Epstein’s 1974 article on Watergate

Highly recommended by Scott Johnson at Powerline is Edward Jay Epstein’s article in the July 1974 Commentary, “Did the Press Uncover Watergate?”, now available online.

The theme of the article is that “it was not the press which exposed Watergate; it was agencies of government itself.” Epstein shows how immediately after the arrest of the Watergate burglars on June 17, 1972, the FBI and other federal agencies began unraveling the conspiracy connecting the burglars to President Nixon’s re-election campaign. He notes in particular that the FBI discovered within a few days the money link between burglars and the Committee to Re-elect the President, and that Woodward and Bernstein did not discover this. But then Epstein points out that the cover-up did not become known until Judge Sirica’s pressure on the Watergate burglars the following spring led James McCord to confess that he and the other burglars had lied—that they had been working for CRP. But if, as Epstein says, the FBI had known almost from the start that CRP was involved in Watergate, how come this evidence wasn’t introduced at the trial of the burglars?

It thus seems to me that Epstein succeeded in proving something like the opposite of what he intended to prove, and the opposite of what Republicans would currently claim to derive from his article. He wanted to prove that the government was really on top of this, and that Woodward and Bernstein’s accomplishments have been greatly exaggerated. This in turn would imply that Deep Throat’s contribution was unnecessary, which would further imply that there was absolutely no reason or excuse for Deep Throat to have violated the law in leading the reporters to classified information. But according to my reading of Epstein’s article (and I admit that my knowledge of Watergate is only a fragment of that of other people), it sounds as though the FBI was not releasing its information connecting the burglars to the Committee to Re-elect, which would tend to justify Mark Felt’s decision to leak to Woodward and Bernstein, even if much of Felt’s information, as Epstein shows, led Woodward and Bernstein up a wrong tree.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at June 03, 2005 01:59 PM | Send