4.20.2022
4.18.2022
Operation Pedestal: The Fleet That Battled to Malta, 1942, Hastings - B
The largest Royal Navy fleet since Jutland went to sea in August, 1942. Over fifty ships escorted 14 merchantmen to the besieged island. Germany and Italy fought fiercely to maintain their control of the Mediterranean.
The strategic location of the island placed it between the Axis powers and their armies in Africa, and for the British, it was the only land they held between Gibraltar and Alexandria. The Germans began bombing in late 1941. Months of bombing led to food rationing among the 300,000 residents. No supplies could get through and the island was emotionally preparing to surrender. Churchill insisted the island be relieved and the navy started to identify battleships and carriers to accompany the fastest merchant ships available. "Pedestal's air contingent was the strongest the Royal Navy could provide in August 1942, but was sadly inadequate for the challenge...fighting shore based aircraft, most of which flew higher and faster." They entered the Straits of Gibraltar on August 9th. The Italian fleet and 600 Axis aircraft were waiting for them. On the 11th, 37 Spitfires took off for a one-way trip to Malta. At the same time, four torpedoes slammed into Eagle, a carrier. She went down in less than 10 minutes taking 160 men and 16 Hurricanes with her. At dusk, 27 Ju88's appeared overhead, but high altitude bombing proved to be ineffective. On the next day, the fleet sailed through the Sicilian Narrows, only one hundred miles wide and 150 miles from Italian airbases. Wave after wave of air attacks only managed to cripple a merchant ship and the British were able to sink two Italian submarines. Then at dusk, the final wave saw multiple hits on the carrier Indomitable from dive bombers, but she stayed afloat. Recognizing that he had lost one of the navy's seven carriers and almost a second, Adm. Syfret withdrew the capital ships to Gibraltar, and sent the fleet on with cruisers and destroyers as escorts. There was no more air cover.
As darkness fell, the submarines attacked. A cruiser, the Nigeria, a destroyer and the most important merchant vessel were hit. The Nigeria was Adm. Burrough's flagship and he transferred to a destroyer with markedly inferior communication equipment. The destroyer Cairo sank. The Ohio, lent by the US and manned by the British, was a tanker full of petrol. The Luftwaffe returned and sank a merchantman, Empire Hope. Another merchant ship was damaged, Brisbane Star,and the Clan Ferguson were sunk. Fortunately, the Ohio continued on. They were still 300 miles from Malta. In the opening minute of the 13th, the first of the nineteen Axis torpedo boats struck, hitting the cruiser Manchester. The ship was badly damaged and the captain scuttled her. The merchantman Glenorchy, the Almeria Lykes, Wairangi and the Santa Elisa were all sunk before the sun was up. At dawn on the 13th, they were 140 miles from Malta. The seven merchant ships left were attacked by dive bombers and the Waimarama, filled with aviation fuel and munitions, was blown sky high. The Ohio was stopped dead in the water. Spitfires from Malta began to provide some assistance. Another merchantman was sunk around noon. The Italian torpedo planes made the last attack at mid-afternoon.
Three merchant ships entered Grand Harbor at six in the evening. Another freighter arrived the next day. A total of 32,000 tons out of the 84,000 that started out made it to its destination. The most important item, the one without which the island could not survive was aviation fuel for the 186 Spitfires that provided its defense. The Ohio was still 100 miles away, dead in the water, and taking on water. The RN began to tow it. It limped into the harbor on the morning of the 15th. Because the Axis sank so many ships, history has been divided on who was successful here. And, whether or not keeping Malta in British hands was worth the effort has also been discussed. Nonetheless, a film, 'Malta Story' was made in the 1950's.
An Empire of Their Own: How The Jews Invented Hollywood, Gabler - B-
Hollywood, and the American Dream it presented to the world, was created and run for thirty years by Jews from Eastern Europe. Then their sons managed the greatest era in the history of the industry. The writers, lawyers, and agents were Jews as well. The anti-semitic reaction began immediately, and culminated in the Red-baiting of the 1950's.
Carl Laemmle (Universal) was born in Germany in 1867; Adolph Zukor (Paramount) was born in Hungary in 1873; William Fox (Fox) was born in Hungary in 1879; Louis B. Mayer(Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer) was born in Russian 1885; and the Warner boys (Warner Brothers) were born in Poland, Canada and the US. "What united them in deep spiritual kinship was their utter and absolute rejection of their pasts and their equally absolute devotion to their new country." All grew up very, very poor. They desperately wanted to assimilate, to be American. And they created the visualization of what America and Americans should be.
