Latest / Conversations: Special Guests with Preston Scott / Moore History - The Scandal That Was Watergate

Transcript

Moore History - The Scandal That Was Watergate · Conversations: Special Guests with Preston Scott

• 0:12
  Thankfully something else to spend some time on this morning on the Morning Show with
• 0:21
  Preston Scott, with my great red Kazoo Grant Allen over there in Studio one
• 0:27
  A. I'm here in Studio one B, and I am joined live and
• 0:31
  in person, and no one happier than he to be both of those things.
• 0:36
  Doctor head Moore joints us this morning on the Morning Show with Preston Scott.
• 0:41
  He's our own version of David McCullough green slid up the voice, the
• 0:45
  voice that people recognize and go, I know that voice. I was walking
• 0:51
  out of the Double Tree the other day and the guy out front, the
• 0:56
  head porter there, hollered at me and made me stop. He goes,
• 1:00
  haven't heard you on the radio lately? When don't you back on, Preston,
• 1:03
  I was gonna here you go. And I don't know how he recognized
• 1:06
  me from my voice, but that kind of stuff happens a lot. Yeah,
• 1:10
  of course you have a very distinctive sound. I guess I do.
• 1:12
  I don't know. Yeah, Like I said, David mcculloughy narrated the movie
• 1:17
  Seabiscuit and people people, what, Yeah, that's David McCullough he's been.
• 1:21
  He was probably as popular of a narrator as he was inside the industry as
• 1:26
  he wasn't an author on the rest of us. My phone should start ringing
• 1:29
  off, I would think, so, McAll and we need you to narrate.
• 1:30
  Yeah, absolutely, new career. Yep, there you go. He's
• 1:34
  our resident historian, hence the title more history here in the Morning Show.
• 1:38
  And we've been talking about scandals, which is kind of appropriate in light of
• 1:42
  the fact that, you know, whether we like or hate Donald Trump,
• 1:47
  the fact of the matter is what happened to him, set aside the personality,
• 1:52
  but what happened to him was truly a scandal. Yeah, and not
• 1:57
  much ado about it, which is what floors me. Typically in these kind
• 2:00
  of circumstances, no matter who's in power, you know, when when there's
• 2:06
  corruption at any level, that should be ferreted out and broadcast and people should
• 2:12
  go no, no, no, we don't do that. Unfortunately, that's
• 2:15
  not what it occurs in this divisive world we live in now. It's politicized
• 2:20
  right away, but you know, it's literally criminal. Now what's happening in
• 2:24
  these some of these attacks though, ed, Yeah, well it is and
• 2:28
  it isn't I mean the Durham report that came out, he was very explicit
• 2:31
  and stating that not everything that people do wrong is a crime, and that's
• 2:37
  why he wasn't advocating for indictments. Is it a crime for collusion of sorts,
• 2:43
  not criminal collusion, but just any kind of collusion to occur between media
• 2:47
  sources, the FBI and a political operation or a political candidate, you know,
• 2:53
  if they're on the phone all the day, tipping each other off,
• 2:55
  telling each other, giving false stories, feeding false stories. When his report
• 3:00
  was replete with malintent, with bad intent by the Clinton campaign and others,
• 3:07
  And so if it's short of criminal, if it's short of criminal, there
• 3:12
  are still other accountability standards, and I'm just going to pick on one.
• 3:15
  And this is on topic and off topic at the same time. Adam Schiff,
• 3:19
  he should be kicked out of Congress. Absolutely, yeah, oh sure,
• 3:21
  But it's the voters responsibility in that. I mean, you don't think
• 3:24
  he should be removed by his peers. They'd all be removed, or not
• 3:29
  all of them, but a significant number. I'm okay with that. If
• 3:34
  we got down to a bad political ax boil boy, Hello, Hello,
• 3:38
  Hello, Hello, I'd be echoing down the hallways of Congress. It's almost
• 3:43
  a scarlet letter, you know, Nathaniel Hawthorne going way back, but it's
• 3:46
  almost a scarlet letter that the public needs to place on these people. They
• 3:52
  need to become pariah's when they misbehave. And yet, but that supports my
• 3:58
  long standing contention we elect who we are. Yeah, well yeah, yeah,
• 4:01
  you know, that's uh what Federalists fifty one I think. Uh,
• 4:06
  I'm not sure if it was Hamilton or Madison wrote that one, but that
• 4:10
  you know, if men were angels, no government would be necessary. Uh,
• 4:15
  you know, we must have this structure around us or we'll run astray.
