8 ms·

The Nixon White House plotted to assassinate a journalist

105 points by mzs 4y ago

lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 4y ago
[flagged]
- dylan604 4y ago
  Why would learning a historical fact force anyone to ignore a current fact? The logic does not compute
  - lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 4y ago
    I'm not sure how to approach this question. I didn't use the word "force". If you're just generally wondering what I mean with my comment, it's that this article is talking about something that happened "historically" ("Nixon's White House") even though similar things are considered today (or I guess 2 years ago)[0]. It is an interesting story, admittedly it may not actually be a distraction piece, but this comment is not a good rebuttal to mine. Certainly the idea of diverting attention from one thing to another is not so nonsensical. [0] https://www.theguardian.com/media/2021/sep/27/senior-cia-officials-trump-discussed-assassinating-julian-assange https://www.theguardian.com/media/2021/sep/27/senior-cia-off...
    - dylan604 4y ago
      But certain information from an administration naturally becomes available after an amount of time after the administration ends. There will be new information about a past administration that becomes available during a different administration. Your comment "I'm just left wondering what recent event I'm supposed to ignore in favor of this piece" makes it sound to readers as if you're not capable of doing both, hence the "forced" word used by me. While media can be used as misdirection, it is not always so. Just because some historical information comes out does not mean it was done for the sole purpose of distraction from a current situation. Your comment definitely implies that was the intent. Assuming that is the only reason it is being released comes across as being closed minded to fit an agenda you have.
      - lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 4y ago
        I believe I understand your point now. Thanks for clarifying.
- atlantic 4y ago
  Assange? I'm surprised he has not been mentioned in the comments thus far.
ubermonkey 4y ago
Just one?
- coldtea 4y ago
  Just Nixon?
  - bombcar 4y ago
    I mean if you’re reporting in the White House and they aren’t trying to kill you are you even really doing reporting?
    - cjbgkagh 4y ago
      [flagged]
consumer451 4y ago
Nixon was quite a fellow. I recently learned that Henry Kissinger reversed a drunk Nixon's orders to start a nuclear war. https://www.warhistoryonline.com/cold-war/richard-nixon-north-korea.html https://www.warhistoryonline.com/cold-war/richard-nixon-nort...
- JumpCrisscross 4y ago
  > recently learned that Henry Kissinger reversed a drunk Nixon's orders to start a nuclear war It's a good, plausible story. But it's not terrifically sourced [1]. [1] https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/north-korea-richard-nixon-nuclear/ https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/north-korea-richard-nixon-...
  - krapp 4y ago
    [flagged]
    - consumer451 4y ago
      When realpolitik gets real.
  - mrguyorama 4y ago
    Every anecdote about Nixon has this same problem because it turns out his administration was full of garbage people with horrific moral compasses. Maybe we shouldn't be so skeptical of those claims though, since the verifiable stuff from the tapes are also pretty terrible
    - boringg 4y ago
      Sounds like another president I've heard of.
      - TravisLS 4y ago
        So tired of people on HN disparaging Warren G Harding. Seriously, though: several of the Trump campaign's architects (Paul Manafort, Roger Stone) got their start in the Nixon administration.
mcsniff 4y ago
"[...] but in the real world, you sometimes have to employ extreme and extralegal methods to preserve the very system whose laws you’re violating." This is what everyone tells themselves when they flip on their own morals, or "it's for the greater good" with the trolley problem.
- tabtab 4y ago
  Indeed. "Ends justify the means" is one of the biggest mis-rationalizations used by people in power. "We have to be devious to protect our people, culture, religion, system, etc." Often with a dose of "the other side probably cheats also".
  - Gibbon1 4y ago
    We covered the prince in high school civics. It took me too decades to come up with an answer to the Ends Justify the Means. The objection is that The means are an end. How you do things is important in and of itself. And more important than just one particular thing at the moment.
    - epicureanideal 4y ago
      I recommend reading The Anti-Machiavel by Frederick the Great as a counter-argument to The Prince.
- jfengel 4y ago
  I honestly don't expect people to have a consistent moral code. We never really know all of the ends, so we're just guessing anyway. I'm just as suspicious of "I'm going to do this obviously horrendous thing because my moral code says I have to." The ends do, sometimes, justify the means -- as best we can understand the ends and the means. And Richard Nixon was just a violent asshole, using the thinnest pretext of "the greater good" for his own short-term and selfish purposes. All I can hope for, morally, is for people do at least try not to be deliberately cruel to each other. Even that seems too much to ask a lot of the time.
miguelazo 4y ago
If you find this interesting, read "The Devil's Chessboard" by David Talbot. Nixon was highly indebted to the Dulles brothers, and they carried out many operations like this at home and abroad (including against their own-- see Frank Olson). They also looked the other way (if not helped facilitate) such plots that were carried out by foreign governments they were working with (see Jesús Galíndez case). But let's not pretend this is only something that happened in the past, and would only happen in "Putin's Russia" today as this article's annoying preamble suggests.
pessimizer 4y ago
They might wait until 2063 to tell us what happened to Michael Hastings, except they probably won't ever confirm their successes, only aborted plans and failures. It's a conspiracy theory to believe that the government has ever been successful at anything.
Convolutional 4y ago
