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Re: Did you listen to the Watergate hearings when that was news?


TRX
06/23/2014

I was just a kid then, and mostly annoyed that the local TV station pre-empted afternoon cartoons for what seemed like forever. I *have* listened to some of the Oval Office tape recordings, though. An amazing amount of that stuff is online, also recordings from the Johnson, Kennedy, and Eisenhower administrations. Despite what the New York Times kept claiming, Nixon wasn't the first to record what went on in the Oval Office...

I've read a fair bit about it since, and the various books written by those involved on both sides. Nixon's "The White House Years vol. 2" covered his side of it.

In fact, I've read most of Nixon's books. Granted, they're pro-Nixon, but they're just about the only books that *are*. His side is, of course, considerably different from the one presented by the media; you can make your own judgements on who was lying about what. But the interesting part wasn't so much Watergate, as how Nixon himself comes across in his own words. A man with an almost fanatical drive to succeed, with absolutely no sense of humor, no hobbies or interests outside of his job, with an old-fashioned sense of management where underlings toady to their superiors, and superiors shovel dung down periodically to make sure the underlings know their places. This quite clearly hurt his political career. And then, when he was elected as Boss of All Things, able to shovel at will, he never quite grasped that most of the rest of DC didn't view him as Boss, but as the latest pair of buttocks in the musical chair. That applied even to his cabinet and staff, who viewed themselves as professionals with their own careers, not his personal yes- men.

What comes across is a man in a position of leadership who had *no freaking clue* about managing people, who rubbed everyone he came across the wrong way, and even if he had known, would have thought that was the natural order of things. How clueless was he? His re-election campaign staff named itself the "Committee to RE-Elect the President", and initialed itself as C.R.E.E.P.