Home > Uncategorized > (“Watergate Was a Coup d’Etat Dave Martin on the lies we’re told to disguise the conspiracy.”) Watergate Lies Multiplied by David Martin…

(“Watergate Was a Coup d’Etat Dave Martin on the lies we’re told to disguise the conspiracy.”) Watergate Lies Multiplied by David Martin…

June 22, 2012 Leave a comment Go to comments

We are now in the midst of a grand celebration of itself by the mainstream media. Forty years ago this summer, through their great investigative reporting, they began the process that drove a president from office for the crime of lying about his participation in the cover-up of a political “black bag” operation.

Richard Milhous Nixon, 37th President of the U...

Richard Milhous Nixon, 37th President of the United States (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

 

To the more perspicacious young people among us who just became aware of their political surroundings in the 21st century, this so-called Watergate story, this morality play, must have them greatly confused. Isn’t this the same mainstream press that shows not the slightest interest in big-time hush-ups like, say, the omission of any mention at all in the official 9/11 report of the collapse, demolition-style, of World Trade Center Building 7 or of who might have been behind the forgeries of documents purporting to show that Saddam Hussein was attempting to obtain raw material from Niger for building nuclear weapons? Could our mainstream press really have come down so far so fast?

The answer, of course, is no. As you might expect, our press in the Watergate episode was not the great knight in shining armor that they would have us believe they were, rather, they were the same old blackguards that are currently covering our current presidential race as if the American people have actually been presented with legitimate choices. As it turns out, almost everything they have told us about Watergate is about 180 degrees from what actually happened. For a good introduction to the real story, I recommend two recent contributions by Charles A. Burris on LewRockwell.com, his article “Watergate Plus Forty” and his LRC Blog entry “Russ Baker and Jim Hougan on Watergate.”

Watergate might have been a small time burglary, but the entire episode was a big time spook operation. And that brings us to the title of this article. If the official Watergate story itself is phony, what is one to make of the 2008 fictionalized movie that is based upon a 2006 fictionalized play about a set of carefully edited interviews that essentially retell the outlines of a phony story? It’s like a fake of a fake of a fake of a fake; like raising a lie to the fourth power.

Actually, as it turns out, we are missing one of the links in the chain. The following is from the dust jacket of James Reston, Jr.’s 2007 book, The Conviction of Richard Nixon: The Untold Story of the Frost/Nixon Interviews: “Originally written in 1977 and published now for the first time, this book helped inspire Peter Morgan’s hit play Frost/Nixon.”

How about that? A prize-winning playwright somehow got his hands on an unpublished manuscript by one of David Frost’s researchers and saw enough in it that he was moved to turn it into a compelling play. One has to wonder how, exactly, that came about, but the dust jacket says no more, nor is there any explanation in the book.

As it turns out, the playwright apparently didn’t see quite enough in the book for his dramatic purpose. In the movie, his Nixon interview is one big desperate and frightfully expensive entrepreneurial venture by Frost and his young producer, John Birt. The advance financing that he had hoped to get from one of the major U.S. networks did not materialize and Frost is forced to resort to his own rather shallow pockets and to do the interviews as an independent production. If he can’t squeeze enough drama out of the Nixon exchanges to attract viewers, he could be ruined. If this were actually true, one would think that this would be of some matter of concern to Frost employee Reston and of interest to readers of his book. Since he makes no mention of this matter, we may draw our own conclusions about its veracity. Reston also fails to mention the drunken, self-incriminating telephone call that the movie has Nixon making to Frost in the middle of the night. As for the truth of that episode, we need make no surmises, director Ron Howard admitted in his commentary on the DVD release that the phone call was, “from start to finish, an artistic invention by the scriptwriter Peter Morgan.”

What is in Reston’s book that is central to the movie is Reston, himself, and his great research success in finding “obscure” court documents that, almost at the last minute, sufficiently arm the “lightweight” Frost that he is able to bring down the haughty and “heavyweight” Nixon to the point that the latter is forced, in essence, to admit his guilt before the world.

That’s all balderdash, too, but, at least, there is a James Reston, Jr., and he………..

EXCERPT

via Watergate Lies Multiplied by David Martin.

drronpaulrev

drronpaulrev (Photo credit: GunnyG1345)

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