ben bradlee

Haldeman, Deep Throat, and Sloan, oh my! Shine your flashlight this way for embarrassing espionage, lying librarians, and unfortunate aliases. Will your hosts enjoy a newsroom drama with Robert Redford at his handsomest?? No comment. The person most confused by the film this week was: the American people.

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Arguably, the most famous story of Watergate, save Richard Nixon's resignation itself, is that of the famous Washington Post secret source, My Friend, Mr. X, or better known thanks to the movie and book "All the President's Men" as Deep Throat. He turned out to be the number 2 man at the FBI, W. Mark Felt.  Felt denied it for decades even though he was among the list of suspects and he only came forward due to his family pushing him for what appears to be a payday long after Felt himself was capable of making the decision on his own.

But the decision of Mark Felt and his family to step forward also flushed out another man, also in his advanced years, near death due to pancreatic cancer, who had paid a horrible price for a role in Watergate that he had not asked for, nor deserved to have played.  L. Patrick Gray was the Acting Director of the FBI following the death of J. Edgar Hoover. Hoover had led the Bureau for nearly a half century and as his health began to fade a power struggle for who would replace him had emerged. When Hoover died, just a month before the break in, Richard Nixon seized the moment to reign in the Bureau that under Hoover had become a power source for its director.

It was in making that play that Nixon turned to Pat Gray so that a new leader, without a dog in the fight for control of the Bureau, could take control and clean house. Gray however soon found himself not only dealing with  intrigue within the FBI but intrigue outside of it as well.  He was barely on the job a month before he was mislead by the White House Counsel to the President and was being spied on and undermined by his number 2 man at the Bureau.

In this episode we look at both men and how their stories are intertwined, and also how aggrandizing one man's role in Watergate led to the destruction of the other man. Gray has seen his name sullied as an untrustworthy pawn of the White House, who destroyed important Watergate investigation files by throwing them in the Potomac River.

In reality, Gray was an honest man whose only real crime was in believing in the people around him. He was mislead into destroying documents that were found in Howard Hunt's safe, but the materials were both not related to Watergate , and while forged,  had content  in them that was actually true.  All of this cost Gray his chance to be the Director of the FBI, a job he had done well, and wanted to continue serve in.  It was certainly a high price for him to pay. 

L. Patrick Gray was, in the end,  the truly innocent man of Watergate. In this episode we look at both the story of Mark Felt and Patrick Gray. 

*** For more information please go to the following website ShepardonWatergate,com

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*** This episode was divided into two episodes, the second will post tomorrow morning

In our second episode of RICHARD NIXON and WATERGATE: 1973 Enemies at the Gate , rather than dive right into our storyline we decided to take an in-depth two-part look at those enemies at the gate, or at least the important ally the Democratic Party could count on in their campaign to undermine President Nixon, THE PRESS, or more specifically The Washington Post. 

 In this episode, we will look closely at the cozy relationship between Katherine Graham and former President Lyndon Johnson, Sally Quin and Ben Bradlee and the relationship they had to the Kennedy family. The ties between Kennedy and Johnson aid Joe Califano and his client The Washington Post, and on and on. 

It will definitely leave you with a sickening feeling about the motivations the paper had to go after the man in the White House who had just won a 49 state landslide and gotten our troops and POW's home from a long protracted war in Southeast Asia. 

But , just in case you think we here at "Bridging the Political Gap" are to swayed by our obvious editorially positive opinion of President Nixon, we will be taking a trip back in time to one of the most sickening displays of liberal journalistic arrogance ever recorded and saved for posterity, (and saved by the very rag-sheet whose journalistic integrity is being called into question, The Washington Post, no less.)  They actually hosted a 40th anniversary celebratory event with Elizabeth Drew, Bob Woodward, Carl Bernstein, Ken Hughes, and Ruth Marcus and when they are done you will be filled with absolute disgust. 

It is all here for you to listen too, the mocking of the President, the totally inaccurate claims, the the obvious disdain, and from Ruth Marcus one of the most outrageously laughable claims ever made about comparing the tapes of Richard Nixon to the apparently saintly Lyndon B. Johnson.  It will make you sick.

BUT we do invite you to our second part of this analysis of the press,  when we look at more of the journalists of the Watergate era, some awful, but not all. The press is after all not a monolithic entity and there are good folks in the media and in the next episode we will introduce you to some of them as well, in part two of "The Press is the Enemy" 

Ranked 4th as one of the best American History Podcasts of 2024
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Questions or comments at , Randalrgw1@aol.com , https://twitter.com/randal_wallace , and http://www.randalwallace.com/
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Thanks for listening!!

In this second episode of Ink in our Blood, Sarah talks to her dad, David Maraniss, about growing up as the son of a “Newspaper Man.” Long before David won the Pulitzer Prize, and wrote best-selling biographies on Vince Lombardi, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and Roberto Clemente, he watched his father, Elliott Maraniss, manage The Capital Times, the afternoon paper in Madison, Wisconsin. The son of a printer in Brooklyn’s Coney Island, Elliott knew every angle of a newspaper, from layout to headlines. David absorbed the sounds and sights of his father’s paper and the rhythm of life for a newspaper man in the 60’s. Those were the days of noisy typewriters, cigarette butts on the floor, teletype machines, and hot type. At the dinner table, he heard about the big stories of the day— a serial killer, JFK’s popularity with Midwest farmers, and a killer zoo elephant named Winkie.  When David arrived at The Washington Post in 1977, the technology had advanced to 6-ply carbon paper and then large computers built by Raytheon.  David tells Sarah about filing stories from earthquake ravaged Mexico, recognizing Bill Clinton’s rising political power, and learning the ropes from the Post’s Ben Bradlee.