In his tweet, Greenwald insisted Carlson was presenting “indisputable facts” and hailed Carlson for being one of the “very few media voices willing to question the US Security State.” He was endorsing the Johnson tweet that, citing Carlson, had stated, “On June 23, 1972, Nixon met with CIA Director Richard Helms at the White House. During the conversation Nixon suggested he knew who shot JFK. Nixon further implied that the CIA was directly involved in Kennedy’s assassination. Helms' telling response: Total silence.”
As you shall soon see, these are not “indisputable facts.” This was simply more conspiracy-mongering from the fellow who has pushed the Great Replacement Theory, pro-Russia disinformation, and the dangerous notion that January 6 was a false-flag operation engineered by the Biden administration so it could use military tactics to round up conservatives.
Here was Carlson’s latest hogwash: In 1972, Nixon received 17 million votes more than his opponent, yet in less than two years he was forced to resign and replaced by “an obedient servant of the federal agencies called Gerald Ford.” Nixon believed “elements in the federal bureaucracy were working to undermine the American system of government and had been doing that for a long time…He was absolutely right.” The evidence: a June 23, 1972, meeting in the White House between Nixon and CIA Director Richard Helms that was secretly recorded. “Nixon suggested he knew ‘who shot Kennedy’—meaning President John F. Kennedy. Nixon further implied that the CIA was directly involved in Kennedy’s assassination which we now know it was.” Helms replied with silence—a signal of assent.
Carlson had more claptrap to share: Four days prior to the Nixon-Helms conversation, the Washington Post had published the first of many stories about the Watergate break-in, which had occurred on June 17. “Unreported by the Washington Post, four of the five burglars worked for the CIA. The first of many dishonest Watergate stories were written by a 29-year-old Metro reporter called Bob Woodward.” And Woodward “wasn’t a journalist. Bob Woodward had no background whatsoever in the news business. Instead, Bob Woodward came directly from the classified areas of the federal government. Shortly before Watergate, Woodward was a Naval officer at the Pentagon” and worked with intelligence agencies and interacted with top Nixon aides. “Soon after leaving the Navy...Woodward was hired by the most powerful news outlet in Washington and assigned the biggest story in the country.” His main source for Watergate reporting was Mark Felt (the notorious “Deep Throat”), who was second-in-command at the FBI and who oversaw the secret COINTELPRO project, “which was designed to secretly discredit political actors the federal agencies wanted to destroy—people like Richard Nixon.”
And we’re not done: “At the same time those same agencies were also working to take down Nixon’s elected vice president, Spiro Agnew,” who was forced to resign in the fall of 1973 for tax evasion. Nixon was then pressured by congressional Democrats to replace Agnew with GOP Rep. Gerald Ford, who had served on the Warren Commission, which had investigated the JFK killing and “absolved the CIA of responsibility for Kennedy’s murder.” Eight months later, Ford was president of the United States.
Get it? The same Deep State that has tried to annihilate Trump murdered a previous president and mounted a secret coup against another. According to Greenwald, this is all based on “indisputable facts.” Not at all.
First, Helms and Nixon had no recorded meeting on June 23, 1972. They met on October 8, 1971. (Oops.) And that 53-minute-long conversation covered much ground: the Soviet Union, Cuba, the Pentagon Papers, previous CIA “dirty tricks” (in Iran, Guatemala, Vietnam, and elsewhere), the Bay of Pigs, and much else. (You can listen to the conversation here.) One theme that Nixon dwelled on was his need to be kept informed about past CIA actions and for Helms to make sure that Nixon knew the full story (or stories). In this context, Nixon referred to a topic that he described as “who shot John.”
We can assume this was a reference to JFK. But this remark was no declaration that Nixon knew the answer and was sure the CIA was behind this dastardly deed. In fact, as soon as Nixon raised this matter, he asked Helms, “Is Eisenhower to blame? Is Johnson to blame? Is Kennedy to blame? Is Nixon to blame? Etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. It may become—not by me—but it may become a very, very vigorous issue. If it does, I need to know what is necessary to protect, frankly, the intelligence gathering, and the Dirty Tricks Department, and I will protect it. Hey, listen, I have done more than my share of lying to protect you, and I believe it’s totally right to do it.”
Nixon often spoke in ellipticals. Consequently, it can be hard to pin down what he had in mind. I read this remark as an indication that he believed—or wondered whether—the JFK assassination was blowback linked to clandestine US government actions. I think that was the case: Lee Harvey Oswald, a fan of Fidel Castro, shot Kennedy because the United States was running paramilitary covert operations against Cuba. These attacks were denied by the US government and barely covered in the American media, but Castro publicly cited and denounced them regularly. (I wrote about this in my first book, Blond Ghost: Ted Shackley and the CIA’s Crusades.) In any event, it’s a stretch to read these few sentences as Nixon accusing the CIA of plotting the assassination. The fact that Helms listened—rather than interjected—as Nixon rambled on means nothing.
