STUDY GUIDE Watergate
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
STUDY GUIDE Watergate scandal Liberal elite anti-Communist KEY TERMS: Viet Nam moral outrage partisan Special Prosecutor Detail Focus: Complete this section during the Main Summary Focus: Complete this video. section after the video. 1. By how much of a margin did President Nixon win the 1. How did the Watergate scandal unfold? election for his second term? 2. Who was the vengeful FBI Deputy Director that secretly met with the Washington Post writers? 2. What was the Watergate scandal really about? 3. On what date did President Nixon resign from office? PRAGERU.COM 1 Discussion & Review Questions 1. Towards the beginning of the video, Mr. Hewitt contends that, “Watergate was first and foremost a political war between the President, Richard Nixon, and the media which in those pre-cable days meant ABC, CBS, NBC, the New York Times, and the Washington Post. The media’s aim, in the words of British historian Paul Johnson, ‘was to use publicity to reverse the electoral verdict of 1972…’” Why do you think that the mainstream media hates Conservative Presidents? Explain. Do you think that the mainstream media should work towards influencing against and taking direct action against the will of the voters? Why or why not? 2. When discussing the events after the Nixon re-election campaign associates were caught breaking into the DNC headquarters, Mr. Hewitt speculates that, “Today, most would conclude that if he [President Nixon] simply acknowledged his campaign’s responsibility, ‘owned it’ as we say, fired those responsible, and apologized, the whole sorry mess would have been rendered the minor incident it was.” Do you agree with Mr. Hewitt that this scenario was highly possible? Why or why not? Why do you think that President Nixon did not respond in this way, by ‘owning it’ and apologizing? Explain. 3. A little further along in the video, Mr. Hewitt explains that, “... the scandal grew beyond his [President Nixon’s] control. Three men made sure of that: a publicity-seeking judge, a revenge-seeking FBI official, and a partisan special prosecutor. The judge was John Sirica. Suspecting a vast conspiracy, Sirica threatened the burglars with lifetime prison sentences if they didn’t rat out the people who authorized the crime. The media loved Sirica. For a time, he was the most famous jurist in the country.” Do you think that a sitting judge should ever intimidate and even threaten defendants? Why or why not? Do you think that the media should have given Judge Sirica so much attention? Why or why not? 4. Mr. Hewitt goes on to note that, “The vengeful official was FBI Deputy Director Mark Felt, known by his code name ‘Deep Throat.’ Felt thought he deserved to become head of the FBI. But Nixon appointed someone else. So Felt leaked a steady stream of tips to the Washington Post writing team of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. Meeting secretly, he told them where to look and what questions to ask. Without him, the duo would have gotten nowhere. Because of him, they became folk heroes.” Why do you think that Mr. Felt used the press to attempt to ‘get back at’ President Nixon? Explain. To whom do you think Woodward and Bernstein became folk heroes, and why? Explain. 5. At the end of the video, Mr. Hewitt laments and warns that, “The support of Republican Senators far from assured, and deeply concerned that an impeachment trial would paralyze the country in the middle of the Cold War, Nixon was boxed in. He resigned from office on August 9, the first and only President to do so. The media had its victory. And a newfound sense of power. The country has not been the same since.” What power did President Nixon’s resignation give to the media? Explain. Do you think that any facet of media should wield such enormous power? Why or why not? What do you think that Mr. Hewitt means when he states that the country has not been the same since- in what ways has the country not been the same? Explain. PRAGERU.COM Watergate 2 Extend the Learning: Case Study Richard Nixon and the press INSTRUCTIONS: Read the article “When Nixon Met the Press ,” then answer the questions that follow. 