economy under the top-down diktat of the Pay Board and the Price Commission. This economic
state of emergency was then compounded by the artificial oil shortages orchestrated by thecompanies of the international oil cartel during late 1973 and 1974, all in the wake of Kissinger's (^)
October 1973 Middle East War and the Arab oil boycott. In August, 1974, when Gerald Ford
decided to make Nelson Rockefeller, and not George Bush, his vice-president designate, he was
actively considering further executive orders to declare a new economic state of emergency. Such
colossal economic dislocations had impelled the new Trilateral Commission and such theorists asSamuel Huntington to contemplate the inherent ungovernability of democracy and the necessity of (^)
beginning a transition towards forms that would prove more durable under conditions of aggravated
econmomic breakdown. Ultimately, much to the disappointment of George Bush, whose timetable
of boundless personal ambition and greed for power had once again surged ahead of what his peers
of the ruling elite were prepared to accept, the perspectives for a more overtly dictatorial form ofregime came to be embodied in the figure of Vice President Nelson Rockefeller. Skeptics will point (^)
to the humiliating announcement, made by President Ford within the context of his 1975
"Halloween massacre" reshuffle of key posts, that Rockefeller would not be considered for the 1976
vice presidential nomination. But Rockefeller, thanks to the efforts of Sarah Jane Moore and
Lynette "Squeaky" Fromme, each of whom attempted to assassinate Ford, had already come veryclose to the Oval Office on two separate occasions.
Ford himself was reputedly one of the most exalted Freemasons ever to occupy the presidency.
Preponderant power during the last years of Nixon and during the Ford years was in any case
exercised by Henry Kissinger, the de facto president, about whose pedigree and strategy somethinghas been said above. The preserving of constitutional form and ritual as a hollow facade behind
which to realize practices more and more dictatorial in their substance was a typical pragmatic
adaptation made possible by the ability of the financiers to engineer the slow and gradual decline of
the economy, avoiding upheavals of popular protest.
But in retrospect there can be no doubt that Watergate was a coup d'etat, a creeping and muffled
cold coup in the institutions which has extended its consequences over almost two decades. Among
contemporary observers, the one who grasped this significance most lucidly in the midst of the
events themselves was Lyndon LaRouche, who produced a wealth of journalistic and analytical
material during 1973 ayears are to be found in the institutional tremors and changed power relations set off by tnd 1974. The roots of the administrative fascism of the Reagan and Bushhe banal (^)
farce of the Watergate break-in.
In the view of the dominant school of pro-regime journalism, the essence of the Watergate scandal
lies in the illegal espionage and surveillance activity of the White House covert operations team, theso-called Plumbers, who are alleged to have been caught during an attempt to buglarize the offices
of the Democratic National Committee in the Watergate office building near the Potomac. The
supposed goal of the break-in was to filch information and documents while planting bugs.
According to the official legend of the Washington Post and Hollywood, Nixon and his retainers
responded to the arrest of the buglars by compounding their original crime with obstruction ofjustice and all of the abuses of a coverup. Then the Washington Post journalists Bob Woodward and (^)
Carl Bernstein, dedicated partizans of the truth, blew the story open with the help of Woodward's
mysterious source Deep Throat, setting into motion the investigation of the Senate committee under
Sam Ervin, leading to impeachment proceedings by Rep. Peter Rodino's House Judiciary
Committee which ultimately forced Nixon to resign.
The received interpretation of the salient facts of the Watergate episode is a fantastic and grotesque
distortion of historical truth. Even the kind of cursory examination of the facts in Watergate which
we can permit ourselves within the context of a biography of Watergate figure George Bush will
reveal that the actions which caused the fall of Nixon cannot be reduced to the simplistic account