Adolph Zukor, an orphan, came to America at the age of 16. He trained as a furrier, built a successful business, and as the new century began was a rich New Yorker. He turned to the ownership and promotion of arcades showing 30 second videos. He opened a movie theater. He believed that what was needed was longer quality films. He was soon making films of plays and books. He combined his business with Paramount, a fledgling producer of films, and was now running a studio.
The affable Carl Laemmle moved to America in 1883, where he spent years failing at endeavor after endeavor. He did reasonably well in an Oshkosh clothing business and while visiting Chicago, was amused by a 5 cent motion picture and purchased a theatre. He began to buy and rent films. By 1911, he was the largest distributor of films in the US and moved to New York. Films were not watched by the broad middle class, but almost exclusively by immigrants. Considered a low-life business, the wealthy establishment eschewed any financial interest in movies. "Laemmle, who failed to scale even the lower reaches of American industry, now presided over a considerable domain - one built on outsiders and the culturally disenfranchised like himself. And these would be his troops in the war that followed when the Jews would take over the movie industry for good." Laemmle formed Universal in the midst of NYC's distribution wars in the 1910's.
William Fox was "obsessed with success," quit school at 11 and was a clothing foreman at 13. He and a friend purchased a movie theater in Brooklyn in 1903. Within a decade, he was a wealthy man and Fox Film was a success.
Louis B. Mayer, claiming his birth records were lost, took July 4th as his birthday. He was raised in New Brunswick, Canada, and went to work at 12. He left for Boston when he was 19. A few years later, he leased a theater and began exhibiting films. In 1911, he built a 1600 seat theater. He was a principal in the creation of the film distributor Metro Pictures. He produced a few films and decided it was time to head to California. "Another blandishment that must have drawn the Jews to California was that, unlike in the east, the social structure was primitive and permeable." He merged Metro and Goldwyn to form MGM.
Harry and Jack Warner were the sons of a Polish shoe maker who immigrated to Baltimore. They were complete opposites who hated each other. Their father's devotion to religion was a major dividing point. Harry could speak Hebrew at seven; Jack never tried. Harry believed in promoting tolerance and justice; Jack didn't care. Their entry point also was film exhibition. They soon moved to production and to Hollywood. Their reputation was that they were iconoclastic and aggressive, a reputation they cemented when they were the first to introduce sound. With 'The Jazz Singer', they assured that sound was here to stay.
The toughest and meanest of them all was Harry Cohn at Columbia. Born in NY in 1891, he was bit of a street hustler whose brother Jack got him a job at Universal. They left and formed their own company. Columbia teamed up with an unknown director named Frank Capra and together, they built a powerhouse. Cohn wanted power, Capra recognition. Together, they achieved their goals.
By the 1930's, the studio system, with its emphasis on control, was fully entrenched. "The moguls made the studios in their images to actualize their own dreams." A Warner film was scrappy, quick, topical and a product of a tight-fisted organization. MGM's heroes were tall, elegant and attractive; Paramount's continental. Warner's stars were Cagney, Robinson, Bogart, Raft and Davis, all fighters and strivers, often in urban settings. Warner's America was a tough place where the little guy didn't have it easy. Their films were "the least assimilative." Warner pushed his people, worked them very hard and they often rebelled against his demands. At Columbia, Cohn ran the studio like "a private police state." His America was Capra's, one propelled by ruthless capitalists against whom good guys like Stewart or Cooper pushed back. It was a "populist America of sinister forces at the top pitched against decency at the bottom..." Columbia's stars - Colman, Stanwyck, Arthur and Grant - weren't remotely ethnic. At Paramount, "the pictures purred with the smooth hum of sophistication." Zukor viewed his movies "as a source of intellectual elevation." Universal was known for its westerns and horror films and received half of its revenue from Europe. The studio struggled in the '30's, not the least because it specialized in nepotism; at one point with seventy of Laemmle's relatives on the payroll. "In the thirties, there was no doubt that MGM was the Tiffany of studios..." They had the best talent and paid well for the privilege. Mayer was obsessed with being the best. He wanted to project beauty on the screen; he wanted to be a father to the big MGM family. His stars were Gable, Astair, Turner, Garbo, Crawford, and Garland.
