RECENT EVENTS HAVE MADE ME DOUBT THE ENTIRE WATERGATE STORY: Reevaluating the Saturday Night Massacre: Recent documents suggest it’s time to challenge the narrative.

According to Haig, Nixon was coming off two huge political victories, saving Israel from the Arab’s Oct. 6 surprise attack in the Yom Kippur War and orchestrating Spiro Agnew’s Oct. 10 resignation, followed by his nomination of Gerald Ford on Oct. 12 to be his successor as vice president. Nixon’s next move, as he saw it, was to address pending Watergate issues by firing Cox as special prosecutor and moving his Watergate Special Prosecution Force back into the Department of Justice. There, while the unit would remain intact, it would report to the career head of DOJ’s criminal division, the highly respected Henry Petersen, who had impressed Nixon in their many meetings leading up to the April resignations of two top lieutenants, H.R. Haldeman, and John Ehrlichman, and the firing of his counsel, John Dean. Kennedy Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee had taken Nixon’s idea of a special supervising prosecutor on Watergate and expanded it into what became known as Cox’s Army: 100 specially recruited partisan prosecution staff of Nixon-hating Ivy Leaguers, operating totally independent of the Department of Justice, which had promised investigations into every allegation of wrongdoing lodged against the Nixon administration since its 1969 inauguration. Watergate investigations were one thing where Nixon himself had called for a renewed investigation, but investigating every aspect of his administration by a group whose top 17 attorneys had all worked in the Kennedy-Johnson Administration, was simply unacceptable.

The plan, again according to Haig, was first to fire Cox and move the prosecution unit into the DOJ, and then to announce the Stennis Compromise, which would resolve the issue over access to the nine tapes subpoenaed by the grand jury. Richardson, however, urged reversing the timing of these two initiatives, with the idea that Cox could be maneuvered into resigning — or being fired if need be — if he refused to accept the Stennis Compromise.

The compromise was the key, which sounds absurd today, except for one thing: It was virtually an exact copy of the proposal submitted by Cox on Sept. 20. Cox’s central concept was “third-party authentication.” Nixon was adamant about not turning over the tapes themselves. What about producing word-for-word verified transcripts of relevant portions of those tapes and summaries of non-relevant portions, but not the actual tapes themselves? That way, the grand jury’s demand could be satisfied, while Nixon could still claim he had maintained the confidentiality of virtually all Oval Office conversations.

Read the whole thing.

HOW IT STARTED:

Some blame Watergate for this abrupt collapse of trust in institutions, but not very convincingly. For one thing, the decline in trust begins to appear in the polls as early as 1966, almost a decade before the Watergate was known as anything more than a big hole in the ground alongside the Potomac River. For another, the nation had managed unconcernedly to shrug off Watergate-style events before. Somebody bugged Barry Goldwater’s apartment during the 1964 election without it triggering a national trauma. The Johnson administration tapped the phones of Nixon supporters in 1968, and again nothing happened. John F. Kennedy regaled reporters with intimate details from the tax returns of wealthy Republican donors, and none of the reporters saw anything amiss. FDR used the Federal Bureau of Investigation to spy on opponents of intervention into World War II—and his targets howled without result. If Watergate could so transform the nation’s sense of itself, why did those previous abuses, which were equally well known to the press, not do so? Americans did not lose their faith in institutions because of the Watergate scandal; Watergate became a scandal because Americans were losing faith in their institutions.

—David Frum, How We Got Here: The 70s The Decade That Brought You Modern Life — For Better Or Worse.

How it’s going: Public’s view of politics slipping, now ‘unrelentingly negative.’

None other than the Pew Research Center sums up the alarming state of politics in and around the nation at this time. It is “dismal,” the pollster advised.

“Americans have long been critical of politicians and skeptical of the federal government. But today, Americans’ views of politics and elected officials are unrelentingly negative, with little hope of improvement on the horizon,” noted the wide-reaching survey, which was released Tuesday.

“Majorities say the political process is dominated by special interests, flooded with campaign cash and mired in partisan warfare. Elected officials are widely viewed as self-serving and ineffective,” the survey analysis advised, noting that there was no single “focal point” in politics that is troubling the public.

Anger and exhaustion permeate the entire political process.

