Watergate-What Really Happened and Why it Unjustly Took Down a Presidency and an Attorney General

Listen to Part I of the interview with attorney John O'Connor on QUORUM RADIO.  

John O'Connor is an attorney who in his long career represented FBI official Mark Felt who was the high level agent revealed to be "Deep Throat" who was passing secrets to the Washington Post reporters Woodward & Bernstein during the Watergate scandal. O'Connor, out of indignation for how the public was led to believe that Nixon and his Attorney General were guilty of serious crimes, wrote the book Postgate: How the Washington Post Betrayed Deep Throat, Covered Up Watergate, and Began Today's Partisan Advocacy Journalism.

The story behind the de facto coup against Richard Nixon was that a group of CIA operatives, working in league with a White House attorney John Dean, who hoped to gather a dossier on politicians that could be useful for his government career, engineered a break in at the Democratic headquarters in the Watergate apartment complex.

Their target was a secretary and documents locked away in her desk connected to her activities organizing entertainment for Democratic party bigwigs and donors. One of these forms of entertainment were call girls. John Dean, according to John O'Connor, was interested in obtaining that list and the CIA was interested as well as part of their domestic spying activities. There wasn't secret intel relevant to the presidential election of 1972 such as campaign strategy to be had whatsoever. It was an operation to obtain dirt as potential extortive material against possible political opponents. The CIA sought involvement of some Whitehouse staff to make it appear plausible that the operation had Nixon's blessing such that the project was defensible as being in the interest of national security. Essentially the CIA was seeking a "get out of jail free card" to protect itself. The CIA sought to continue their surveillance operations with Washington DC area prostitutes and John Dean helped to facilitate cover for his own blind ambitions.

The Watergate break-in happened behind Nixon's and Mitchell's back and soon became an ongoing political scandal appearing on daily news headlines and on TV news each night. Nixon sought to wage damage control for months. This lead eventually to not only the downfall of the Nixon Presidency but with it his policy to stabilize South Vietnam collapsed as well. A mere 8 months later Saigon fell to communists. John Dean's book Blind Ambition points to the man who bore significant blame, according to O'Connor. The unintended consequences-the destruction of a successful White House administration resulted in the waste of over 58.000 American Armed Forces lives and thousands more wounded warriors disillusioned with their nation.