Politically, the Jews of Hollywood were reactionaries. They also were the highest paid people in America. In the mid-30's, forty of the sixty-five highest paid Americans were Hollywood execs. In 1934, they worked together to thwart the gubernatorial candidacy of Upton Sinclair. The younger, better educated Jews who worked for them as writers disagreed. A Jewish actor formed the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League. The communist party also took root. The rise of Hitler garnered the attention of the leaders of the industry. Laemmle and Zukor helped hundreds escape. However, not wanting to draw attention to themselves, and not wishing to hurt their European business, the studios were slow to confront the Nazis. Once they began to do so, Sen. Wheeler called for an investigation into why Hollywood was encouraging America to end its neutrality. With the onset of war, Hollywood was on the side of the angels. Hollywood's leftward leanings came under attack later by the House Un-Americam Activities Committee (HUAC). Inspired by rabid anti-semitism, HUAC came after Hollywood after the war. The hearings began in Washington in October, 1947. The studio heads feared that the protestant establishment that shunted them into a marginal business that they turned into a world class industry, was coming to take that industry and their wealth away. Ten witnesses refused to answer the committee's questions and were held in contempt. The industry folded. It fired the Hollywood Ten and promised to not hire known communists.
The moguls were aging and slowly losing their personal control of their empires. In an agreement with the DOJ, the studios divested themselves of their theater holdings. Zukor, Fox and Laemmle had left in the thirties. Mayer was distracted by his wife's long illness. Cohn simply lost his ability to dominate everything. Jack Warner convinced his brothers to sell the business, which they all did. The next day he bought it back. He and Harry never spoke again. After needing a year to recover from a car accident, Jack came back but the role of the studio was diminishing daily. A decade later, he sold his interest's in his company. Mayer resigned from MGM after a battle with his production team. "Though it was a purveyor of sentiment, Hollywood was, as Mayer learned, a notoriously unsentimental place." He became a bitter, lonely old man. Slowly, the founding moguls passed away, Zukor was the last dying at 103 in 1976. "What remains is the America of our imaginations and theirs. Out of their desperation and their dreams, they gave us this America."
In many ways, this is an exasperating book. It's quite long and at times goes into incredible detail, yet loses track of the big picture. It opens with specificity about all of the moguls and then focuses on Jack Warner and Louis B. Mayer for almost all of the second half of the book. I kept wondering what happened to the others. I do not know how one could run through the 1930's without any mention of all the Europeans who came to Hollywood. From a continuity standpoint, it's been a bit of a challenge. However, it affirms the obvious about this niche area of Jewish immigrant history. The German, Irish, Italian and Jewish immigrants of the 19th century disrupted and changed American society, I like think for the better. With fewer people, the Jews did it faster than anyone else I can recollect.
Berlin Exchange, Kanon - B+
In this novel set in 1963, American physicist Martin Keller, imprisoned in the UK for a decade for giving atomic secrets to the Soviets, is exchanged and crosses into E. Berlin. His motive in going to E. Germany is that he would like to get to know his 12-year old son. He and his wife had divorced when he was imprisoned. Both are die-hard believers. When he and Sabine have a few moments together, he tells her that she had to be the one who turned him in, and she acknowledges that she was ordered to in order to protect someone higher up. She also advises him that she is dying of lung cancer and it's imperative that he look after their boy, Peter. His KGB handler tells him he has to go to work again, and without a choice, he agrees to keep his ears open at his new place of work. He is assigned to work on the bomb again, and spying on his old friends. He realizes he can't do it and tells Sabine, also born in the US, that they have to take Peter to America, they need to leave. He orchestrates an elaborate scheme to leave and, although there are are some glitches, he pulls it off. A well done effort by a skilled writer of post-war Germany novels. Interestingly, E. Germany exchanged thousands of people and returned them, or sent them, to the west for hard currency. It is estimated that billions of Deutschmarks flowed into the GDR over the course of its failed existence.