“There is widespread criticism of the three branches of government, both political parties, as well as political leaders and candidates for office. Notably, Americans’ unhappiness with politics comes at a time of historically high levels of voter turnout in national elections. The elections of 2018, 2020 and 2022 were three of the highest-turnout U.S. elections of their respective types in decades,” the poll analysis advised.

“But voting in elections is very different from being satisfied with the state of politics — and the public is deeply dissatisfied,” it said.

—Jennifer Harper, the Washington Times, today.

W. JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Watergate’s ‘Gift of the Gods:’ The Surprise Disclosure of Nixon’s Tapes, 50 Years On.

The conventional storyline of the Watergate scandal is that Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, through their dogged reporting for the Washington Post, uncovered evidence that forced Richard Nixon to resign the presidency in 1974.

A more accurate, less mythical interpretation is that the president’s fall was triggered not by newspaper reporters but by a mostly anonymous former White House aide who, 50 years ago, reluctantly told investigators that Nixon had secretly recorded most of his conversations at the White House. The disclosure by Alexander Butterfield in mid-July 1973 altered the complexion and dynamics of Watergate, shifting the scandal to a monthslong drama to pry the tapes from Nixon’s possession.

Butterfield’s surprise revelation about the White House tapes was, according to the late Stanley I. Kutler, Watergate’s preeminent historian, “the gift of the gods.”

Read the whole thing.

WATERGATE STARTED 50 YEARS AGO TODAY. Recent events have made me view Watergate quite differently.

THE DEEP STATE, MARK ONE: The Watergate Cover-up Never Ends. “That’s not in any way to excuse the many stupid things Richard Nixon and his cronies did. But Nixon was at best a peripheral figure. Then as now, D.C. is a rigged town, with very different rules for Republicans as against Democrats.”

NEWS YOU CAN USE: Podcast: Everything You Know About Watergate Is Wrong, Part 1.

OF COURSE THEY DO: Flustered FEC Democrats link Trump campaign to Watergate.

HOW THE MIGHTY HAVE FALLEN: Fifty Years After Watergate, A Generation of Frightened Editors. The Washington Post’s strange journey from ousting Richard Nixon to ousting Felicia Sonmez.

One voice I’ve missed in the mini-uproar was that of the Post’s owner, Jeff Bezos. He’s held forth lately on Twitter about how he thinks President Joe Biden is mishandling inflation, but not about the recent turmoil at the Post, or even the broader cultural challenges the episode represents. This is a missed opportunity. The reality is that editors and other managers at values-based institutions are only as strong as owners allow them to be.

In sharp contrast: SpaceX fires employees behind open-letter campaign against Musk: “It blows my mind that people are actually arguing that a commitment to free speech means you would tolerate your employees undermining you and your business in public. Are you guys f**king high?”

WHOM THE GODS DESTROY, THEY FIRST MAKE NIXONIAN: How one-third of “The Watergate Three” got written out of journalism history.

In the spring of 1976, the Post’s Watergate team gathered for a private screening of a nearly finished cut. The men in the room saw themselves reshaped on screen into big-name stars. Robert Redford played Woodward; Dustin Hoffman played Bernstein. Three Post editors were portrayed by award-winning character actors: Jason Robards as Ben Bradlee, Martin Balsam as Howard Simons, and Jack Warden as Harry Rosenfeld.

Most of them were happy with their portrayals. (Robards won an Oscar playing Bradlee, despite barely 10 minutes of screen time.) But Simons was hurt deeply by the way the film made him seem like a mere functionary under Bradlee; in reality, Bradlee was only lightly involved in the story until months after the break-in. One critic noted that Simons “is made to sound like a fool who wanted them taken off the story” when in reality he was “the reporters’ strongest defender.” (Simons was later curator of the Nieman Foundation until his death from pancreatic cancer in 1989. At his memorial service, Woodward apologized for how Simons was portrayed in the movie.)

But [Barry] Sussman, the leader of the Watergate Three, wasn’t portrayed inaccurately — he just wasn’t portrayed at all. He’d been written out of the movie entirely.1 Filmmakers said they were worried that having three middle-aged white-guy editors on screen was already confusing for the audience, and four would’ve been too much.

But that it was Sussman they chose to cut — the editor most involved in the story from Day 1 — was galling to many, both in and out of the Post. When director Alan Pakula was doing his initial research for the film, both Simons and Rosenfeld had told him that, “if any one individual at the Post was deserving of a Pulitzer for the newspaper’s Watergate coverage…it was Barry Sussman.”

