Gaslit

[NightskyeB4Dawn]

I tripped up on this series, by mistake. It was not what I was looking for but I couldn't stop watching it after I started.

I just finished it, and I though I am not a Julia Roberts fan, she deserves kudos for her performance in this series. I think she did an awesome job.

I can't vouch for how accurate it is, but I found a very good series.

Gaslit is a modern take on Watergate that focuses on the untold stories and forgotten characters of the scandal – from Nixon’s bumbling and opportunistic subordinates to the deranged zealots aiding and abetting their crimes to the tragic whistleblowers who would eventually bring the whole rotten enterprise crashing down. The story will center on Martha Mitchell, played by Julia Roberts. A big personality with an even bigger mouth. Martha is a celebrity Arkansan socialite and wife to Nixon’s loyal Attorney General, John Mitchell, played by Sean Penn. Despite her party affiliation, she’s the first person to publicly sound the alarm on Nixon’s involvement in Watergate, causing both the Presidency and her personal life to unravel.

[EndtheMadnessNow]

I remember seeing the trailer for it, but later forgot about the show. I have not seen it yet.

Related and wasn't sure which forum to add a new thread so dropping the following here.


On this day 50 years ago, sometime after midnight on Saturday June 17, 1972, burglars broke into the Watergate hotel of the democratic national committee. The following morning five office burglars were arrested.



Later identified as Virgilio Gonzalez, Bernard Barker, James McCord, Eugenio Martínez, and Frank Sturgis.

Yet, half a century later, the official story still has no answer to who ordered the break-in or why they were there.

And no official investigation has uncovered what the burglars were even targeting there, or who sent them into the DNC. In the recent book WATERGATE: A New History By Garrett M. Graff (Feb 15, 2022, 832 pages) navigates around the question and compares it to JFK conspiracies.

GRAFF: I think America misremembers Watergate as an event, the break-in of the DNC offices, when history has shown us that Watergate was more of a mindset. It was this dark, paranoid, conspiratorial, corrupt mindset that enabled a whole series of crimes and abuses of power that permeated the entire Nixon White House from the campaign of ’68 right through his resignation in ’74. It encompasses a dozen distinct but interrelated scandals with overlapping players, differing motives, differing targets that led the Nixon administration deeper into this morass of scandal. In many ways, the burglary on June 17, 1972, was the equivalent for America of walking into the second or third act of a play without understanding that the play had been underway for some time before.

GAZETTE: What would be the first scene of the first act of that play?

GRAFF: What I tried to argue in the book is when you look at the full scope of the sins of the White House it was the Chennault Affair in the fall of ’68, which stands as one of the greatest political scandals in American history, one of the only times there are credible allegations of, effectively, treason against a senior U.S. official. It was only within the last decade that we understood the centrality of it at all to Nixon’s mindset and what unfolded there. But the Chennault Affair — when Richard Nixon, as a candidate, interfered with the Paris peace talks to keep the Vietnam War going for his own political benefit — is the original sin that drives the Nixon administration and the Nixon White House to ever deeper and more outlandish and complex cover-ups.
That’s where it’s really important to understand the full umbrella of Watergate.

GAZETTE: How is it that we still can’t say for sure who ordered the break-in or why? Are there other important questions that remain unanswered even after all this time?

GRAFF: One of the most fascinating and weird questions to wrestle with is H.R. Haldeman, who is seen as one of if not the most organized and competent chiefs of staff of any White House in the modern presidency.
....
Wrapped up in that is a related but slightly separate and distinct question of what the CIA knew about the burglary in advance and what role, if any, did the agency have on the night of June 17, 1972? There is compelling but not conclusive evidence that the CIA knew a great deal and might have taken action to sabotage it. But that’s unproven, and we may never know or there might still be documents buried inside the CIA archives that come out some day that show that the CIA sabotaged the whole burglary.

Is there anything to learn about Watergate? New history says yes

Nixon (1995) HQ "Do you ever think of death, Dick?"




It appears actor Hal Holbrook gave a better analysis of deep throat and the myth of Watergate in 2005 than any of the takers we're seeing for the 50th anniversary now.


NY Times






Roper Center | @RoperCenter - The largest archives of public opinion data in the world, housed at Cornell University.




Full issue here from the Black Panther Party Intercommunal News Service [PDF] (Nov 17, 1973) Watergate article starts on page 10.

Now, what I found very interesting (only because I just discovered it) is: in October 1971 Nixon tells CIA director Dick Helms he needed to get all the CIA's Bay of Pigs files, and he says it's important because those files have "THE WHO SHOT JOHN?' ANGLE", a direct reference to the JFK assassination.

Here's a link to the tape itself at 17:30 for the "who shot John" remark. It's a direct .mp3 file so should play directly in your browser. Not the best audio quality so headphones will help.

However, Nixon says the "who shot John ANGLE" here, hinting that this was only one part of a larger issue. In this case, it's perhaps the use of anti Castro Cuban exiles in the Bay of Pigs, turning them into assassination squads, and then turning them inward on JFK.

I also learned "who shot john" was used in British military slang in the mid-19th century as a way of talking about the blame game, and finger-pointing. Also, is/was used in the Appalachian foothills and in the Old West for moonshine.

Well, as everyone here knows (some I'm sure better than me) that there is so much that has been written on this scandal, one could go on ad infinitum.