I can’t figure out how Len Colodny and Robert Gettlin managed to convince St. Martin’s Press that anyone would buy another book about Watergate. The bungled break-in, which toppled a president, has also toppled an awful lot of trees. According to the bibliography to Colodny and Gettlin’s Silent Coup: The Removal of a President, there have been no fewer than 28 previous books on the subject.
To uncover what they believe is the true Watergate conspiracy, Colodny and Gettlin reexamine a forgotten scandal from the early part of the Nixon administration. In 1971, a Navy yeoman named Charles Radford was discovered swiping top secret papers from Henry Kissinger’s briefcase, and passing them on to Admiral Thomas Moorer, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
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To penetrate the secrets of the “silent coup,” Colodny and Gettlin argue that we must reevaluate three key Watergate figures: John Dean, Alexander Haig, and Bob Woodward. In the conventional interpretation of Watergate, Dean was the Nixon insider who exposed the truth about Watergate with his dramatic Senate testimony; Haig was the career military officer who steadied a shaky ship of state as White House chief of staff in 1973 and 1974; and Woodward was half of the reporting team that revealed the full story to a grateful nation.
Colodny and Gettlin believe this conventional interpretation is an outrageous fiction. The real story, they say, goes something like this: John Dean, not Nixon or any of his top aides, was the primary author of the Watergate break-in and the subsequent cover-up. Dean’s real motive, they argue, had nothing to do with dirty tricks against Democrats. Instead, they uncover evidence that suggests that Dean was trying to protect his then-girlfriend, Maureen Biner (later to become Maureen Dean), who was linked to a prostitution ring that serviced members of the Democratic National Committee (DNC). Biner’s name was in a phone book inside DNC headquarters–and Dean was apparently trying to make sure the Democrats didn’t uncover and exploit her connection to him.
Woodward, it turns out, was no ordinary rookie reporter. Before becoming a journalist, Woodward spent five years in the Navy, starting in 1965. His service included a stint on a floating naval command post, where he obtained “top-secret crypto” security clearance–and in 1969 he was assigned to the communications office in the basement of the White House. Woodward has told previous interviewers that his job there was “awful and boring . . . scut work.” It involved nothing more, he said, than carrying “some documents or a folder. . . . Strictly nuts and bolts.”
There’s one small problem with the silent coup theory suggested by Colodny and Gettlin: the coup–if there was one–was a total failure. If you believe, as many people do, that the CIA murdered John F. Kennedy because they didn’t think he was tough enough on Vietnam, you can point to Lyndon Johnson’s rapid escalation of the war as proof that the coup plotters succeeded. And if you believe, as many people do, that Ronald Reagan’s campaign aides persuaded the Iranians to hold on to the American hostages until after the 1980 election, you can point to the hostage release on the day of Reagan’s inauguration to prove that the “October surprise” was a stunning success.