“Of all the filmmakers’ real and imagined derelictions, the elimination of Sussman as a character was the one that bothered Post staffers most,” Post film critic Gary Arnold wrote in his review. “Indeed, it has proved a more serious drawback than one might have guessed, because the picture needs a rumpled, avuncular, dogged editorial type to contrast with Robards’ flamboyant Bradlee and to supply some lucid updating and recapping of information as we go along.”

“As history, this is inexcusable,” wrote Jim Mann of The Baltimore Sun, “because it expunges from the record the editor who worked most intimately and directly with the reporters in the early days of Watergate.”

Post reporter Timothy Robinson told the Chicago Daily News he’d almost boycotted the movie because of Sussman’s omission. “The real hero isn’t even in it,” he said. “He was the guy who kept pushing and pushing that story.”

“When the celebrification of Watergate hit, Barry Sussman got cut out,” Mann, a former Post reporter, would say later. “If you take the hurt that Howard Simons felt, and you multiply that hurt by a thousand, you get to Barry Sussman.” In 1992, the Post itself would call Sussman’s omission “the most grievous example” of the movie’s “factual deficiencies.”2

After the film, the break between Sussman and Woodstein was total. Shepard describes the movie as having done “permanent psychic damage” to Sussman. Thirty years later, when she called Sussman to interview him about Woodward and Bernstein, his reply was: “I don’t have anything good to say about either one of them.”

* * * * * * * *

It’s more than a little ironic that Barry died less than two weeks before the 50th anniversary of the Watergate break-in, a moment that will be endlessly mined for content. The scandal will likely be remembered at least as much through myth — Robert Redford questioning Hal Holbrook in a parking garage — as through reality. Hollywood wrote Barry out of Watergate; mortality wrote him out of its anniversary. There’s plenty for journalists to celebrate about that particular Story of the Century; let’s just remember the cast of characters wasn’t a short one.

As Max Holland wrote in the Weekly Standard right around this time in 2017 in “The Woodstein Tapes:”

The truth was that All the President’s Men was a fabulistic account of a newspaper procedural, part and parcel of what was then called the New Journalism. It presented a sanitized and often trivialized account of what had gone on inside and outside the Post—or what Barry Sussman described to Pakula as a “modified, limited hang out,” intentionally parroting John Ehrlichman’s infamous phrase about the tactic of presenting misleading information in order to divert attention from the real facts. In particular, Deep Throat was a fiction—not in the sense of a completely invented character—but in the motives attributed to him.

What Woodward and Bernstein conveniently left out of their explanation to Pakula—either because they were all-too-acutely aware of it or were inexcusably ignorant of it—was that this last rendezvous had coincided with [Mark] Felt’s abrupt departure from the FBI because he was suspected of leaking to the press. He had never talked to Woodward out of a concern for the office of the presidency or the bureau, much less the law or morality. He had leaked to damage the reputations of his rivals for the FBI directorship, which he coveted above all things. In May 1973, years of scheming had finally come to naught, and if he wasn’t experiencing a nervous breakdown that night he was close to one.

Woodward and Bernstein, of course, could hardly fess up: It would have been impossible to do so without providing Pakula with a serious clue to Deep Throat’s identity, and they were intent on keeping his name secret. More importantly, the mythology of Deep Throat-as-whistleblower had become central to their book and their reputations—and soon it would be central to the movie. So the duo kept up the pretense that Felt was a truth-teller and they had been in danger. Pakula faithfully recreated the paranoia in the film’s penultimate scene, careful, as Redford counseled, not to deliver the message “with hysterics.”

And “Woodstein” apparently didn’t mind a 138 minute gap in the film for Sussman, as well.

Related: From Glenn: Nixon’s Revenge. “But ultimately, that tolerance—and even the ruling class self-policing—was the product of deep-seated security in power. The liberal establishment of that era, which had crushed Sen. Barry Goldwater’s campaign like a bug, saw no one who might challenge it. This is why Nixon’s election was so traumatic for them. Like Donald Trump’s 2016 victory over Hillary Clinton, the election of a Republican seemed somehow fundamentally wrong. Republicans in Congress could do things, and could even occasionally snatch a short-lived majority. But after four Roosevelt inaugurations, and a string of Democratic presidents interrupted only by Dwight Eisenhower, who could have had the nomination of either party and who showed no inclination to interfere with the post-New Deal federal gravy train, the presumption was that the Executive and the bureaucracy would stay essentially Democratic forever. Then, Nixon. Not the Camelot-redux hoped for with Bobby Kennedy, or even the party-establishment regime promised by Hubert Humphrey, but Nixon. A man from a small college instead of the Ivy League, a sometimes-awkward introvert, a fervent anti-communist when anti-communism was seen as declassé, Nixon was very much not our kind, dear.”

