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May 26, 2021 - Dennis Prager Show
09:06
Hugh Hewitt Educates Us on the TRUTH Behind the Watergate Scandal
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So, first of all, congratulations on a fine video.
Well, Dennis, thank you.
I have to begin, instead of having fun with you, by just simply saying PragerU is an amazing thing.
And a million people have watched this five minutes since PragerU released it yesterday.
And that's a million people who know something about Watergate that they did not know before.
Which is probably the context, the complete narrative, the whole story.
Or at least an introduction by which they might judge it.
So PragerU is doing amazing work.
And when I visited the PragerU studios, which make Tony Stark's house in Iron Man look small, people have to understand that PragerU is a vast industrial complex of truth.
But its vastness will overwhelm.
Moreover, the average age there is 22. You've got the youngest group of people working there.
I'm just so impressed with it.
Thank you.
Well, they were impressed with you.
When I visit it, I get a big burst of enthusiasm over the future.
Because it's a dark age in American life today.
And going there is exactly as you described it.
Well, you're bending the curve.
You're bending the curve.
When you can get a million people to watch a Watergate video in one day.
You know, the library is reopened in Yorba Linda.
We couldn't have timed it better because it's been closed for a long time now.
It's reopened after 15 months.
And we can have that library open for five years and get a million people to go through the Watergate exhibit and study it.
Or we can do a PragerU video and reach a million people in a day.
It's astonishing.
Well, thank you for saying all of that.
Okay, we touch a lot of people and we want to touch more.
Everybody thinks...
I'll let you answer this.
You asked an average American, what is Watergate?
We use Watergate always, or something gate.
What happened at Watergate?
What would they answer?
A terrible political scandal that Nixon had to resign over.
Interesting.
That's what they'll say.
And that's it.
Right.
That would be it.
That would be it.
And it's true.
That is not an untrue statement.
It was a terrible political scandal.
For which Richard Nixon had to resign.
But what you can do in five minutes is explain relative to other scandals, relative to the times, relative to the hatred with which Nixon was held.
It was partly anti-communism.
It had a lot to do with Elder Hiss.
Mostly it's about the media.
One thing I didn't say on the video, it hadn't happened when we made it, is I talked about Watergate with former President Trump, and he asked me the same question a lot of people.
Would Nixon have survived in the media environment of today?
And the answer would be yes.
There would be talk radio.
There would be Fox News.
There would be Twitter.
There would be alternative points of view.
And he would have survived like Trump did.
You know, blues but unbowed.
That's very interesting.
I would not have expected that response.
That's true.
Look, there are more powerful alternative media today.
That's a very intelligent observation.
So, your video did not explain, nor did it have to.
So, I have had a question all of my life since it happened.
Why did they rob, or why did they even enter the Democratic National Committee offices?
You and Richard Nixon.
He has said to have thrown an ashtray across the room.
I can't corroborate that even with the library at my disposal.
When he heard about it, it was so stupid.
G. Gordon Liddy, the worst hire in the history of the Nixon administration, was hired by a guy named Bud Crow.
And G. Gordon Liddy fancied himself a super sleuth and a super agent and a hard-bitten G-man.
And he had been an FBI man.
And he cooked it up.
And John Mitchell should have shot it down, thought he did.
But G. Gordon Liddy...
He carried it out on his ab initio.
He did it himself.
There's some question whether or not John Dean knew about it before it happened, but G. Gordon Liddy invented this idea.
And he thought he was going to find something of use, but it's the dumbest thing in the world because nothing is at the headquarters of the party.
Everything is at the headquarters of the candidate.
And so if you're going to do an actual break-in for the purposes of political chicanery or intelligence gathering, not that it should ever be done, but if you were doing it in Turkey, say, or in Russia, you wouldn't go to the campaign.
You wouldn't go to the party headquarters.
You'd go to the candidate headquarters.
It was dumb.
That's what – G. Gordon Liddy thought he'd find something.
There's an alternative view out there that I don't quite believe about what John Dean sent him there to get.
It was – whatever it was, it was a dumb, stupid idea, and it cost Nixon a second term.
It was Tell me if I'm right.
It was particularly stupid given Richard Nixon's astonishing victory in the previous presidential election.
It's not like this was a man grasping for power.
That's an exponential stupid level because it happened before the 72 election and McGovern was on his way to the nomination and he was a sure win.
And Nixon might not have known he was going to win 49 states, but he'd gone to China.
He'd secured the peace with Vietnam.
He got detente with the Soviet Union.
He was going to win in a walk, and so there was no need to go to an empty office to break in to put a bug that didn't work.
And Nixon, every historian, even the most critical historian of Nixon, do not believe he knew before the break-in that it was coming.
He had no knowledge.
He did participate in the cover-up.
That's why he was eventually, or wasn't quite impeached, but was going to be impeached.
Right, which leads me to the next question.
What if he had said, which seems to me to have not been that difficult, God was that stupid, I had no idea of this, and these people needed to be investigated and if necessary punished.
What would have happened?
He would have gotten 40 verbal lashes from the Washington Post and the New York Times, and it would have been over.
I make that point in the PragerU video that had he simply owned it, as we say, it would have been over.
And he was already elected, so there would have been no downside.
But in those days, surrounded by the media that had hounded him since 1950 forward, I don't think he was sufficiently confident to do that or to trust that he would get a fair hearing from Sirica, who was the judge we talk about in the PragerU video as well, who was the judge we talk about in the PragerU video as well, because it's not only the political process, there was a criminal process underway, and Sirica was doing whatever he could to get as many heads on the wall
So what prevented Richard Nixon from saying what I just said and what you said in the video?
I don't know.
I think it's because Richard Nixon did not believe that it would stop there.
As for Haldeman and Ehrlichman's resignation with the famous explanation, David Frost, I gave my enemies a sword and they used it.
I had to get rid of my senior staff.
I didn't do it soon enough.
All of that were bad decisions every step of the way that he did not focus on at any given point and simply transparently saying he knew that.
He said so in his memoirs.
His fault, his bad call, a genius with a blind spot.
And that blind spot was driven by A very accurate awareness of what the media would do with any confession of weakness, but he still, nevertheless, he should have done that.
Not burn the tapes, that's the other question we get.
Why didn't he burn the tapes?
And too much of a historian, too much of an eye on history to have burned the tapes.
They're fascinating.
But he could have just said, my bad.
My campaign people got out of control.
They're all fired.
The FBI should prosecute the people who organized it.
Just basically what we're saying about the people who invaded the Congress on January 6th.
They're all criminals.
They all ought to be prosecuted to the extent that they are culpable for whatever crime they are charged with.
And that's it.
That's the only answer, but he didn't give it.
You depict a man who was hounded by the media his entire career.
And you give a very interesting reason other than politics like anti-communism, and that is that he was not part of the elite.
I think that that's a very significant part of your video, and when we come back, I'd like you to expound on it.
I'm speaking to Hugh Hewitt, who's a scholar at the Nixon Library, aside from being a professor of constitutional law, and a...
The video is up at DennisPrager.com.
It is a perfect example of a video we put up that has zero political intent.
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