The Matchmaker, Vidich - B+
The story opens in Berlin in the fall of 1989. Anne is an American interpreter for the occupying authorities, and her husband Stefan is a piano tuner who travels the continent. In reality, Stefan is/was a Stasi agent, part of the Matchmaker's tactic of marrying Stasi men to westerners as part of a spy network. Stefan was also skimming from the E. Germans, and had a wife and son on the other side of the wall. He goes missing and the W. Germans think she is complicit, the E. Germans want to find him, and both sides are interested in his Swiss bank account. Anne resolves to help the wife and son and is working to help them escape when Stefan shows up on the night of November 8th. The following evening, when the wall comes down, all are able to crossover, except Stefan, whom the Stasi nab at the last moment. A month later, Stefan's cremains are delivered to the family apartment. For the W. Germans, the pursuit of the Matchmaker is on. For Anne it's simply about trying to understand what happened to her, and extracting a degree of revenge. This one stumbles a bit at the end, but Anne does get even.
Blackout, Scarrow - B
Criminal Inspector Horst Schenke is in charge of the 12 man Kripo unit at the Pankow precinct in Berlin in the freezing December of 1939. His politics are marked by ambivalence. He is called in by the head of the Gestapo to handle what he characterizes as a "delicate matter." The wife of a high party official has been murdered and the matter must be handled with finesse. Subtlety, however, is not the name of the game because the murderer is a serial killer. Schenke manages to fight through the interference of the Gestapo and the Abwehr, while holding to his values as an apolitical investigator. This a good historical fiction/police procedural, one that ably discusses the challenge of enforcing the law in a country ruled by criminals.
Eight Days In May: The Final Collapse of the Third Reich, Ullrich - B
This is an effort by an esteemed German historian to sort through the chaotic week between Hitler's suicide on April 30th and Germany's unconditional surrender on May 8th. It was sort of a "temporal no man's land" between the past and future. National Socialism had collapsed, but the Allies were not yet in control.
Hitler spent his last day bidding farewell to his staff and tending to some of the details of the war. He shot himself in the head and his wife Eva took cyanide at about 3:30 PM. Their bodies were burned and their remains buried in a bomb crater. A few hours later, a telegram from Bormann advised Adm. Donitz that he was now the leader of the nation.
On the 1st, the Battle of Berlin continued unabated. Donitz "saw his main task as to continue the war on the eastern front long enough to allow as many soldiers and refugees as possible to escape capture by the Red Army." In the Fuhrerbunker, the Goebbels' followed Hitler's suicide path and everyone else tried to escape. From the east, Walter Ulbricht, who would run E. Germany for years, arrived in Berlin from Moscow.
On the 2nd, Berlin radio announced that the Fuhrer was dead. The reaction was rather muted. The Wehrmacht announced a cease fire and the surrender of the city. The civilian population was relieved and the conquerors were jubilant. The plunder and rape of German women by the Red Army began immediately. Ulbricht would allow no discussion of this, would take no action, and prohibited abortions. That evening, 600,000 men surrendered in Italy. Werner von Braun and his team surrendered to the Americans in Bavaria.
On the 3rd, Donitz's government discussed trying to surrender in the west, but to continue to fight the Russians. The military and civilian leadership of Hamburg surrendered the city to the British. German leadership offered to surrender all forces in the northwest to Montgomery, but he refused to accept the surrender of Army Group Vistula fighting the Russians. He offered to accept a tactical surrender of those in the north, including occupied Denmark and the Netherlands.
On the 4th, Donitz approved the partial surrender in the west. "Along with entire army groups, individual armies and divisions also tried to save themselves from Russian captivity by surrendering to the Americans or the British." That afternoon American and French soldiers took Hitler's redoubt at Obersalzberg.
On the 5th, the people of Prague took to the streets to rebel against the remaining power Germany had in the protectorate. The following morning, Waffen-SS troops attacked the civilian rebels, but soon abandoned the city. The Russians would arrive on the 9th. As the Reich continued to collapse, not just German soldiers, but millions of slave laborers and concentration camp survivors fell into the hands of the Allies. Neither the western powers nor the Russians were equipped to effectively process, house, or feed them.
The 6th saw continued efforts by the German high command to surrender in the west. Eisenhower let it be known that the only option was unconditional surrender of the Reich's remaining fighters.
On the 7th, Donitz authorized an unconditional surrender and Jodl signed it in Reims early in the morning. It took effect on the following midnight. Stalin insisted on a surrender to the Red Army too, and that took place in Berlin on the 8th. Of the three million men fighting on the eastern front, about half surrendered to the British and Americans, and half to the Russians. The war in Europe was over.