(Bumped.)

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Woodward and Bernstein didn’t bring down a president in Watergate – but the myth that they did lives on.

However popular, the heroic-journalist myth is a vast exaggeration of the effect of their work.

Woodward and Bernstein did disclose financial links between Nixon’s reelection campaign and the burglars arrested June 17, 1972, at headquarters of the Democratic National Committee, in what was the signal crime of Watergate.

They publicly tied prominent Washington figures, such as Nixon’s former attorney general, John Mitchell, to the scandal.

They won a Pulitzer Prize for the Post.

But they missed decisive elements of Watergate, notably the payment of hush money to the burglars and the existence of Nixon’s White House tapes.

Nonetheless, the heroic-journalist myth became so entrenched that it could withstand disclaimers by Watergate-era principals at the Post such as Graham. Even Woodward has disavowed the heroic-journalist interpretation, once telling an interviewer that “the mythologizing of our role in Watergate has gone to the point of absurdity, where journalists write … that I, single-handedly, brought down Richard Nixon.

“Totally absurd.”

With the upcoming 50th anniversary of Watergate on Friday, here’s a related anniversary as well: 60 Years Ago This Week: the Birth of the New Left.

If a New Left emerged in 1962, that means there had to be an Old Left. The Old Left was dynastic — think Roosevelts and Kennedys — and aristocratic. More importantly, it was anticommunist.

Mohler points out that there wasn’t a ton of difference between the Old Left and conservatives in the first half of the 20th century.

“One of the things I often do with my graduate students is show them the 1960 platforms of the Democratic and Republican parties in the United States,” he says. “You go to a year like 2016? They are radically different. But in 1960, you’ll have a hard time drawing distinctions between the Democratic and the Republican parties on many policies. Because during the era of the Cold War, and in the wake of the New Deal, the two parties were pretty close together.”

By contrast, the New Left, as the SDS represented, was populist, youth-led, and radical. The SDS itself stemmed from campus socialist organizations. It took advantage of the youthful energy and idealism of that generation in order to push for change.

At the time, the SDS didn’t make much of a splash. The media didn’t herald it as a major event, and it didn’t create immediate ripples. But what came after it did change the decade of the ’60s and the era that followed.

The SDS and the Port Huron Statement begat the anti-Vietnam War movement, the activism of earnest young civil rights activists, and the “free-speech movement” on college campuses. They also served as the genesis of the Weather Underground, the Chicago Seven, the sexual revolution, and the gay rights movement.

As radical as the New Left was at the time, its tenets are mainstream in today’s Democratic party (and some of its ideas might even come across as outdated to this crop of leftists). Mohler puts it this way: “many of the ideas that were considered radical 60 years ago are now absolutely mainstream, and for that matter, nowhere near the left of what we might call the New New Left in the United States. In particular, taking a snapshot of the Democratic Party.”

Flashback: Amity Shlaes’ ‘Great Society:’ How Poverty Won America’s War on Poverty. There’s a reason why its epigraph is, “Nothing is new, it is just forgotten.”

MY THOUGHTS ON THE 50TH ANNIVERSARY OF WATERGATE: Nixon’s Revenge.

KYLE SMITH: From Watergate to whinegate: The Washington Post is a hot mess.

The Washington Post, June 1972: Two dogged reporters patiently dig into the details of a strange burglary at Democratic Party headquarters, diligently assemble facts, cultivate sources and put together a package of revelations that will lead to the first presidential resignation in history.

The Washington Post, exactly half a century later: Two Mean Girl basket cases spend an entire weekend crazily lurching around spitting inane accusations at their colleagues for microaggressing them. The more people laugh, the louder they cry, “I’m being endangered!”

How institutions change. The 145-year-old paper was once personified by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein: “Woodstein.” This weekend the WaPo’s reputation was effectively redefined by MezRenz: Felicia Sonmez and Taylor Lorenz, each of whom brought shame on the paper over nothing.

