The Nixon Conspiracy

ISBN:978-1642937152

Geoff Shepard was there for Watergate. In The Nixon Conspiracy Shepard goes all in. He describes how at first he was disgusted by Nixon’s resignation and thought that Nixon had betrayed everyone–including Shepard who was, at that point, a lawyer on Nixon’s staff. Shepard even characterized the evidence against Nixon in a specific way familiar to everyone who remembers the case–he coined the neologism “the smoking gun”. The phrase referred to a recorded conversation where Nixon formulates a plan with Haldeman to have the CIA ask the FBI to “stay the hell out of this” (this referring to the investigation). The idea was to suggest that the FBI had blundered into some covert matters entangled with the CIA. This, most everyone concluded, was Nixon trying to obstruct justice.

Shepard, however, makes a different case. He finds, after investigating some records that were unsealed only in 2018, that there was a coordinated deep state effort to remove Nixon from the Whitehouse in part because Nixon had plans to reorganize the federal government. Why Watergate was broken in to is still not necessarily firmly addressed by this work but the thesis would appear to suggest that Gordon Liddy might have gone a little crazy in trying to shut down leaks. It might also have been the leak issue combined with the actual CIA being involved in some “sex for blackmail” types of operations that directly concerned John Dean. Really, it bluntly seems to be a lot of corruption that did not want any kind of reform which Nixon was poised to address. It did not help anything that there were Kennedy’s out there in the wings using the whole ordeal to try to get a Kennedy elected to the Oval Office.

Shepard goes above and beyond in addressing this case–especially over at his website where you can find an entire chronology of the events. The scholarship is first-rate. It is rare to see a website as helpful as this one is. Clearly, Shepard is very motivated to tell this story. He does this by going through each piece and provides certain insights only he was privy to by having been there.

The most startling thing, however, that Shepard finds, is a record unsealed in 2018 that is called the “Road Map”. This document was secretly transmitted to the House Judiciary Committee through arranged meetings with the judge involved in the case and prosecuting attorneys. It contained skewed events with evidence and footnotes of what happened and when. The problem was that these events were often inferred, or made to fit a narrative timeline. This timeline said that Nixon was guilty of ordering the break-in, and the roadmap simply pointed to how.

The facts as Shepard presents them are that Nixon had no inkling about the break-in. Indeed, his position was that the whole thing was stupid. The asking of the CIA to tell the FBI to stay out of the situation concerned keeping the confidentiality of a couple of Democratic donors to Nixon’s campaign private. The smoking gun in this interpretation of what occurred, is little more than a campfire sending smoke signals. Problem is, the natives are not sure how to interpret what the chief is saying, and more than a few of them have their minds set on being chief some day themselves of some tribe, somewhere.

The rest of the thesis, though interesting, basically reads like a Who’s Who of the 70’s corrupted political landscape. Power is removed from the DOJ and special prosecutors are brought in that use special definitions of certain things in order to make their charges stick. Prosecutorial task forces are formed with the sole purpose of making sure their targets go down. Everyone in the Nixon administration begins eating everyone else, so that they minimize the damage done to their own reputation. At the top of the heap of this corrupt is one Leon Jarworski, who, coming from Texas, had all ready succeeded in bringing about some creative litigation–the kind that the Nixon prosecutorial task forces needed. The checks and balances of the legal system go out the door, and most of the rest of the event becomes a bargaining session for the tapes which Nixon had made of the presidency so that he could, later, refer to them to tell his own stories through memoirs and biographies. Ironically, Nixon thought that the truth would come out and the tapes would be mostly harmless. Sure, there might be some unflattering things said on them, but nothing criminal. He was wrong, since everyone twisted them to say just exactly what they wanted them to say. Jarwoski went as far as withholding exculpatory evidence which he had done before in his “creative litigation” phase.

If nothing else, Shepard’s work is an indictment of judicial procedure that was implemented in Watergate. There are enough problems here for the conclusions to be thrown out in any case, let alone one concerning the President of the United States. Shepard concludes everyone owes Nixon an apology, especially in light of the Trump era where the same kinds of things were attempted. He might be right.

Nixon, in his own words, said that he was guilty of asking the CIA to stop the investigation. Of course, he asked them to do this because the entire thing had spun out of control. The tapes serve as a kind of plot line as to what happened to Nixon himself. “Don t lie to them,” said Nixon, “to the extent to say there’s no involvement (on the part of the president) but just say this is sort of a comedy of errors, bizarre, without getting into it.” That is exactly what happened to Nixon. It was a comedy of errors, and it was bizarre, and the first person to take a real crack at clearing it up in a comprehensible way has to be Geoff Shepherd.