confront Moorer and tell him, as Mitchell put it, that "this ball game's over with"; Radford's home was wiretapped; and he and his immediate supervisor were eventually transferred to remote posts. But the president and his men had no doubt about the ultimate consumers of Radford's espionage fruits.

"(T)he whole concept of having this yeoman get into this affair and start to get this stuff back to the Joint Chiefs of Staff," Mitchell told Nixon in one tape-recorded conversation, "is just like coming in and robbing your desk."

The matter remained buried from December 1971 until January 1974, when sketchy newspaper reports about the episode led to brief and inconclusive hearings by the Senate Armed Services Committee. As the Watergate scandal mushroomed and Nixon's political fortunes worsened, he and his advisers gave thought to exposing the Moorer-Radford affair, as an example of legitimate national security work undertaken by the Plumbers, but again decided that disclosure of the Joint Chiefs' spying would stain the military's honor.

"Admiral Moorer," Nixon told an aide in May 1973, "I could have screwed him on that and been a big hero, you know. I could have screwed the whole Pentagon about that damn thing ... Why didn't I do it? Because I thought more of the services."

(Moorer, who died in 2004, denied involvement in any improper or illegal activity, but did acknowledge, in an interview with CBS News in February 1974, that he perhaps should have been more alert in tracing down the precise origin of these papers he received.)