"Most Germans, even those critical of the regime, regarded May 8, 1945, not as a day of liberation but as an unprecedented national catastrophe." The Donitz government, although it had nothing to do, continued for two weeks before it was abolished and its members arrested. The Allies noticed two themes in the German population. They tried very hard to curry favor with the occupiers, while claiming their surprise at all of the exposed atrocities. Most Germans felt that they were victims. All of the senior ministers, generals and gauleiters were collected in a hotel in Belgium. Fifty-two of the highest ranking Nazis were at the Palace Hotel in Mondorf. Almost all were transferred to Nuremberg for their trials. And as unlikely as it seemed in May, 1945, Germany revived and is now a "nation defined by stability, freedom, and peace." This a very good, precise and concise history of that fateful week.
Woman On Fire, Barr - B+
The title is the name of a painting that is very important to two people. The first is Ellis Baum, the dying son of the woman who was the model for the artist. As a boy in Berlin, he saw Nazis take away the picture and take away his mother. The painter was considered degenerate, and he too was consigned to the ashes. The second is Margaux de Laurent, whose grandfather was a Parisian art dealer who purchased the painting in a 1938 Swiss auction of paintings confiscated in Germany and sold to raise capital. Her grandfather lost it to the Nazis when they occupied France. Its appearance in the apartment of the son of the Nazi collector has set both Ellis and Margaux trying to locate it. This is a well done thriller with some very nice background on the world of high fashion, and the amazingly complex world of stolen art, its recovery and the endless legal/moral issues that the world still faces.
4.14.2022
I Am Not Who You Think I Am, Rickstad - C
Something incongruous about the day his father killed himself always stuck with him. His dad was over six feet tall, but he remembered his dad's feet not touching the floor as he sat on his bed and pulled the trigger. He sets off at the age of 16 to try and sort out exactly what happened and if it really was his dad. A fast-paced, incredibly well done page turner crashes and burns with a weak, preposterous finale.
4.04.2022
Watergate: A New History, Graaf - A*
"At its simplest, Watergate is the story of two separate criminal conspiracies: the Nixon world's dirty tricks that led to the burglary on June 17, 1972, and then the subsequent cover-up." The story is of course bigger and more complicated. The genesis of Watergate was the administration's anger with ongoing leaks to the press. After eighteen wiretaps of WH staff came up empty, Nixon ordered an expansion of the taps when the Pentagon Papers release in the summer of 1971 burst onto every front-page in the country. Although the Nixon administration was not even mentioned, an enraged Kissinger demanded an aggressive WH response to the Papers. Thus, the Plumbers, managed by Egil Krogh and reporting to Ehrlichman, were born. A Hunt/Liddy burglary of Ellsberg's psychiatrist's office came up empty. Throughout the planning for the 1972 election Liddy, now charged with Intelligence for CREEP, pushed Mitchell for approval of an endless list of burglaries, wiretaps, dirty tricks and illegal acts. Mitchell later swore he never approved anything, and it's likely that the okay for the Watergate break-in came from Magruder. The first entry into the DNC headquarters came on May 28th. They came back to replace a failed bug on June 16th. A little after midnight, Barker, McCord, Gonzalez, Martinez, and Sturgis were arrested. Liddy and Hunt, watching from across the street, quickly fled. "By the time dawn rose in Washington, the cover-up had begun."
With McCord on the CREEP payroll and Hunt, a WH employee whose name was in a burglar's notebook, stress pulsed through the administration. The Post assigned Woodward to the case and by late Sunday, he knew that Hunt worked for Colson. The first official lie came that same day when Mitchell disavowed McCord. It was soon determined that all of the burglars had CIA connections, leading Nixon to suggest that the CIA be told to call off the FBI in the interests of national security. Dean was sitting in on some of the FBI interviews and reading all the FBI interview files from June until the following April. The president pointed out that the place to get money for the burglars was the Miami Cuban community.
The FBI was in management turmoil. When Hoover died in May, Nixon appointed L. Patrick Gray as acting director. Gray was a capable former submarine officer with no familiarity with law enforcement. His acting deputy, Mark Felt, was a career agent who believed he should be in charge. He undermined Gray at every turn, and began leaking prodigiously to the press. Almost four decades later, he would acknowledge that he was Deep Throat.
