dictatorial form of regime 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 very close 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 something has 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 and 1974. The roots of the
administrative fascism of the Reagan and Bush years are to be found in the institutional
tremors and changed power relations set off by the 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, the so-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 of justice 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 just summarized. There is, for example, the
question of the infiltration of the White House staff and of the Plumbers themselves by
members and assets of the intelligence community whose loyalty was not to Nixon, but to