Sunday, December 21, 2014

How a Check for $6.36 Brought Down the Nixon Administration

Well, it's not quite that simple, but still...  I've just finished reading John Dean's latest book, The Nixon Defense.  He and a group of students working under him, listened to all the thousands of hours of Nixon tapes and that led to this book that explains what Nixon knew and when he knew it.  The book is a big one, the narrative is over 600 pages, plus appendices and lots of end notes.  I ended up having to check it out from our local library three times before I got it finished.

The book is very interesting, and well worth reading.  It's amazing that anything else got done following Watergate as Nixon and his staff were spending several hours a day, up to five hours a day, on the cover-up.  And, once the cover-up started to unravel, they began a cover-up of the cover-up.

Anyway, back to the $6.36 check.  This check, drawn by Howard Hunt, was found with the Watergate burglars.   He didn't want to pay the expensive in-state dues for his local country club, so wrote a check to pay for the cheaper out-of-state dues, even though he lived in-state.  And he gave the check to one of the Watergate burglars to mail from Miami.   I hadn't known about this check before, and I think it's symptomatic of what was wrong with the Nixon administration.


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