The WH had Mitchell resign for personal reasons, an idea that was readily accepted because of his wife's erratic conduct, while Dean was successful in raising the money for the burglars and E. Howard Hunt. Within a few weeks, the story died. But, the FBI, the Post and the Times continued to plug away. The administration stated that everyone should cooperate with the investigation, and then spent the summer "constructing an elaborate series of lies, suborning perjury, and constructing half-truths to obfuscate the campaign's darkest corners.'' The President acknowledged to his staff that the hush money was keeping Hunt et. al. quiet. The first indictments came in September with the five burglars, Liddy, and Hunt the only ones to face justice. Nixon, Haldeman, Ehrlichman, and Dean gloated over the success of the containment. The Post, Time, and the LA Times continued to find suspicious kernels of extensive impropriety, but were not yet able to tie it all together. Walter Cronkite mused on CBS that there may be more to Watergate than we know, but the election came without the affair having any impact on the nation or the outcome. Nixon won in a massive landslide. He seemed untouchable.
Five defendants pleaded guilty and two mounted virtually no defense. Barely any information about motive or all the money floating around surfaced. Judge John Sirica felt that the wool was being pulled over his eyes. In the Senate, a Select Committee On Presidential Campaign Activities was created under the chairmanship of Sam Ervin. As the committee began its work, and while John Sirica was trying to get the seven convicted men to talk, Dean met with Nixon on March 21st and mentioned the "cancer" on the presidency. Dean detailed at length all that he had done throughout the cover up, as well as Haldeman's and Ehrlichman's involvement. It was the same meeting where Nixon said he knew where to get millions in cash. As March 1973 came to an end, the unravelling began. James McCord told Sirica that Mitchell, Magruder, and Dean authorized the burglary, and orchestrated the payoffs to the burglars. Dean began to realize there was no way out and hired counsel. He met with the prosecutors, as did Magruder a few days later. Nixon announced there would be new details forthcoming because he was now investigating. Acting Director Gray resigned after acknowledging he destroyed evidence. Nixon summoned Haldeman and Ehriclman to Camp David and asked them to resign. AG Kleindienst also resigned. Dean's secretary called to tell him he'd been fired. Mitchell and Stans were indicted.
On May 17, 1973, the Watergate Committee began its public hearings. McCord, Magruder and quite a few others preceded the star, John Dean, in June. He spent nine hours reading a 245 page statement. After hearing Dean, Tip O'Neill began to consider how the House would handle an impeachment. One of the WH lawyers told a colleague about the president,"I've listened to some of the tapes, and he was in the cover-up right up to his eyeballs from the beginning." On July 16, likely the most stunning revelation of Watergate came when Alexander Butterfield, formerly Haldeman's assistant, was speaking. He made the committee, and the world, aware of the extensive recording system in the WH. No longer was Dean's testimony the only source of information about the cover up. Immediately, Ervin issued a subpoena as did Archibald Cox, the special prosecutor. Over the summer, the Committee presented 257 hours of testimony that was carried on all three networks. Watergate dominated America as millions watched daily. Sirica ordered that the subpoenaed tapes be turned over to him so he could determine the merits of Nixon's executive privilege claims. Tension was building for the president on the issue of the tapes and, in particular, the tactics of Cox. A Gallup poll showed less than 9% of the country thought Watergate was important, and Nixon kept preaching that he had nothing to do with the break-in or the cover-up. He said that he needed to get back to running the nation.
"October 1973 would prove to be perhaps the most historic single month in the history of the American presidency..." Agnew pleaded guilty to bribery charges and resigned the vice-presidency. In the Middle East, Egypt and Syria started what would be known as the Yom Kippur War and placed a first-class foreign crisis on Nixon's desk. Israel was on the threshold of defeat. Nixon ordered an airlift that gave the Israelis the material they needed to safeguard their borders and take the offensive. An appeals court rejected Nixon's arguments and ordered the tapes turned over. Dean pleaded guilty to a one count felony charge. Nixon focused on the idea of having a third party review the tapes, summarize them and make a decision about executive privilege. Cox rejected the idea. On the evening of the 20th, the attorney general and his deputy resigned rather than follow Nixon's order to fire Cox. The deed was done by the solicitor general. The event became known as the Saturday Night Massacre.