In 1976, in Washington DC, the Chilean secret service assassinated the wife of an American economist, as well as a former minister of the previous Chilean government (which had been overthrown in a Nixon backed military coup). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Orlando_Letelier https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Orlando_Letel...
- bediger4000 4y ago
  This reflects poorly on the Chilean secret service, not Nixon. Although as noted, Nixon was very bad.
  - drewcoo 4y ago
    Not to mention that Nixon resigned two years earlier. But yes, let's make it about Nixon. Who was bad.
  - gausswho 4y ago
    The US is plenty culpable. That assassination was one among a number of clandestine actions of Operation Condor, for which the US collaborated with South American nations to disrupt left-leaning movements across the continent.
DerekL 4y ago
Title needs (2022).
rospaya 4y ago
Anyone even remotely familiar with Nixon or Kissinger won't be surprised. "If the right people had been in charge of Nixon’s funeral, his casket would have been launched into one of those open-sewage canals that empty into the ocean just south of Los Angeles. He was a swine of a man and a jabbering dupe of a president. Nixon was so crooked that he needed servants to help him screw his pants on every morning"
- quickthrowman 4y ago
  That must be a Hunter S Thompson quote; I completely agree with him.
  - duskwuff 4y ago
    It is a quote from Hunter S. Thompson's obituary for Nixon: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1994/07/he-was-a-crook/308699/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1994/07/he-was-...
sacnoradhq 4y ago
Remember: 1. The prohibition War on Drugs had nothing to do with public health, it was a cynical plot by the Nixon admin to attack its perceived enemies, African-Americans and leftist hippies, using the establishment and media. Ehrlichman admitted it in 1994 on tape. https://harpers.org/archive/2016/04/legalize-it-all/ https://harpers.org/archive/2016/04/legalize-it-all/ 2. The ideological cause of the Nixon admin was recreated by Roger Ailes in the vehicle of Fox News. It largely accomplished its goals of radicalizing millions of Americans towards their warped views and permitted the denigration and exploitation of women employees along the way. I would wager most nursing homes play Fox News constantly and their inhabitants, both worker and housed tend to lean that way. It's inexplicable how many poor whites believe/d Nixon and Trump were their saviors. 3. Nixon's alma mater's newspaper at Whittier College found an old listening device https://rense.com/general20/whi.htm https://rense.com/general20/whi.htm 4. The assassination of Fred Hampton in 1969 by the Cook County's State Attorney, state police, Chicago police, and the FBI (J. Edgar era). Surely, POTUS Nixon signed-off on it. https://chicago.suntimes.com/2021/1/24/22244731/new-fbi-records-black-panthers-police-reform-fred-hampton-mark-clark-editorial https://chicago.suntimes.com/2021/1/24/22244731/new-fbi-reco... 5. The first episode of the Nixon interviews drew a 45 share, the highest in history for a political documentary which still stands. The interviews has its own play and a movie, both named Frost/Nixon. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nixon_interviews https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nixon_interviews
- flandish 4y ago
  Adding to 2.: Reagan. My mother, born in 1961, adores him for some reason. I was born in 1979. Hell, my father has a room of trinkets to/about him. I’m a leftist. Reminding them he was an evil man and his wife was a wack-a-doo is.. fun.
  - blue039 4y ago
    > Reminding them he was an evil man and his wife was a wack-a-doo is.. fun. Why do you feel the need to do this? Does it provide you some personal validation that lets you sleep better at night? That you "bested" your parents? I think your issue is deeper than politics. Militant atheists get the same kicks "besting" Christians. It's not a healthy way to go about living.
justinclift 4y ago
https://archive.is/Hm6Oj https://archive.is/Hm6Oj
refurb 4y ago
Nobody finds this story fantastical? "Poisoned with LSD?" Howard E. Hunt (the source of this) was a CIA officer with quite a checkered past including leading the failed Bay of Pigs invasion and involvement in Watergate. I'm not sure I'd take these stories at face value. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._Howard_Hunt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._Howard_Hunt
- mzs 4y ago
  Edward T. Gunn also corroborated much of this, some under oath even.
credit_guy 4y ago
So the assassination was supposed to be carried out by Hunt [1] and Liddy [2], two of the Watergate burglars. Both these guys served time in federal prison. And wrote books, did campus tours, gave interviews, made a lot of money telling people about Watergate and other stuff. Did they ever tell a lie, or embellish their stories for dramatic effect? In this case, it appears so, because the stories are inconsistent. The Washington Post article claims the idea came from Charles Colson, who contacted Hunt and proposed assassinating Anderson by using an untraceable poison, like LSD. After that, they brought Liddy in the conspiracy. But Washington Post also links to [3], where we learn that Liddy considered Anderson a "fit target for killing", not because Anderson was a pain in Nixon's neck, but because he doxxed some American spy who lost his life because of that. True or not, Liddy says he also planned to kill Hunt himself. To which Hunt states that Liddy was "a posturer with doubtful credentials as a killer " (one wonders if that was in comparison with his own "credentials") and "suggested he (Liddy) was mentally unbalanced". What a mess... I'll take anything these guys say with a big grain of salt. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._Howard_Hunt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._Howard_Hunt [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G._Gordon_Liddy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G._Gordon_Liddy [3] http://jfk.hood.edu/Collection/Weisberg%20Subject%20Index%20Files/W%20Disk/Watergate%20to%20File/Item%20176.pdf http://jfk.hood.edu/Collection/Weisberg%20Subject%20Index%20...
- mzs 4y ago
  Were the plots crazy, sure but there were people plotting it. Also Gunn confirmed parts of all this under oath shortly after the fact.
DoItToMe81 4y ago
Nixon also drunkenly attempted to order nuclear strikes on various southeast Asian nations. He was a pretty sick man.

