Foxfyre wrote:
Quote:Had the press not been so almost universally hostile to the Vietnam war, had it not descended in a virtual feeding frenzy when the Watergate burglary story first broke and then, when Watergate turned out to realy be a third-rate burglary, it turned its full fury on Nixon.
1) The press was not universally hostile to the Viet Nam war. Hardly, after the events of Chicago 1968, the temper of the American press was directed at the peace movement and the trials of the Chicago Seven who were treated as traitors in every paper from the Boston Globe to the LATIMES, meanwhile Spiro Agnew was getting massaged headlines from every statement he made against the nattering nabobs of negativity. Remember? The tv networks were showing war footage, but that was to PROMOTE the war effort, demonstrations and the like got no air time in 1970, 1971.
2)What feeding frenzy? I'm doing this from memory, but it seemed to me that there was two days of coverage and then nothing. A blurb about indictments around Labor Day and then, until the burglar's convictions in January, after the election, nothing. It wasn't until one of the guys going to jail wrote to Judge John Sirica (sp?) alleging a massive cover-up and money connections to the White House that anything got going. Even then, that was like April of 1973, the major news networks, with the execption of CBS, were ho-huming the story. Midway through the summer AFTER the Washington Post broke the story, the gates opened, a full year after the arrests.
3) Watergate was never a third rate burglary except in the eyes of Nixon's defenders. It was an assault of the electoral process ordered by the highest members of the President's staff with the KNOWLEDGE of the
Attorney General of the United States. The President may or may not have actually ordered the break-in and other events (McGurder (sp) says he did), but there is no doubt that he participated in and assisted with the cover-up of those crimes.
Good grief, what does it take to make you understand the seriousness of these events? They tried to steal your country. This was not an attack by the press, it was an attack on the foundations of this nation by those in power and a defense by the free press saved us all.
Code:no evacuation of Saigon
well. what can i say?
We would have still been there then, and the Viet Nam Memorial would have tens of thousands more names and we would be a completely different nation than we are, and I think, not for the better.
Joe(You're going to make me start looking this stuff up.) Nation