American Conspiracies - Jesse Ventura [49]
That’s a terrible thing to realize. The things I’m learning about, I come home at night and wonder, why do I need to know this? I was better off being ignorant. Meeting with a man who considers himself a “Manchurian Candidate”—what we talked about scares you, whether you believe it or not. It scared me. And I don’t scare easily.
WHAT SHOULD WE DO NOW?
If the assassination of Robert Kennedy tells us anything, it’s that even apparently obvious things are not always what they seem. Here we had what appeared to be an open-and-shut case with Sirhan Sirhan as the perpetrator. It’s almost unthinkable, in polite society, to consider that his mind may have been manipulated by unscrupulous people using techniques out of the Dark Ages. But MK-ULTRA’s existence is a proven fact, and should not be forgotten.
CHAPTER SEVEN
WATERGATE REVISITED: THE CIA’S WAR AGAINST NIXON
THE INCIDENT: The Watergate burglars broke into the Democratic National Committee headquarters on June 17, 1972, were taken into custody by police, and discovered to have ties to the Nixon White House.
THE OFFICIAL WORD: President Nixon authorized the break-in, along with other “dirty tricks,” and then covered this up, leading to his resignation on August 9, 1974, before he could be impeached.
MY TAKE: Nixon was involved in a power struggle with the CIA, trying to pry loose what their files contained on the Kennedy assassination. He was taken down by “double agents” who were actually working for the CIA, who intentionally got themselves caught. Many of the Watergate cast track back to who killed JFK.
“In a time of deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”
—George Orwell
At this point in my life, I guess the word “astounding” should not be used, because I’ve been astounded by so many other things. But it was astounding to realize that Richard Nixon could actually have been set up by some of the Watergate burglars, whose loyalty was really to the CIA. When you look at some of the data, you realize this possibility exists. Watergate was an attempt to get him out of the White House, because he was going where other powerful people didn’t want him to tread.1
The official history, of course, is that the break-in on the night of June 17, 1972, into the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate complex, was simply the latest in a long line of “dirty tricks” authorized by President Nixon. It just happened to be the time that his henchmen got caught. Ultimately, Watergate came to refer to the many illicit activities and the cover-up that led to Nixon’s resignation in August 1974. That’s the basic storyline of Woodward and Bernstein in All the President’s Men, and most other accounts. Nixon was the bad-guy who got carried away with his thirst for power, and that’s that. But maybe it’s as Watergate burglar G. Gordon Liddy once said: “The official version of Watergate is as wrong as a Flat Earth Society pamphlet.”2
Let’s start with the fact that Nixon had been haunted by the specter of the Kennedys ever since losing the election to JFK in 1960. He even happened to be in Dallas on November 22, 1963, for a Pepsi-Cola Bottler’s Convention! If Robert Kennedy hadn’t been assassinated, he’d have been the likely Democratic contender against Nixon in 1968, and quite likely Nixon would have lost. So what if, after his election, his obsession resulted in the beginning of a carefully orchestrated plan to get rid of Nixon?
What if it all tracked back to the assassination of John F. Kennedy almost a decade earlier? What if the Watergate backstory is really about what Nixon knew, or wanted to know, about who killed JFK?
Maybe Nixon was determined to find out what the CIA possessed about the assassination, out of curiosity and for his own purposes. He could then use that knowledge against the powerful