105 points by mzs 4y ago

lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 4y ago

[flagged]

dylan604 4y ago
Why would learning a historical fact force anyone to ignore a current fact? The logic does not compute
- lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 4y ago
  I'm not sure how to approach this question. I didn't use the word "force". If you're just generally wondering what I mean with my comment, it's that this article is talking about something that happened "historically" ("Nixon's White House") even though similar things are considered today (or I guess 2 years ago)[0]. It is an interesting story, admittedly it may not actually be a distraction piece, but this comment is not a good rebuttal to mine. Certainly the idea of diverting attention from one thing to another is not so nonsensical. [0] https://www.theguardian.com/media/2021/sep/27/senior-cia-officials-trump-discussed-assassinating-julian-assange https://www.theguardian.com/media/2021/sep/27/senior-cia-off...
  - dylan604 4y ago
    But certain information from an administration naturally becomes available after an amount of time after the administration ends. There will be new information about a past administration that becomes available during a different administration. Your comment "I'm just left wondering what recent event I'm supposed to ignore in favor of this piece" makes it sound to readers as if you're not capable of doing both, hence the "forced" word used by me. While media can be used as misdirection, it is not always so. Just because some historical information comes out does not mean it was done for the sole purpose of distraction from a current situation. Your comment definitely implies that was the intent. Assuming that is the only reason it is being released comes across as being closed minded to fit an agenda you have.
    - lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 4y ago
      I believe I understand your point now. Thanks for clarifying.
atlantic 4y ago
Assange? I'm surprised he has not been mentioned in the comments thus far.

ubermonkey 4y ago

Just one?

coldtea 4y ago
Just Nixon?
- bombcar 4y ago
  I mean if you’re reporting in the White House and they aren’t trying to kill you are you even really doing reporting?
  - cjbgkagh 4y ago
    [flagged]

consumer451 4y ago

Nixon was quite a fellow. I recently learned that Henry Kissinger reversed a drunk Nixon's orders to start a nuclear war. https://www.warhistoryonline.com/cold-war/richard-nixon-north-korea.html https://www.warhistoryonline.com/cold-war/richard-nixon-nort...

