2001: Nixon’s Administration Isolated, Layered in Lies upon Lies, Says Historian

Richard Reeves. [Source: Real Clear Politics.com]In his biography of former President Nixon, columnist and historian Richard Reeves sums up the isolation and duplicity that characterized the eight years of the Nixon presidency, particularly the second term after the controversy of the Watergate conspiracy became front-page news. Reeves writes: “Deceived and confused egos… eventually undermined the president.So many layers of lies were needed to protect the secrecy that no one, including the president himself, knew what the truth was anymore. No one inside the White House knew whom or what to believe. There was a chaos of lies at the top. The rings of deception built around the president, [Henry] Kissinger, [H. R.] Haldeman, and [John] Ehrlichman to protect themselves against ‘The Establishment’ as Nixon imagined it, gradually isolated his Cabinet and much of his staff. Colleagues became distrusted parts of the hated bureaucracy, enemies who must be kept away by bodyguards of lies. In the beginning, the idea was to make the president’s world secure from outsiders; in the end, even the insiders themselves could no longer penetrate to reality. There are many lines in the many lies of Nixon’s Oval Office tapes, but two that weave and twist through the plots are attempts to cover up past lies while trying to unravel them at the same time… It comes as no surprise then to learn that all the principals were spying on each other, stealing each other’s papers, tapping each other’s telephones, bugging their own offices. It was hard to keep track of the deceptions, even for the deceivers.… In the end, no one knew whether anyone was telling the truth, the whole truth, or any truth at all.” [Reeves, 2001, pp. 15-16]