When Bob Woodward appeared on Jeopardy a few days ago, he stated that he was still unwilling to reveal the identity of Deep Throat. Who, I wondered at the time, still has that much power thirty years later?
In another thread,
Poll: Who is the least competent President , I wrote:
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An interesting side note to touring the Gerald Ford museum were the photos of Jerry Ford with Cabinet members and advisers to Richard Nixon who later became Cabinet members and advisers to both President's Bush. I can't drive for the next five months, but if I find any notes that I took that day, I'll post their names somewhere.
I have a vague recollection of having seen a photograph of Gerald Ford with Karl Rove in the White House…Ford was sworn in August 9, 1974. I asked myself, “Was Karl Rove that active in politics at the time?”
As per a column,
Karl Rove: The King of Dirt, by Wayne Madsen, which PE uncovered for me,:
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This evil practitioner of political chicanery earned his stripes first as an apprentice of Richard Nixon's dirty trickster, Donald Segretti.
--From The Wilderness, December 5, 2003
I did a search for Karl Rove, and I stumbled across an
outdated, but fascinating collection of websites,
Famous Texans For a perspective on the time-frame of the website; when last updated, the most recognizable George W. Bush quote they could find was:
QUOTE(George W. Bush)
"I’ve got a significant strawberry."
--spoken to reporters about injuries he received after narrowly avoiding flying debris when an out-of-control trailer overturned near where he was jogging.
The Famous Texans Biography of Karl Rove reports:
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In the years of the Watergate scandal, Rove's career as a big-time political handler began with a motley crew of friends and associates. He was chairman of the College Republicans when George Herbert Walker Bush was chairman of the state Republican Party in 1973.
There appears to be a strong possibility then, that Bush Senior may have known Rove at least as early as 1973, the year before Gerald Ford became President.
Famous Texans Biography of George Herbert Walker BushQUOTE
In 1953, Bush got money from Brown Brothers Harriman and, with partners Hugh and Bill Liedtke, formed Zapata Petroleum. By the late 1950s they were millionaires. Bush bought subsidiary Zapata Off-Shore from his partners and went into business on his own in 1954. By 1958, the new company was drilling on the Cay Sal Bank in the Eastern Gulf of Mexico. These islands had been leased to Nixon supporter and CIA contractor Howard Hughes the previous year and were later used as a base for CIA raids on Cuba. The CIA was using companies like Zapata to stage and supply secret missions attacking Fidel Castro’s Cuban government in advance of the Bay of Pigs invasion. The CIA’s codename for that invasion was “Operation Zapata.” In 1981, all Securities and Exchange Commission filings for Zapata Off-Shore between 1960 and 1966 were destroyed. In other words, the year Bush became vice president, important records detailing his years at his drilling company disappeared. In 1969, Zapata bought the United Fruit Company of Boston, another company with strong CIA connections.
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He served as Gerald Ford’s Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) from November 1975 to January 1977. As head the CIA, Bush was answerable only to President Ford. He was supposedly the first CIA “outsider” to hold the agency's top position. During his tenure as DCI he maintained a policy of disinformation and secrecy, despite a public show of cooperation with congressional investigations of CIA abuses such as assassination plots using Mafia hit men. In September 1976, Chilean dissident leader Orlando Letelier was assassinated in Washington D.C. by agents of DINA, Chile’s secret police. The CIA knew of such plots, and the two assassins entered the U.S. using fake Paraguayan passports. But the FBI was kept in the dark about this information.
In 1980, Bush hired Rove to help him run for president. He was the first person Bush hired for the campaign, according to the Karl Rove biography cited above. That campaign ended with Bush as Reagan’s Vice President.
This site credits Bush as Vice President with casting Senate tie-breaking votes to renew chemical weapons production, support sale of missiles to “terrorist” Iran, and the illegal arming of the Nicaraguan contras and other paramilitary groups he called “freedom fighters.
Following the invasion of Panama while Bush Sr. was President, this site claims; Bush’s Defense Secretary, Richard Cheney claimed a death toll of between 500 and 600; but independent human rights groups put the death toll between 3,000 and 5,000 with about 25,000 left homeless.
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This military operation turned out to be practice for even greater press censorship, propaganda and human rights violations during and after Operation Desert Storm, the U.S. air and ground attack that failed to depose Iraq’s leader, Saddam Hussein, in 1990. That failure eventually eroded public confidence in Bush and contributed to his defeat by Bill Clinton in the 1992 presidential election.
Famous Texans Biography of George W. Bush states:
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During his second four-year term as governor, Bush announced he was running for U.S. president. He had already been given the status of Republican front-runner in the 2000 presidential campaign. In his first four months of fund-raising, he collected record-setting contributions of $37 million.
Bush's first defeat came early in the campaign, however, with a big loss to Senator John McCain of Arizona in the New Hampshire Primary. After the sound defeat was clear in the state of New Hampshire, Karl Rove, Bush's chief strategist, was quoted congratulating McCain for winning, then oddly adding that the Bush campaign was prepared to win and beat McCain in all 50 states, although only 47 state contests remained. McCain skipped the Iowa Caucuses a week earlier, conceding that state to Bush. The razor-thin Bush win in the Alaska GOP Caucus was by a mere five votes over publisher Steve Forbes.
QUOTE(The Famous Texans Biography of Karl Rove)
Mark McKinnon, a former Democratic consultant who defected to the Bush campaign, called Rove the "Bobby Fischer of politics. He not only sees the board, he sees about 20 moves ahead."
I had heard that Karl Rove was largely responsible for George W. Bush's successful campaign for the Presidency. I did not know that Karl Rove managed the campaigns of both Presidents Bush, as well as working on the Reagan/Bush presidential campaign. If I did see his picture with Gerald Ford, I'm left to wonder how involved he was in the Nixon politics of the Watergate era.
George H. W. Bush was selected as an “outsider,” from a largely Democrat voting Texas, to head the CIA. His possible link? Preparations for The Bay of Pigs invasion may have been launched from his company’s islands. If the popular assumption at the time wass correct, a deal was cut to trade a Presidential Pardon for Richard Nixon’s resignation. If such a deal was cut, I could easily envision Karl Rove as the broker for the deal. Perhaps the Quid Pro Quo was promoting a Texan that he wanted to introduce to national politics. Karl Rove could easily at the time have been a college student with ambition, some influential friends, and, being young, the ability to blend unnoticed into the background. (For that matter, in November 1963, JFK was assassinated in Texas and LBJ, a Texan, became President… What was Karl Rove doing at the time?)
My speculation this morning is that perhaps Karl Rove was “Deep Throat,” beginning his campaign of behind the scenes “dirty tricks” to influence the American Presidency. It could have begun with good intent when someone shared a secret with him, or he could have masterminded the break in at the Watergate… Purely speculation of course….
The question to discuss:
Who do you think “Deep Throat” might have been, and how did you reach your conclusion?