Lamar Waldron – 2012
The needlessly cluttered title says a
lot about this book. This is a flawed and
exhausting book about a crucial and little-appreciated subject; the bearing
that America’s secret war on Cuba in the 60s had on Watergate and Richard Nixon’s
downfall. Woodward and Bernstein’s All the President’s Men (1974) – often treated
as the final word on Watergate – is so incomplete and fanciful that it is
practically a fairy tale in my view; so Waldron’s book, warts and all, is a
welcome redressing of history. For one
thing, it is based on numerous records only recently declassified, and is
therefore more valuable than any Watergate book since the groundbreaking Secret Agenda (1984) by Jim Hougan and Silent Coup (1991) by Len Colodny &
Robert Gettlin. The main thing that’s
important to understand about Watergate is that it wasn’t about election year
dirty tricks gone too far and Nixon’s war with a righteous liberal press; it
was always all about Cuba. Though many
details remain elusive, it is fairly well established that Nixon, as vice
president in 1960, pushed the CIA to neutralize Cuban leader Fidel Castro,
which he expected to turn that year’s election in his favor. To do this, the CIA turned to the mafia, which
was eager to get back into Cuba and to have the U.S. government in its debt as
leverage against prosecutions. What
Nixon didn’t know was that his opponent, John F. Kennedy, already had ties –
through his father’s deal-making and a mutual girlfriend – to two of the
gangsters recruited by the CIA, Johnny Rosselli and Sam Giancana, and was a
personal friend of then-CIA Director Allen Dulles, all of whom could have kept him
apprised of Nixon’s secret strategy. This
fact is why we may never truly know the mafia’s or CIA’s true motives in the Cuba
affair; whether they sided with Nixon or Kennedy or simply hedged their bets by
half-heartedly helping both. Numerous
people who worked on Cuba over the next few years ended up involved in
Watergate too, including all five of the actual burglars and their ring-leader
Howard Hunt. Most significantly, it was
Nixon’s sheer horror of his instigating role in the highly illegal and
unethical Cuban war coming to light that drove him to such extremes, as
president, to secure any documentation on the subject. It’s what the Plumbers were sent to find and
its existence is what made his embrace of a cover-up so quick and
reckless. Many books have outlined this
long saga – the best of them focusing more on their serious implications on the
JFK assassination; (i.e. Warren Hinckle & William Turner’s Deadly Secrets, 1993 and Gus Russo’s Live By the
Sword, 1998) – but not until Waldron’s new book has everything been laid
out – laboriously over 800 pages – all in one place; and ending where it
should, not in Dallas but in Watergate.
For this, Waldron deserves credit, and even with my many beefs about the
book, I would still recommend it to anyone interested in the subject. At worst, we can regard it as – (to
paraphrase Oliver Stone) a “counter-myth” to All the President’s Men. The
costly, undeclared Cuban war was a secret for good reason; it was an outrageous
comedy-of-errors, a total failure in every way, and one of the worst foreign
policy disasters in our nation’s history, perhaps just behind the adjacent
Vietnam war, which did everything in the spotlight that Cuba did in the
shadows. There is substantial and
eye-opening new data in Waldron’s book.
It now seems pretty undeniable that Nixon was well-aware of Howard Hunt before the Watergate break-in’s, whereas
before we had to give him the benefit of the doubt that Hunt’s activities were supervised
at a lower level in the White House.
Newly released tapes reveal Nixon micromanaging not only partisan dirty tricks
and cover-ups but ordering actual crimes.
Nixon’s receipt of bribes from the mafia on behalf of Jimmy Hoffa are
also documented. Some of the Watergate
burglars’ connections to Florida mob boss Santo Trafficante are clarified
for the first time as well. Waldron quotes
several investigators who insist that the 18-minute gap on the Watergate tapes
could only have been accomplished by Nixon personally. The most damning allegation, (the one still
not definitively proven, in my opinion, thought it is extremely likely), is
that it was Nixon himself who suggested, or ordered, the CIA to cut a deal with
the mafia to assassinate Castro. This
was illegal on so many levels that, if exposed at any time between 1960 and
1973, the plot would have been an even worse scandal than Watergate. Nixon was acutely aware of this and he spent
much time as president trying to force the CIA to hand over its documentation
about his involvement, leading to a standoff with CIA Director Richard Helms
that forced Nixon to sloppily run the Watergate cover-up himself. Where I feel Waldron goes wrong – at the
expense of his own mammoth tome’s credibility – is in his tremendous assumptive
leaps and his thinly disguised agenda to whitewash the Kennedys in order to
present Nixon and Helms as exceptionally villainous; (Robert Kennedy withheld
information about Cuba from the Warren Commission, for example, in order to
save the lives of American agents in Cuba, but when Helms did the exact same thing, it was to save his job.) To insist, against almost overwhelming evidence to the contrary, that the Kennedys had no idea what the CIA was up to with the mafia, and in fact had no mob ties whatsoever, (simply because Waldron has decided that they were rich enough and couldn't have needed money), is just bizarre and delusional to me. To accept without
question the assertions of mobsters, spies and convicted criminals, just
because they corroborate his thesis, while also insisting that various
testimonies from people who don’t agree are untrustworthy, is pretty shoddy and
hypocritical, in my opinion. Persistent
repetitions – such as about Nixon and Joseph McCarthy being “friends” and
Howard Hunt being Richard Helms’ “protégé” – occur without the slightest
support beyond them suiting Waldron’s premise.
Both things may very well be true, but Waldron gives us nothing by way
of examples or evidence. He makes far
too frequent use of phrases like “probably,” “most likely” and “must have” when
he has no data to accompany his suppositions, however well-informed they are. He also uses terms like “don” and “godfather”
as mob titles quite liberally, which is silly because no one in the mafia ever
used those words; they were invented by Mario Puzo for his novel The Godfather and only entered common usage
after the film adaptation became a blockbuster.
Granted, the book is long, but surely the author or publisher could have
assigned an intern to scour the manuscripts for grammar and spelling issues;
but instead much punctuation and many words are incorrect or simply missing, to
a degree that is extremely distracting.
All these things smack of amateurism, which is unfortunate since Waldron has obviously spent many years doing
his homework and has a genuinely important story to tell. Why not, then, go the extra mile to make the
book a work of credible journalism and history, not just one more obsessive and
slightly hysterical entry in a long line of paranoid and conspiracy-addled
books about the JFK-Nixon years?
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