"Condemnation of the president's actions flowed from political allies and foes alike, and even from church pulpits across the nation." The country was outraged. The president's approval rating was 24%. In the House, eighty-four members proposed impeachment. On Tuesday, the president's lawyer announced that he would turn over the tapes. Leon Jaworski was appointed the new special prosecutor and Peter Rodino's House Judiciary Committee began impeachment hearings. Editorials around the country began calling for the president to resign. His lawyers even suggested he resign. Then, the WH went public with the eighteen minute erasure of a Watergate conversation that Nixon and Haldeman had the previous June. When the special prosecutors finally listened to the subpoenaed tapes, they knew they had compelling evidence of crimes by Nixon. An investigation by the IRS^ revealed that the president had paid virtually no taxes because of a gift of papers to the National Archives and that the gift had been illegally backdated. At years end, Sirica graced Time's cover as its Man of the Year. Only fifty-two weeks earlier, it had been Nixon.
The wheels of justice turned slowly. In March, the grand jury convened by the special prosecutor indicted Mitchell, Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Colson, Strachan, Mardian, and Parkinson. Nixon was an unnamed, unindicted co-conspirator. In late April, the president released 1300 pages of transcripts that he told the nation showed that he knew nothing of the cover-up until March 21, 1973, the day of his meeting with Dean. Upon examination, the prosecutors noted that the WH had released a fraction of what they asked for. Even so, the country was appalled at what they read."Congress was furious, Nixon defenders dumbstruck, and the general public was repulsed." His former lawyer said, "Nixon released a thousand pages of mumbled plotting, twisting, turning, and double-dealing, all the numbing sleaziness of political men in desperate trouble, the whole mess compounded by countless transcription mistakes, arbitrary omissions, and perhaps worst of all, innumerable references throughout to expletive deleted." Most importantly, the Judiciary Committee and the special prosecutor subpoenaed tapes, and got transcripts. Starting in May, the committee heard testimony three days per week for ten weeks, and then began public testimony in early July. A unanimous Supreme Court affirmed that Nixon had to turn over all the subpoenaed tapes. On July 27, the committee voted 27-11 to impeach the president. A few days later, the transcript of the June 23rd meeting in which Nixon fully endorsed a cover up was released, and the committee's votes switched to make the recommendation unanimous. The WH concluded they probably had seven votes in the Senate. He resigned in a nationally televised broadcast on August 8th. He acknowledged no wrongdoing, just a lack of political support.
On September 8, Ford pardoned Nixon. It was a very unpopular decision. Perhaps the most important long term consequence of Watergate was that the nation no longer trusted Washington. A noted observer said,"If Nixon's has bequeathed to his presidential successors a permanently hostile news system, he has cursed them all." The author closes with a most ironic observation. We still don't know who ordered the break in or what the burglars were trying to achieve.
I am struck by Mark Felt's duplicity and motivation after remembering his rather positive treatment in 'All The President's Men'. I am amazed by Kissinger's balancing act having called the WH staff "maniacs in a madhouse" and knowing full well that the president despised Jews. I am surprised that John Mitchell tried to stop John Dean from joining the WH staff which he characterized as a bunch of "looneys." As for the staff, they just seem grossly incapable and disconnected from reality. And for the president, I find it incomprehensible that he spent hours upon hours rambling on and on while he bathed in his unique mix of paranoia, anti-semitism, and delusion. My most important takeaway is that this book is a masterpiece, and I'd be shocked if it doesn't rack up some very serious awards.
*Although it would be almost thirty-five years before Deep Throat was identified, Mitchell told Haldeman it was Felt, and the WH decided it couldn't do anything about it without facing Felt's ire and disclosure of all he knew.
^Nixon was assessed a $440,000 tax bill.
April In Spain, Banville - B
We find state pathologist Quirke on vacation in Spain, where he believes he sees a woman from Dublin whom everyone thinks is dead. April Latimer was a physician in Dublin when her brother confessed to killing her, but her body was never found. News of her presence in Spain stirs her uncle, a minister in the Irish government, to seek out and find a hitman; because April knows way too much about his illegal arming of IRA members in the north. The attempt at murder fails. The author is a Booker winner and has a way with words that manages to propel a slim story enjoyably along.
Bad Little Falls, Doiron - B
As punishment for his insubordination and disinclination to follow rules, Mike has been transferred to the easternmost county in Maine, a rural wasteland of drug abuse and criminality. In the midst of a storm, he's called out. It appears as if two or three people had a falling out in the midst of a drug deal in the middle of the blinding snowstorm. He also falls for a beautiful young woman who has perhaps the most dysfunctional set of relatives ever. His new boss doesn't like him, and just about all of the law enforcement people in Washington County are skeptical. Through his courage and inherent detective skills, he helps sort things out and gets to the bottom of a pretty awful mess.
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