something fishy

[excerpt]--------------The White House Correspondents Association annual dinner is a formal, overdone, alcohol-saturated event, attended by all those with power -- or pretensions to power -- in the media and the government.  It was held on April 14 at the Washington Hilton....

Some of the news organizations had rented hospitality suites where drinks were served almost to sunrise.  Woodward arrived at the Wall Street Journal's party at about 2:00 A.M.  About 20 people, glasses in hand, were gathered in one corner, and a familiar voice was ringing out from the center of the circle.  "You son of a bitch!"  Unmistakably Bradlee.  He was arguing with his former employee, now White House aide Ken Clawson.  The subject was Clawson's purported statement confessing he had written the Canuck Letter.  But the argument ranged over ancient battles -- the press versus the government, the Washington Post versus Nixon.  Clawson had once told friends that Bradlee was the man he most admired.  Now he despised Bradlee, and held him personally to blame for the Canuck Letter story.

Fueled by alcohol, the debate grew hotter and more personal.  The two men, in dinner clothes, waved away anyone who tried to join in.  Finally, in a ridiculous attempt to be more discreet, they moved into a closet, and left the door open.

"Have they hit each other yet?" one woman asked hopefully.

At the bar, there was another Watergate imbroglio.  Edward Bennett Williams, the Post's lawyer and the president of the Washington Redskins, President Nixon's favorite football team, was faced off against Patrick J. Buchanan, a White House speechwriter.  Williams' firm also represented the Democratic Party.  He was speaking bitterly about the 1972 election.

"You're just a sore loser, Ed," Buchanan was saying.

"But you did it dirty, Pat," Williams said, heaving his large body to one side.  "You had to do it dirty.  You won, but you had to steal it."---------------------[end excerpt]

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I never felt that way; it did not seem to me, at the time, that the Watergate burglary and the other dirty tricks had caused Pres. Nixon to win re-election in 1972.  It seemed like -- Nixon won by a large landslide (as opposed to what -- a small landslide?, but you know...) -- obviously it was the will of the people to reelect this president, & even if his people had not gone and done a lot of cheating things, he would still have won, I thought. 

I was only in 8th or 9th grade -- if I could see this point of view, why couldn't these hospitality-suite guys, who were grown-ups, see it? -- of course, I'd not had any cocktails...But, realize now, I also, in junior high, did not have grasp of the bigger picture which was that some heavy sabotage techniques had been used throughout the primary season against other Democratic candidates -- Muskie, etc. -- as "Deep Throat" says in the movie, "They wanted to run against McGovern, look who they ended up running against...!"

I only understood, at the time, I think, spying, and cheating-to-win....
But having Donald Segretti and his "Trojans" (Trojans?) from USC (ref. Blue Collar Lit. Sept. 9, 2013) mess with the entire Democrat Primary is another kettle of rather stinky fish....

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{All The President's Men.  Woodward - Bernstein.  Simon & Schuster -- 1974.}

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