I just finished reading Born Again by Charles Colson. It’s a solid book and I recommend it. Colson gives us a brief overview of his time as a political operative, starting in Boston, and becoming one of President Nixon’s top men in the Whitehouse.
The book is not really about that, though. Most of his narrative surrounding Nixon and Watergate springboard for telling his conversion to accept Christ and became one of His mightiest disciples in our modern era. You have to understand that this man was involved in one of the greatest political scandals of his time and through all of that he came to Christ and ended up finding redemption, forgiveness, and serving restitution to those he had wronged.
So overall, it is a good read and I’d recommend it because firsthand account of what happened during those times that won’t be watered down by stupid high school textbooks, communist journalists, or stuffy professors who have never had to face the possibility of prison time in their miserable lives.
To his credit, Colson never did anything wrong with regards to the Watergate break-in or had anything to do with the subsequent cover-up but he does admit that what he was imprisoned for was legitimate. He did commit obstruction of justice against Dr. Daniel Ellsberg during his trial for releasing the Pentagon Papers.
And this is what I want to focus on. Charles Colson states in this book that he never ordered the Watergate break-in and that he tried bothered to cover it up. The most you could say he did was making the mistake of hiring Howard Hunt, the man behind the actual break-in, as he was a, supposedly, former CIA operative.
This part stuck out to me. While it’s not a significant part of the narrative of the overall book, it does shed some interesting light on the truth about the whole Watergate affair.
The Watergate operation was more than likely not an operation to bug the Democrat campaign, but it was an operation perpetrated by the CIA and the Deep State to discredit Nixon in some fashion. The operation was botched, that much cannot be in doubt, but at the same time, if they had succeeded, the end result would have been the same. The bugs would have very likely been discovered by Democrat party members and the scandal would’ve perpetuated anyway, especially if the CIA decided to tip them off.
When Colson found out about the break-in, he found out when everyone else did by reading about it in the local newspapers. He states in his book that despite being a political hatchet man, he would have never resorted to such tactics as they were incredibly stupid. President Nixon personally called him to confirm whether or not Colson had ordered the break-in and Colson stated as much and Nixon agreed. The Watergate break-in was an independent operation done by E. Howard Hunt and G. Gordon Libby designed to bring low a man who commanded massive popular support among the American people.
In the book, Colson states that at one point he was given access to CIA documents which showed they were trying to frame Colson as a means of deflecting attention away from the CIA. He also states that Bob Woodward was a CIA asset. My guess is that the whole reason the Watergate scandal got as big as it did was because the CIA was pushing their narrative in the press and drumming up as much anti-Nixon fervor as they could. They didn’t care about the country or the duly elected officials. They wanted to protect their own skins and if that meant making a popular president look like a sack of shit, so be it.
I’m not exactly sure why the CIA went so far as to get Nixon to resign. Perhaps they were afraid of his power. He did win the 1972 election with 61% of the popular vote and 49 states. People were back then, as they are today, completely disgusted with the radical Left’s insanity. It’s something that gets overlooked in your public skool history lessons where the hippies are often the good guys fighting against wicked old men like Nixon. But that wasn’t the case then and it isn’t the case now.
Fortunately, the Watergate scandal backfired on the CIA as well. I doubt we would have had the Church Committee investigations if nothing had happened. The whole Watergate incident should have fizzled out. Had the people trusted Nixon a little bit more and had Nixon been a little less paranoid, maybe he would have never resigned in disgrace. The truth is, Nixon had nothing to do with the break-in and it doesn’t look like he was trying to cover anything up. The Whitehouse tapes pretty much proved all of that.
But the truth is not something that the general public deals in. The truth was the Charles Colson was innocent of everything surrounding Watergate, that he was merely a shrewd political operative but not so unscrupulous as to plant bugs in the offices of his rivals, especially when his side was winning so soundly.
It should be noted that Howard Hunt has been fingered as one of the men behind the JFK assassination. I don’t know how true that is, as this was all inconclusive based on faulty deathbed confessions of his, but given how Watergate was executed outside of the Nixon administration and Republican party’s wishes, it would not surprise me.
Whatever the case is, I suppose we’ll never know the full extent of it. I still don’t have a clear motive for why the CIA sandbagged Nixon myself, but it is very likely that they did it.
And sometimes, evil men do things for no reason at all other than to hurt others.