Buckley, Hunt, Watergate, etc

Thinking of Wm. F. Buckley a few moments ago, I am reminded that he wrote the foreword to the memoirs of E. Howard Hunt, published last year. I have still not read the book (American Spy: My Secret History in the CIA, Watergate, and Beyond) but have been meaning to. Or at least, I've been meaning to read Buckley's foreword. Howard Hunt had a solid three decades to set the record straight, and it seems a mite suspicious that his final testament would come to us only after he was dead.

I feel somewhat more trusting when it comes to the memoirs of L. Patrick Gray, who held the title of "Acting Director" at the FBI for about 12 months after Hoover's death (I was about to say, "ran the FBI for about 12 months" but that would be absurd). Gray died in 2005, and his book is titled In Nixon's Web: A Year in the Crosshairs of Watergate. The book has apparently been edited, or co-authored, or both, by his son, Ed Gray. That sounds a little dodgy ("co-authored" books usually do), but at least in this case I think we can fairly assume that the son is being protective of his father's reputation, and that he has not said anything that the father would not have approved of.

The other new Watergate book (isn't in incredible that we still have "new Watergate books" after all these years?) is called The Strong Man, and is apparently not just a Watergate book, but is also a biography of John Mitchell. The author, James Rosen, includes the charge-- only implied by Colodny/Gettlin-- that Dean really was the one who ordered the break-in(s) to occur. Dean of course launched a massive lawsuit over all this back in the 1990s. He is 69 years old now, and I will be intrigued to see if he goes to court over this, too.

"Watergate" has been a fascinating subject to me for a long time, and I intend to comment on it at some length, now and then. Just for the moment I will say that on the level of political tactics, I do not consider the Nixon White House to have operated at an appreciably lower level than that which the White Houses of Franklin Roosevelt, John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson operated. I think that-- today-- the general public is aware of this, if only vaguely. But in 1974, that awareness was non-existent, and in fact the truth was widely held to be the exact opposite.