James Rosen, RealClear Politics: Watergate at 50: Revelations From Newly Declassified Evidence
It took an outsider to offer the paper’s only clear-eyed assessment of Secret Agenda. In his review of the book for the Post, Anthony Marro, managing editor of Newsday, presented numerous criticisms while conceding: “What [Hougan] offers up is not so much a totally revisionist history as a history with a significant new dimension and perspective.”
Hougan has attacked the official record of Watergate with persistence and considerable skill, pointing up scores of questions, flaws, contradictions and holes.… He has added an enormous amount of raw data and information to the record, and his book should lead to a reexamination and reassessment of important parts of the story.
Central to Hougan’s challenge to the Established Order were the two discoveries that represented, amid all the incredible sleuthing he accomplished, his twin masterstrokes: the evidence that the Democratic National Committee in the spring of 1972 was, like the Nixon White House and the Committee to Re-elect the President, engaged in criminal conduct.
It took courage for Hougan to declare nothing less than that all the armies of investigators had missed the heart of the Watergate scandal – that Woodward and Bernstein and the rest of the national news media had gotten it wrong. Nowhere in the official Woodward and Bernstein canon – All the President’s Men (1974), The Final Days (1976), and The Secret Man: The Story of Watergate’s Deep Throat (2005) – do the names Spencer Oliver or Maxie Wells even appear. The key Eugenio Martinez struggled to conceal was, as Secret Agenda put it, “quite literally the key to the break-in”: its presence on “Muscolito” pointed to the critical role played by the CIA in the operation and to the mission’s true target.
No less startling was Hougan’s unveiling of the official correspondence between Assistant U.S. Attorney Earl Silbert and the FBI laboratory. With painstaking methodology, the bureau’s lab technicians presented unassailable evidence to buttress their conclusion that the Democrats themselves had planted the crude and inoperative bugging device they “discovered” on Oliver’s telephone, and announced to the press, in September 1972 – three months after the arrests.
“No one seems to have asked the obvious,” Hougan wrote at a separate point in Secret Agenda – yet nowhere else in the Watergate saga was this observation more apt than with respect to the September Bug. Here were the top officials of the Democratic National Committee, in an election year, announcing their discovery of a bugging device in their headquarters three months after the bugging suspects had been arrested on the premises, and after the FBI had made three exhaustive sweeps of the DNC telephones and found no devices installed.
That this planting of evidence, this obstruction of justice, didn’t blow the Watergate scandal wide open, didn’t trigger the dismissal of the charges against the burglars, Hunt and Liddy, was only because federal prosecutors wrongly withheld the September Bug correspondence – exculpatory evidence in any bugging case – from the defendants’ attorneys.
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