Mouth of the South

In June 1972, a comically inept group of bunglers and incompetents — led by ex-CIA agents — broke into the Watergate building to gain intel that would be helpful to Nixon’s presidential campaign. They picked the lock and then taped over it to keep it from latching shut, intending to come back the next night. But they put the tape on wrong, horizontally, so that it showed on the outside. A security guard noticed it almost immediately and removed it.

When the burglars returned, the door was again locked. They tried to pick the lock a second time. But they failed. They had to remove the door from it hinges. The break-in then was so obvious that when a student intern returned after an hour or so he immediately called the police.

A police car arrived minutes later, but the criminals’ lookout failed to notice…and failed to alert them. The police entered the building and arrested the five men in the Democratic National Committee headquarters.

What a mess.

The quality of America’s public and elected officials seems to have declined sharply over the last 50 years. But is it true? Today, we take a glance back at the Watergate scandal…and wonder: will the Epstein Saga go the same way?

Many scapegoats were proposed to explain the Watergate break-in. Many were the ‘conspiracy theories’ floated up like mists from the Potomac. Fidel Castro was behind it (several of the burglars were Cuban), said some. No, it was a CIA plot to ruin Nixon, said another. Nixon himself seemed to favor this explanation; he nearly fired Bill Colby…who later became a source for one of our newsletters.

Another theory suggested that Democrats themselves had set up the burglary…to entrap Republican operatives.

Two Washington Post reporters got on the case. Then the Senate set up a committee to investigate…calling witnesses to televised hearings. John Dean, White House counsel, spilled the beans to Sam Ervin’s committee in June of 1973.

The following month it was revealed that Nixon had secretly recorded his phone conversations. Naturally, the public wanted to hear them.

‘The Nixon tapes’ were roughly analogous to the Epstein files. They were subpoenaed.

Note that in the ‘70s there were still many people in Washington with what might be called an Eisenhower Era sense of right and wrong. And in the wrangling over the tapes, they were much needed; there were plenty of opportunities to derail the investigation.

Nixon ordered his attorney general, Elliot Richardson to fire special prosecutor, Archibald Cox. Both Richardson and his deputy, William Ruckelshaus, resigned rather than carry out the order. Then when the tapes were delivered, some were missing. This led to further back and forth and foot-dragging. It wasn’t until July of 1974 that the ‘smoking gun’ tape — in which Nixon tried to stop the investigation, clearly obstructing justice — was released. He resigned the following month…more than two years after the original break-in.

Probably the funniest part of the whole farce was the kidnapping of Martha Mitchell.

Ms. Mitchell was the wife of former Attorney General, who was then head of the Committee to Re-Elect the President (known pejoratively as CREEP). She was also known as the “Mouth of the South,” and had appeared on such popular TV shows as ‘Laugh-In.’

Martha Mitchell was, above all, a gossip. She would have a few drinks in the evening and then call reporters with what she had learned during the day. It was this that her husband tried to prevent after Ms. Mitchell found out about the Watergate break-in. One of the men arrested was none other than her daughter’s bodyguard, former CIA agent James McCord, who would connect the crime to the Mitchells and ultimately to the president’s re-election committee.

Mitchell was in a house in Newport Beach when she locked herself in her bedroom, picked up the phone to call UPI reporter, Helen Thomas. Steve King, however, had been hired by her husband to keep her from doing that. He broke down the door and pulled the phone from the wall. For the next few days, she was kept sedated and under control by FBI and Secret Service agents. And when she finally was able to contact Thomas, she reported that “I’m back and blue. I’m a political prisoner.”

Now it was out in the open. John Mitchell then resigned. He later went to jail. Martha and he separated and never saw each other again. She died in 1975.

That is the closest parallel we have to today’s Epstein Files. But today’s circumstances…and today’s cast of characters…are very different.

Will Pam Bondi do an imitation of Elliot Richardson? And who in the Senate has the stature of Sam Ervin to lead an investigative committee? And while Washington Post reporters have closely followed the tussle over how and when to release the Epstein Files, they have shown little interest in what is really in them.

How will it turn out? We wait to find out.