• 4:19
  But the bottom line here is far from the only scandal in history.
• 4:24
  No, that's that's true. And sadly though, and I'm going to talk
• 4:29
  the next two segments on the on a big one, but that occurred that
• 4:33
  most people are aware of, but they don't really understand the details of it.
• 4:40
  We're we want things to happen instantaneously. Now we're in this you know,
• 4:45
  pop tart society that we live in. This stuff with Biden and you
• 4:51
  know, I'm going to talk about the Nixon scandals. It took twenty seven
• 4:57
  months from the first water great break into him resigning. I mean it took
• 5:02
  time. Yeah, and in between that he won an election where he won
• 5:06
  forty nine states when people were aware that there was something, you know,
• 5:13
  something rotten in Denmark. Here, I think I'm gonna cry and suck my
• 5:15
  thumb at the same time because I the possibilities that you're bringing me to are
• 5:19
  just not good. Thanks for joining us. It's the Morning Show with Preston
• 5:25
  Scott's on News Radio one hundred point seven FLA or on News RADIOFLA Danama City
• 5:32
  dot Com. It is eleven minutes after the hour. Doctor Ed Moore joins
• 5:39
  us. More history. Nixon got boy, you could talk for days on
• 5:46
  this guy. Here's a guy not a cork. Yeah. Yeah, he
• 5:49
  said that in Florida. Actually, here's a guy that was heading into reelection
• 5:56
  with an overwhelming lead and still got in Gay first with the plumbers group that
• 6:01
  they had to break in tried to break into Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist's office to try
• 6:08
  to get tidbits on to smear Ellsberg. That was the intent there, because
• 6:13
  he was coming out with the Pentagon papers that made Nixon look bad and they
• 6:16
  were worried about this election coming up. Well, the election was nineteen seventy
• 6:20
  two. Nixon won forty nine states, George McGovern won Massachusetts and the district
• 6:28
  of Columbia. That was it. So he was so paranoid about, oh,
• 6:32
  my goodness, what might happen here, that he put into operation this
• 6:40
  group that were to do bad things, and they were relatively incompetent. One
• 6:46
  of two of them were Cuban Americans from South Florida, one of whom was
• 6:51
  a locksmith. They broke into the water Great Complex and the DNC headquarters in
• 6:59
  May and to put bugs in and bugs around. And when they first tried
• 7:04
  it, they realized he had the wrong locksmith lockpicking tools, and they left
• 7:11
  and they actually went in, got all set up, it didn't work.
• 7:14
  They left, sent him back to Miami to get the right tools. This
• 7:17
  is, you know, it's like a three stooges routine. They went back
• 7:20
  in and May, they broke in, put bugs in. Then they wanted
• 7:24
  more information, They wanted pictures of documents and all this. So they went
• 7:28
  back a month later and they broke into the Watergate again and put tape keeping
• 7:33
  all the doors from locking behind them as they went in. Security security guards
• 7:38
  saw found that called the police. Police came in and arrested all these guys
• 7:43
  that were taking pictures. When they went in, they realized some of the
• 7:46
  bugs were missing, so they had already been discovered. But and didn't go,
• 7:50
  oh, hey, maybe we'd better get out of here, or maybe
• 7:53
  we were being rebugged or watched now. They didn't they so they all get
• 7:56
  arrested. Well, it turns out in their bag of stuff was a phone.
• 8:00
  The phone number was from what we referred to as creep the committee to
• 8:03
  re elect the President. It was the phone number of Creepy. That's you're
• 8:11
  giving me this look. But this is you know, this is the highest
• 8:15
  levels of the sophisticated surveillance going on. Yeah, absolutely, and being directed,
• 8:22
  as it turned out later, being directed basically out of the White House,
• 8:26
  you know, denials notwithstanding it was being directed from the White House.