As for Woodward, Watergate revisionists have long concocted conspiracy theories about his role in breaking open the story. After graduating Yale, Woodward did serve in the Navy for five years. He then applied for a reporter position at the Washington Post and after a two-week trial…was not hired. He subsequently put in a yearlong stint at a weekly suburban newspaper and then was picked up by the Post. He and Carl Bernstein were reporters covering local news when they were assigned to the break-in at the Democrats’ headquarters in the Watergate complex—a story that seemed to be no more than a local crime. The Post did not immediately report that several of the Watergate burglars had been involved in the CIA’s Bay of Pigs attack on Cuba and other anti-Cuba activities because that would take some time to figure out. But in the Post’s first story on the break-in—which appeared on the front page—Woodward did report that James McCord, the leader of the arrested burglars, had told the court he had recently retired from the CIA.
Carlson’s capsule depiction of the Woodward angle was false. Woodward had not mysteriously and quickly moved from the Navy to reporting on one of the biggest stories and suppressing the CIA connection to the break-in. He had slogged through local reporting to reach the newspaper and was assigned to what was not immediately regarded as a big deal. (The New York Times had its first article on the break-in written by an intern and published it on page 30.) Felt did indeed become a major source for Woodward. (Read the story I broke in 2005 with author Jeffrey Goldberg on how Nixon assigned Felt the mission of finding out who Deep Throat was!) Yet Carlson absurdly mischaracterizes the COINTELPRO program. It was not aimed at targets within the Nixon administration. It was created to illegally surveil, infiltrate, discredit, and disrupt mainly liberal and leftist domestic political groups, including anti–Vietnam War activists, feminists, civil rights advocates, the Communist Party, the American Indian Movement, the Black Panthers, and many others. The program has been accused of involvement in the killing of Black Panther leaders, including Fred Hampton. (See Judas and the Black Messiah.) Martin Luther King Jr. was a major target of COINTELPRO, and the FBI tried to blackmail him into committing suicide.
It is a perversion of history to suggest that Nixon was a COINTELPRO victim. He even endorsed his own version of COINTELPRO called the Huston Plan, which was so extreme that FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover balked at implementing it, forcing Nixon to shelve much of the scheme. Nixon tried to use the Deep State to crush his political foes and undermine American dissent. Yet now Carlson and Greenwald are flipping the tale to excuse Nixon and render him a helpless sap.
Which brings us to Agnew, a total crook. Not merely a tax cheat, he had pocketed large bribes related to state contracts when he was governor of Maryland and continued doing so as vice president. He got off easy by pleading nolo contendere to one felony charge of tax evasion and resigning the vice presidency. (He was fined $10,000 and placed on probation for three years.) The record is clear. This was no Deep State setup. (Check out Rachel Maddow’s marvelous podcast, Bag Man, which chronicles the entire Agnew episode.) Carlson alleges a government cabal knifed Agnew so Gerald Ford, a participant in the Warren Commission cover-up, would be in line for the White House, once these sinister schemers covertly ousted Nixon. More nonsense. (Of course, the Warren Commission did not tell the public the truth about many aspects of the JFK assassination, but there is no proof it hid evidence of a direct CIA role in the murder.)
Carlson is spinning lies and disinformation. To advance the MAGA narrative of a Deep State that defies Trumpism and, as House Republicans now claim, “weaponizes” the government against conservatives, Carlson has reached back into the dark history of the United States to miscast Watergate, to absolve Nixon and Agnew of their crimes against American democracy, and to fire up JFK conspiracy theories. In his cracked tale, Nixon was a casualty of the evil plotters within the US government. Certainly, Nixon, a paranoiac, believed he had enemies within the state. He even ordered his White House personnel director to count the number of Jews at the Bureau of Labor Statistics, believing Jews in that agency were undermining him by releasing bad-news economic reports.
But it was Nixon who was the ultimate Deep State schemer. He wanted to deploy the national security apparatus to neutralize and destroy his enemies, and within the White House he repeatedly proposed criminal activity. (Firebomb the Brookings Institution!) On the date that Carlson errantly attributed to the Helms-Nixon conversation, Nixon ordered his aides to get Helms to lean on the FBI to shut down the Watergate investigation. This secretly recorded conversation in which the president attempted to obstruct justice became known as the “smoking gun” tape that forced Nixon to resign.
Nixon, Watergate, COINTELPRO, Agnew, the JFK assassination—Carlson is turning history inside out and murdering the truth to buttress MAGA’s alternative reality. And Greenwald is helping to spread this propaganda. It’s Soviet-like revisionism, done to benefit Dear Leader and bolster the assumptions of the paranoid far right. Their reliance on such crazy bunk shows how far they must go to preserve their tale of Trump as the heroic crusader battling an all-powerful, malevolent Deep State. Desperate narratives require desperate history.
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