An article by Michael Kranish in the July 4th edition of the Boston Globe adds some fresh perspective on Fred Thompson's role as Watergate prosecutor:
Thompson tipped off the White House that the committee knew about the taping system and would be making the information public. In his all-but-forgotten Watergate memoir, "At That Point in Time," Thompson said he acted with "no authority" in divulging the committee's knowledge of the tapes, which provided the evidence that led to Nixon's resignation. It was one of many Thompson leaks to the Nixon team, according to a former investigator for Democrats on the committee, Scott Armstrong , who remains upset at Thompson's actions.
Scott Thompson a Democratic investigator who worked with Thompson on the Watergate team is still upset with Thompson over 30 years later:
Thompson was a mole for the White House.Fred was working hammer and tong to defeat the investigation of finding out what happened to authorize Watergate and find out what the role of the president was.
It's an interesting perspective on Thompson role that I'd never heard before. Some my further readings bear Scott Johnson's story as having some basis in fact. As both a print and electronic journalist I'm always on the prowl for new angles on stories like this. So Scott Johnson inspired my own document search to jog my memory on Fred Thompson's role in the Watergate hearings. I was a bit surprised by what I found.
Historian Ricard McGowan:
The most incorrigible partisans were Senator [Howard] Baker and the hand-picked [Fred]Thompson, a 30-year-old Tennessee lawyer with an Ed ward G. Robinson scowl who had served as Baker’s 1972 senatorial campaign manager. Baker later described Thompson to President Nixon as a "Tennessee lawyer with brass balls." Their mission was to make things easier for the White House whenever possible, leak pro-White House stories and fight the immunity process for anti-administration witnesses.
Source:Watergate.
McGowan goes on to point out that Fred Thompson enforced a double standard of leaking information to the media
Everybody on the Senate Watergate Committee leaked— from the senators to the committee staff to the lowest secretary. The lantern-jawed Thompson, who would later appear in countless movies and is now a U.S. senator from Tennessee, made a big deal early in the hearings about curbing committee leaks while he was feeding pro-Nixon stories to a naive Washington newcomer like Connie Chung. The White House leaked around-the-clock.
Americans were gullible back in 1974 and most of us would never dream that a prosecutor would collude with the defendant he was charged with investigating. Apparently that liberal press that conservatives claim to be biased, dropped the ball again and portrayed Thompson as someone he was not. I recall that even Cronkite spoke approvingly of Fred Thompson's role. Maybe Cronkite himself,was clueless.
Watergate, even more than the Vietnam war was the defining event of my generation. Vietnam was the story of Richard Nixon's rise to power and Watergate was the story of Nixon's fall from grace. Watergate was our real moment of victory where we finally began to gain some perspective on Vietnam experience. We were not the traitors that Nixon and Agnew proclaimed us to be. The anti-war movement had finally succeeded in bringing the war home and in doing so, we turned the tables and exposed Nixon as the traitor. The hunter gets captured by his game.
It was Republican Lowell Weicker that was the unsung hero of Watergate:
Only the appearance of Alexander Butterfield, who testified about the White House taping system, had an impact like the steady stream of damning revelations from Lowell Weicker’s office about the nefarious dealings of Mitchell, Magruder, Colson, Rebozo, Sloan, Liddy, Ehrlichman, Kleindeist, Haldeman and the rest of the Watergate cast. Weicker single-handedly moved the committee forward and Ervin, the constitutional scholar who agonized over taking the chairmanship, became a national folk hero.
Democrat Sam Ervin apparently dozed through many of the hearings sessions but would rise to the occasion whenever he rose to claim spotlight to cross examine witnesses.Behind the scenes Republican Weicker quarreled with Ervin to dampen his fears of retaliation from the Nixon administration and Ervin reluctantly pressed on with the hearings. The real grunt work was done by Weicker's office. And in one historic defining moment Weicker declaration of faith in justice Lowell Weicker drew the line. It was Weicker's finest moment and one of the finest moments in history of American justice:
McGowan writes:
The networks replayed and replayed the tape of the hearing room crowd erupting in the longest and loudest applause of the televised proceedings after Weicker declared: "Let me make it clear. Republicans do not cover-up; Republicans do not go ahead and threaten; Republicans do not go ahead and commit illegal acts; and God knows Republicans don’t view their fellow Americans as enemies to be harassed but rather, I can assure you, that this Republican, and those that I serve with, look upon every American as human beings to be loved and wanted."
In that moment Weicker shamed all his fellow Republican partisans into ending their charade to protect a rogue president, simply because he was a Republican. God knows the Republicans need a Lowell Weicker today because Weicker was the last of the great Republican senators.
I always thought that it was odd that Fred Thompson's political sympathies were too close to Nixon to be a competent Watergate prosecutor. Now over thirty years after the fact we learn that we may have been duped and Thompson was playing a shrewdly calculated duplicitous role doing damage control for the White House.
In that light Fred Thompson role as Chairman of the Scooter Libby Defense Committee begins to make some sense.
For every Lowell Weicker there was a dead-end partisan like Howard Baker who defended Nixon until the final day. It only makes sense that Fred Thompson was acting on the orders of his sponsor, Howard Baker. Thompson's media grandstanding showed his own actor's instinct for drama. Perhaps Thompson's pose as the diligent prosecutor may have been a masquerade for his duplicitous role in the cast of characters from the Watergate kabuki show.
I watch the quagmire of Iraq on television seated at an old wooden table in my kitchen. For the first time today that I remembered that my old wooden table is the same wooden table I sat ate as a teenager on the day I received my own "Greetings" letter from my draft board for service in Vietnam. The table came into my hands when my parents moved out of my family home into an smaller retirement apartment.
I also sat at that wooden table watching the Watergate hearings in 1974. For me the table has become a reminder of how little we've learned about ourselves because our history has been stolen from us. The contours of history are shaped by the beautiful lies whispered to us by soulless demons of the state. We will finally be free when we start making our own history, not theirs.
And I'm still haunted by ghosts of Watergate who still rattle their chains outside my door whenever I watch the current probes into similar crimes against the people by the Bush administration, some 34 years later.
Fred Thompson may be the one final ghost of Watergate I have yet to exorcise to put the Watergate era to rest.
For some of us the healing process amounts to a lot more than saying "Our long national nightmare is over," as you sign a pardon or commutation order. The books of history must be balanced by telling the truth if Fred Thompson has deceived the American public about his behavior as a Watergate prosecutor then Fred Thompson will return to haunt us as the ghost of Watergate past.