• 8:31
  These guys got all arrested, and a couple of young cub reporters for the
• 8:37
  Washington Post, one of them was assigned to go and see the hearings on
• 8:43
  these guys. These five guys, when did they break into the Democratic headquarters
• 8:46
  for the bond hearings and stuff. So he sat in there and that was
• 8:50
  Bob Woodward. Wow. But he wasn't just a cub reporter. It was
• 8:54
  pretty new at that point in time. He was an intelligence officer for the
• 8:58
  Navy. Yeah, there's a little bit of a background there. Oh yeah,
• 9:01
  very great guy. And then the other guy, Uh, Carl what's
• 9:07
  his name, I'm losing trucks Bernstein. Uh. He goes say, oh,
• 9:11
  y'all make some phone calls. I mean, this is how it started.
• 9:15
  You know, if you watch the movie. The movie in that sense
• 9:16
  was pretty accurate about Watergate. Uh. And it built and built, but
• 9:20
  it still took twenty seven months from that first break in and the arrest to
• 9:28
  Nixon resigning. It was and in between that was an election that was the
• 9:33
  landslide proportions. It was one of the biggest landslides ever in the history of
• 9:37
  the country. Why. I mean, you ask, why do these people
• 9:43
  do these things? Who knows? I mean, what went on in the
• 9:48
  minds of Haldeman and Erlikman and Mitchell and Mitchell and Dean. I mean,
• 9:52
  the list is long. Forty four people were investigated and twenty two of them
• 9:58
  actually convicted. Out of that, at the highest levels in our country,
• 10:03
  and yet and one of them became a popular talk show host. Go figure,
• 10:09
  Well, you know you got a gun earn a living w FLA on
• 10:13
  your phone with the iHeart Radio app and on hundreds of devices like Alexa,
• 10:18
  Google Home, Xbox and Sonos. Yes, and i Heearts Radio season twenty
• 10:24
  one past the r I think Grant and I would both come to the conclusion
• 10:28
  that time flies when you're talking history, but time really flies when you're talking
• 10:35
  more history. You see how I did that? Well, you're so smooth.
• 10:39
  Boy? Am I a broadcast professional? Doctor edmore with us? I'm
• 10:43
  surprised you don't have on shade. You're so smooth. Yeah, smooth,
• 10:48
  and I will never be mixed in the dictionary. There you go. M
• 10:56
  My contention is and has been, that we choose relatively poorly. The structure
• 11:01
  of how we pick who ends up in the White House is flawed, and
• 11:07
  it's getting more flawed as time goes by. We had the closest, really
• 11:13
  the closest election in history in two thousand based a large part of what was
• 11:16
  going on in Florida, and none of those problems got resolved in that That's
• 11:22
  how two thousand ended up with Supreme Court of the United States punting, and
• 11:26
  it is what it is because the calendar was moving and we got to be
• 11:30
  done by this date, and we couldn't get into all of that stuff still
• 11:33
  unresolved. So we could have potentially another two thousand election anytime now because we
• 11:39
  are so relatively evenly divided in our philosophies. It's where we are. But
• 11:46
  in nineteen seventy two, like I said, Nixon overwhelming. He got sixty
• 11:50
  almost sixty one percent of the vote. Okay, sixty one percent of the
• 11:56
  vote, and forty nine states he won. Why Why do people in positions
• 12:03
  of power do foolish things? It floors me. I'll never did they just
• 12:07
  not have any accurate polling because there was no need to do the stupid thing
• 12:11
  he did. No, No, there wasn't none at all. But there
• 12:13
  was there was a paranoia that occupied and later John dene in the famous presentation
• 12:20
  he made, but he talked about a meeting he was general counsel in the
• 12:24
  White House and he went to Nixon and told Nixon that there's a cancer growing
• 12:28
  in the White House. It wasn't a cancer, it was this mental paranoia
• 12:33
  that was bleeding through his top level of staff people and the highest levels were
• 12:39
  involved and got got corrupt, corrupted, but then got convicted. John Mitchell,
• 12:45
  Attorney General, went to jail. Maurice Stands as Secretaria Commerce, you
• 12:50
  know, went to jail, Chief of Staff, General counsel. I mean,
• 12:54
  right all the way down the line, right, everybody did, but
• 12:56
  Richard Nixon. Yeah, because Richard Nixon. A month after he resigned,
• 13:01
  gerald Ford pardoned him one almost to the day. A month gerald Ford pardoned
• 13:07
  him, and a lot of people were highly critical. I think had probably
• 13:09
  cost Ford the election in doing that, Ford had I think a sense of
• 13:13
  history and wanted to do what he thought was best in the healing that needed
• 13:20
  to be done at that point in time, and so he took that bold
• 13:22
  action. He was the only one at that point to get pardoned. There
• 13:26
  were only two people involved in all of Watergate, two people that got pardoned,
• 13:31
  the President and the locksmith from Cuban American locksmith from Miami. He got
• 13:37
  pardoned by Ronald Reagan and then later it found out that he was a CIA
• 13:45
  asset and had been involved in working for the CIA prior to the Watergate break
• 13:50
  and had connections with G. Gordon Lyddy and others. But he did we
• 13:54
  ever ask him if the mistake with the pick locks. He never said much.
