April 21, 1976

New Book About Nixon Is Garbage

No matter how much money you make selling garbage, you're still a garbage man.

And that's the best I can give the two Washington Post gossip mongers - Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward - who have parlayed the anti-Nixon craze into a two million-dollar fortune.

Having destroyed a president with rhetoric in Katherine Graham's newspaper and Newsweek magazine, and in a diatribe titled "All The President's Men," Bernstein and Woodward squeeze more bucks out of misery with a new book, "Final Days."

Not so coincidentally they are elevated to liberal peerage in a movie version of the original "expose."

Next year we can expect "More Of Watergate," then "Watergate Revisited," and "Son of Watergate" ad nauseum until Bernstein and Woodward are billionaires.

As garbage gets older it stinks more, and so does the third-hand hearsay that oozed from their typewriters in their latest kick to the groin.

We are told that Nixon sobbed, drank, talked to pictures, gulped sleeping pills, contemplated suicide, wanted nuclear war and brooded over his wife's refusal to sleep with him.

We are expected to believe that words made up by Bernstein and Woodward were so uttered simply because the writers tapped the quotation key of their typewriters before and after.

The book is not substantiated or documented and has no credibility.

It is a disgrace to journalism.

Adulation of Bernstein and Woodward as the reporters who "broke the Watergate story" is silly.  Judge John Sirica forced Watergate "confessions" by threatening 35-year sentences for a break-in to eaves-drop on political campaign talk.  Burglaries involving theft and injury bring hardly more than a slap on the wrist elsewhere.

As the manufactured "crisis" built up, a disgruntled White House insider telephoned Bernstein and Woodward regularly with confidential information.  The two Post hatchet men even had a code name for their squealer "Deep Throat," the title of a hard-core pornographic movie.  Bernstein and Woodward simply repeated what was fed to them.  Their choice of a code name is a sub-conscious tip-off of their attitude toward their assignment.

Though scorn and ridicule is heaped upon the prostrate former president, an objective reading of "Final Days" evokes sympathy for Nixon.  Even Bernstein and Woodward have to admit that Nixon had no prior knowledge of the Watergate caper.  His great sin was to try and pass off the "jackassery" as the trivial matter it was - find still remains today despite the hypocritical howls of "cover up" and "obstruction of justice."

The continued rehashing of Watergate seems to be necessary to keep the lynch mob convinced.

Once we get past the dark-purple adjectives we see that those closest to Nixon betrayed him one by one - starting with E.  Howard Hunt and ending with the Rev.  Billy Graham.  In between we observe the perfidy of Secretary of State Henry Kissinger; Fred Buzhardt, Nixon's attorney; General Alexander Haig; Press Secretary Ronald Ziegler, Lawyer James St.  Clair and many others.

Bernstein and Woodward attempted to downgrade Nixon by trying to prove how much his aides loathed him.  Yet, disloyalty comes off less than admirable no matter the provocation.  No man deserves the shiv from those he trusted and rewarded.

Et to Brutus?

The cheapest shots by Bernstein and Woodward are those surmising what the participants thought to themselves while Watergate was unfolding.  This is standard practice for make-believe novels - it is libel when dealing with real people and real events.

Some of those whose thought processes were deduced from idle gossip have taken pains to denounce Bernstein and Woodward.

The U.S. News and World Report is the only publication to my knowledge, which bothered to ask those "quoted" in the Bernstein-Woodward "journafiction" whether they really said all those horrid things.

President Gerald Ford, who was vice-president in those "final days", called the book "unfair" and said, "I never saw any instance where (Mr. Nixon) was a danger to his own life, nor did I see any incident or attitude where I thought he might do something that would endanger the country."

Kissinger issued a statement that the book "contains too much gossip, too many inaccuracies, distortions and misrepresentations to be dealt with."  In addition, he stated, "the book shows an indecent lack of compassion and lack of essential understanding on the part of the authors."

Kissinger comes in for much libelous treatment from Bernstein and Woodward.  His attitude toward Nixon is described as "one of loathing and contempt."  He is said to have referred to Mr. Nixon as "our meat-ball President".  He is reported to have intensely disliked being asked to pray with an hysterical Nixon.  He is accused of sexual perversion that is irrelevant to Nixon's agony even if true.

It is hard to libel a politician, but some of them in Bernstein's and Woodward's garbage can ought to sue to keep them honest.

Author: Lindsey Williams