1. Who was Phil Potter, and what was his view of Richard Nixon? What did members of the press do, in terms of standards of objectivity, when covering Nixon? What caused the press corps to turn on the young Nixon? What lesson about the press corps did Nixon learn in his early campaigns for Congress? Who was Alger Hiss, and why did Nixon’s involvement with him earn Nixon so much hate from the press? Why did the press corps begin toting tape recorders on the campaign trail? Who was Arthur Hays Sulzberger, and what did he write in a letter to Vice Presidential candidate Nixon? Who was Earl Mazo, and how did he feel about Nixon? What percentage of the press corps were ‘all-out supporters’ of John Kennedy in the presidential campaign against Nixon? Who was Willard Edwards, and how did he characterize the attitude and behavior of the press towards Nixon? What can the Watergate burglary be traced to? Who were ‘the alphas in the wolf pack’ of the press that kept the Watergate scandal alive and escalated it? Which of Nixon’s enemies conspired against him? 2. Why is it wrong for the press to be so politically biased instead of objective? Explain. Do you think it is possible for the press to ever be objective? Why or why not? How does the modern era of ‘fake news’ exacerbate and complicate the myriad of problems presented by the extremely biased press? 3. What is the main point that Mr. Hewitt is making in the video? Explain. PRAGERU.COM Watergate 3 https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/08/nixon-and-the-media-109773 POLITICO Magazine History Dept. When Nixon Met the Press Just because he was paranoid doesn’t mean the media wasn’t out to get him. By JOHN ALOYSIUS FARRELL August 06, 2014 John Aloysius Farrell is the author of biographies of House Speaker Thomas “Tip” O’Neill Jr. and attorney Clarence Darrow, as well as a forthcoming book on the life of Richard Nixon. Phil Potter was one of the finest journalists of his generation. He served as a war correspondent during World War II, got wounded covering the Korean War, and was one of the few reporters who tried to hold Sen. Joseph McCarthy to basic standards of fairness and accuracy during the Red scare of the 1950s. In 1947, Potter was in Greece, covering the civil war between communist and government forces for the Baltimore Sun, when a delegation of U.S. congressmen arrived. He was particularly PRAGERU.COM Watergate 4 impressed by young Richard Nixon—a California freshman who had insisted on traveling to the combat zone for a firsthand look at the war. “Nixon came up where the action was while the others…stayed down in the fleshpots of Athens,” Potter recalled, admiringly. “There was a curiosity and an energy to him.” Potter’s favorable view of Nixon faded, however, when the journalist returned home and took over the “Red Beat” for the Sun. He came to view then-Vice President Nixon as a sneak and a hatchet man: playing fast and loose with facts, smearing foes with innuendo, painting them as communist dupes . By 1960, covering the presidential election, Potter was openly rooting for John F. Kennedy to defeat Nixon. “We’re going to get the son of a bitch now,” a startled colleague heard Potter declare, after Nixon fared poorly in a presidential debate. The national press corps was much like Potter: they loved Nixon, and then they hated him. Understand that, and Nixon’s implosion makes sense. It’s a media story, in more ways than one. First there’s the largely forgotten opening chapter: Nixon’s spectacular rise – he went from House freshman to the vice presidency in just six years – was built on exceptionally favorable notices in the press. “As typically American as Thanksgiving,” the Washington Times Herald raved, after Nixon was elected to Congress. “[I]f he bears out his promise, he will go far.” Then the media turned on him, and helped the Democrats drive him from office. In both fueling Nixon’s early career – and then destroying him later – members of the press abandoned professed standards of objectivity. And Nixon’s innate wariness, in turn, evolved into arrant hatred. In the end, this dysfunctional relationship helped fuel a national tragedy. It put the country on the road to Watergate. On Aug. 9, 1974, Nixon resigned the presidency, a skip ahead of near certain impeachment. Forty years later, unlocked archives – at the Richard Nixon Presidential Library, the papers of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein at the University of Texas, and the hundreds of interviews of leading political and journalistic figures conducted by the late David Halberstam for his books on the Cold War era, which were opened this spring at the Howard Gottlieb Archival Research Center at Boston University – confirm, with often startling candor, the mutually hostile attitudes of Nixon and his pursuers. From the beginning, there was little objectivity in the journalistic coverage that launched Nixon into American politics. It was wildly favorable. At home, he was a darling of California’s conservative publishers—most notably the Chandler family, owners of the Los Angeles Times. And when Nixon first went national, he did so with the help of a rules-bending Washington bureau chief from the New York Herald Tribune, who helped craft the gleaming mythos surrounding Nixon’s pursuit of Alger Hiss, the Soviet spy, in the famed “Pumpkin Papers” case.