The proximate cause of this spastic overreaction was a joke, retweeted by WaPo reporter Dave Weigel, that suggested all women are either bisexual or bipolar. This kind of “Bitches be craaaaazy!” joke died out in the ’80s, and Weigel shouldn’t have retweeted it, but Sonmez clearly was trying to get Weigel fired or severely punished when she re-tweeted Weigel’s retweet with a sarcastic note that it was “Fantastic to work at a news outlet where retweets like this are allowed!” Weigel was already being corrected internally, so there was no need to take this public on Twitter, and he shortly deleted and apologized. That should have been the end of it.

And the hits just keep on coming! The Washington Post suspends reporter David Weigel over sexist retweet.

As Saagar Enjeti tweets, “Just so we’re all clear: Taylor Lorenz can literally lie and violate basic standards and gets no punishment. Felicia can leak her bosses emails, violate company policy and harass her coworkers and is good to go. Dave Weigel shitposts and he’s suspended w/o pay for a month.”

DEMOCRACY DIES IN SELF-AGGRANDIZEMENT: How ‘alone’ was WaPo in reporting emergent Watergate scandal? Not very.

It’s long been a misleading element of media lore that the Washington Post was mostly alone in reporting the unfolding scandal of Watergate, which broke nearly 50 years ago and eventually brought down the corrupt presidency of Richard Nixon.

The claim reemerged yesterday in a commentary by the newspaper’s media columnist, Margaret Sullivan. She referred to the Post‘s lead Watergate reporters, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, declaring that they “were almost alone on the story for months.”

Not exactly.

Read the whole thing.

Earlier: “There are two reasons the Clinton story isn’t a bigger one in the public consciousness. One is admitting the enormity of what took place would require system-wide admissions by the FBI, the CIA, and, as Matt Orfalea’s damning video above shows, virtually every major news media organization in America. More importantly, there’s no term for the offense Democrats committed in 2016, though it was similar to Watergate.”

MARK JUDGE: Hooked on Nixon: How Watergate created junkie journalists addicted to scandal.

ICYMI: RASMUSSEN REPORTS: Worse Than Watergate? Most Voters Believe Clinton Campaign Scandal ‘Very Important.’

RASMUSSEN REPORTS: Worse Than Watergate? Most Voters Believe Clinton Campaign Scandal ‘Very Important.’

NOW OUT: The Nixon Conspiracy: Watergate and the Plot to Remove the President. #CommissionEarned

I ONCE WOULD HAVE FOUND THIS IMPLAUSIBLE, BUT NOW AFTER WHAT THEY DID TO TRUMP . . . Watergate revised: Prosecutor cover-up alleged.

It’s taken decades of work, but a former aide’s campaign to clear Richard Nixon’s name in the 1972 Watergate scandal has finally reached the Justice Department, with the aide seeking an investigation into allegations of prosecutorial misconduct and a “deep state” conspiracy to take Nixon down.” . . .

Shepard’s credibility is hard to challenge. He was an insider who turned on Nixon after hearing one of the most critical secret tape recordings in the Watergate case. In fact, he is credited with dubbing the tape the “smoking gun” because he believed it tied Nixon to the Watergate cover-up.

Only later did Shepard change his mind when he realized that Nixon was running through options in the scandal, not approving a hush payment in the case.

And more recently, he forced the release of the secret prosecutor’s “road map” used to convince a grand jury to indict key Watergate figures and egg on the impeachment inquiry that turned out to be a hoax, somewhat similar to the “dossier” used to spark the FBI investigation of former President Donald Trump.

“They knew it was a lie, and they made it up,” Shepard said. That road map, however, was never revealed to Nixon’s defense team and was sealed until 2019, when Shepard got it released. It is a central piece of his latest book, published by Bombardier Books.

He also found out that several members of the Watergate Special Prosecution Force, then headed by prosecutor Archibald Cox, improperly left the group with their documents. In some, they described how they worked with the anti-Nixon judge in the case, John Sirica, to get Nixon — a big legal no-no.

Like I say, knowing what we know now about how our institutions work, it’s a lot more plausible than I once would have believed.