• 14:01
  And I think the fellow lived I think to be ninety eight or I
• 14:05
  mean he lived a very long time, moved back to Florida and lived in
• 14:07
  some small town with his daughter in Florida. But those are the only two
• 14:11
  people out of all these people to get a pardon. It's kind of an
• 14:15
  interesting little tidbit. But when I rediscovered that, I knew that way back.
• 14:20
  And then when I rediscovered that, I thought, that's really odd.
• 14:22
  Why did he get a pardon? When I saw that he was one that
• 14:24
  got the pardon? It yea, he worked for the CIA and part of
• 14:28
  the deal. Back then, you know, they inadvertently discovered the fact that
• 14:35
  Richard Nixon was taping himself. Nobody else had ever done that to that extent.
• 14:39
  In the White House. They were over three thousand hours of tape that
• 14:43
  got turned over, some missing segments, the famous, famously famous gap that
• 14:48
  oh I must have leaned way over and shut it off, you know.
• 14:52
  But John Dene in his testimony revealed that. And how did John Dene know?
• 14:56
  He didn't know he was being taped. He he might be being taped
• 15:01
  because when he was making a presentation to Richard Nixon in the Oval office,
• 15:05
  Nixon said, hey, went just second, walked over with him to the
• 15:09
  corner of the room and very quietly told him some things, and then went
• 15:15
  back and sat down and they continued their conversation. And John Deane, very
• 15:18
  being very astute, said why did he do that? It wasn't for a
• 15:24
  photo op. Yeah, And then an aid called Butterfield was testifying and got
• 15:30
  asked the question are their tapes? And his immediate response to Congress when they
• 15:35
  asked him about was there a taping system in the White House? His immediate
• 15:39
  response was, oh, I wish you hadn't asked me that question, and
• 15:43
  then proceeded to tell them, yeah, we have this comprehensive taping system.
• 15:48
  Oh boy. But my main point, though, is there's corruption. There's
• 15:52
  been corruption. I've been alive for fourteen presents since I was a baby.
• 15:58
  Only three of them really had relatively scandal free administrations. The eleven of the
• 16:04
  fourteen, can I ask you a question, Yeah, could you say Trump
• 16:07
  was scandal free? Now? Why? Well, because of just we're all
• 16:11
  kinds of things going on We talked about that the next time. What's occurred
• 16:17
  probably since Bush forty three to now, which kinds of levels of disruption,
• 16:23
  And it's not necessarily the guy himself, the president himself, that's the one
• 16:27
  that's corrupt. But then it's the people around him that are getting paid off
• 16:32
  and things happening, get the Pentagon and government contracts. It's scandals. It's
• 16:37
  where the leadership comes from. You have to say it that way. Scandals,
• 16:41
  scandals, all right, So we'll talk about that next month. Yeah,
• 16:45
  well, where no government would be necessary. I always keep that in
• 16:48
  mind. Doctor Ed Moore with us. Thanks, But it's twenty eight after the hour