MATT TAIBBI: Russiagate, More Like Watergate: The indictment of Michael Sussmann sheds new light on the outrageous pre-election activities of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign, which have a familiar ring. “These people didn’t just keep quiet about that fact, but actively lied to the public about it. The deception went all the way up to Hillary Clinton herself, who tweeted about the original report from Foer in Slate. Hillary’s tweet, which is still up — this should tell people a lot — contains a lengthy statement from Sullivan.”

Plus: “The only thing preventing all of this from being thought of as a scaled-up version of Watergate is the continued refusal of institutional America to own up to the comparison. Dick Nixon’s low-rent escapades like the ‘Canuck letter,’ distributing fliers offering free ‘balloons for the kiddies’ on behalf of Hubert Humphrey in black neighborhoods, or sending masses of pizzas to Ed Muskie’s hotel, all paled in comparison to the massive, ongoing campaign of fake news stories — political sabotage — planted by Clinton campaign figures in 2016 and beyond. The fact that the accompanying program of illegal surveillance was effected by lying to obtain FISA authority instead of a “third-rate burglary” and a bug doesn’t improve the situation. If the target had been anyone but Donald Trump, no one would bother even trying to deny how corrupt all this was, and continues to be.”

That insiders of both parties united to destroy an outsider who had somehow managed to be elected President says all you need to know about the corrupt uniparty that rules America today.

RIP: G. Gordon Liddy, architect of the Watergate burglary, and legendary Miami Vice guest star, dead at 90.

WORSE THAN WATERGATE: Biden Admin Officials Had Roles in Probes, Surveillance of Trump Campaign.

WATERGATE? RUSSIAGATE? NOW PAGERGATE? Austin, Texas, is likely not the only jurisdiction in America in which taxpayers are still paying for pagers that are almost never used. If you aren’t following the Texas Public Policy Foundation (TPPF), you should be, even if you don’t live in the Lone Star State. It may be liberty’s last safehouse.

OLD AND BUSTED: Turtles all the way down.

The New Hotness? Watergate all the way down: Carl Bernstein calls Trump’s Georgia call ‘far worse than Watergate.’

—The Hill, today.

But how does it compare to all of the other Trump moments that Bernstein said was “worse than Watergate?”

● Carl Bernstein — Bob Woodward’s old reporting partner — says the tape of Trump admitting to downplaying COVID-19 is worse than Watergate, calling it ‘homicidal negligence.’

—Business Insider, September 10^th, 2020.

● Legendary investigative journalist Carl Bernstein: ‘The Trump presidency is worse than Watergate.’

—Business Insider, August 3^rd, 2018.

● Carl Bernstein: Russia probe feels ‘worse than Watergate.’

—Chicago Tribune, November 2^nd, 2017.

Will anyone ask Bernstein his thoughts on how Trump compares to Dubya, whom he also compared to Nixon?

● Carl Bernstein: Bush Has Done “Far Greater Damage” Than Nixon.

—TruthOut, January 24, 2007.

● Carl Bernstein: Bush More “Disastrous” Than Nixon.

—The Nation, August 8^th, 2007.

● Senate Hearings on Bush, Now:

Worse than Watergate? High crimes and misdemeanors justifying the impeachment of George W. Bush, as increasing numbers of Democrats in Washington hope, and, sotto voce, increasing numbers of Republicans – including some of the president’s top lieutenants – now fear? Leaders of both parties are acutely aware of the vehemence of anti-Bush sentiment in the country, expressed especially in the increasing number of Americans – nearing fifty percent in some polls – who say they would favor impeachment if the president were proved to have deliberately lied to justify going to war in Iraq.

—Carl Bernstein, Vanity Fair, April 17, 2006.

Flashback: “The lowest form of popular culture – lack of information, misinformation, disinformation, and a contempt for the truth or the reality of most people’s lives – has overrun real journalism. Today, ordinary Americans are being stuffed with garbage.”

—Carl Bernstein, 1992.

WORSE THAN WATERGATE:

MEDIA MYTH ALERT: Woodward’s latest Trump book prompts myth-telling about Watergate. “‘[T]o explain Watergate through the lens of the heroic journalist,’ I wrote, ‘is to abridge and misunderstand the scandal and to indulge in a particularly beguiling media-driven myth’ — one that even Woodward has disputed. He told an interviewer in 2004: ‘To say that the press brought down Nixon, that’s horseshit.’”

The DNC-MSM’s self-serving mythopoeic narratives don’t write themselves, you know.