JumpCrisscross 4y ago
> recently learned that Henry Kissinger reversed a drunk Nixon's orders to start a nuclear war It's a good, plausible story. But it's not terrifically sourced [1]. [1] https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/north-korea-richard-nixon-nuclear/ https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/north-korea-richard-nixon-...
- krapp 4y ago
  [flagged]
  - consumer451 4y ago
    When realpolitik gets real.
- mrguyorama 4y ago
  Every anecdote about Nixon has this same problem because it turns out his administration was full of garbage people with horrific moral compasses. Maybe we shouldn't be so skeptical of those claims though, since the verifiable stuff from the tapes are also pretty terrible
  - boringg 4y ago
    Sounds like another president I've heard of.
    - TravisLS 4y ago
      So tired of people on HN disparaging Warren G Harding. Seriously, though: several of the Trump campaign's architects (Paul Manafort, Roger Stone) got their start in the Nixon administration.

mcsniff 4y ago

"[...] but in the real world, you sometimes have to employ extreme and extralegal methods to preserve the very system whose laws you’re violating." This is what everyone tells themselves when they flip on their own morals, or "it's for the greater good" with the trolley problem.

tabtab 4y ago
Indeed. "Ends justify the means" is one of the biggest mis-rationalizations used by people in power. "We have to be devious to protect our people, culture, religion, system, etc." Often with a dose of "the other side probably cheats also".
- Gibbon1 4y ago
  We covered the prince in high school civics. It took me too decades to come up with an answer to the Ends Justify the Means. The objection is that The means are an end. How you do things is important in and of itself. And more important than just one particular thing at the moment.
  - epicureanideal 4y ago
    I recommend reading The Anti-Machiavel by Frederick the Great as a counter-argument to The Prince.
jfengel 4y ago
I honestly don't expect people to have a consistent moral code. We never really know all of the ends, so we're just guessing anyway. I'm just as suspicious of "I'm going to do this obviously horrendous thing because my moral code says I have to." The ends do, sometimes, justify the means -- as best we can understand the ends and the means. And Richard Nixon was just a violent asshole, using the thinnest pretext of "the greater good" for his own short-term and selfish purposes. All I can hope for, morally, is for people do at least try not to be deliberately cruel to each other. Even that seems too much to ask a lot of the time.

miguelazo 4y ago

If you find this interesting, read "The Devil's Chessboard" by David Talbot. Nixon was highly indebted to the Dulles brothers, and they carried out many operations like this at home and abroad (including against their own-- see Frank Olson). They also looked the other way (if not helped facilitate) such plots that were carried out by foreign governments they were working with (see Jesús Galíndez case). But let's not pretend this is only something that happened in the past, and would only happen in "Putin's Russia" today as this article's annoying preamble suggests.

pessimizer 4y ago

They might wait until 2063 to tell us what happened to Michael Hastings, except they probably won't ever confirm their successes, only aborted plans and failures. It's a conspiracy theory to believe that the government has ever been successful at anything.

Convolutional 4y ago

In 1976, in Washington DC, the Chilean secret service assassinated the wife of an American economist, as well as a former minister of the previous Chilean government (which had been overthrown in a Nixon backed military coup). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Orlando_Letelier https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Orlando_Letel...

bediger4000 4y ago
This reflects poorly on the Chilean secret service, not Nixon. Although as noted, Nixon was very bad.
- drewcoo 4y ago
  Not to mention that Nixon resigned two years earlier. But yes, let's make it about Nixon. Who was bad.
- gausswho 4y ago
  The US is plenty culpable. That assassination was one among a number of clandestine actions of Operation Condor, for which the US collaborated with South American nations to disrupt left-leaning movements across the continent.

DerekL 4y ago

Title needs (2022).

rospaya 4y ago

Anyone even remotely familiar with Nixon or Kissinger won't be surprised. "If the right people had been in charge of Nixon’s funeral, his casket would have been launched into one of those open-sewage canals that empty into the ocean just south of Los Angeles. He was a swine of a man and a jabbering dupe of a president. Nixon was so crooked that he needed servants to help him screw his pants on every morning"

quickthrowman 4y ago
That must be a Hunter S Thompson quote; I completely agree with him.
- duskwuff 4y ago
  It is a quote from Hunter S. Thompson's obituary for Nixon: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1994/07/he-was-a-crook/308699/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1994/07/he-was-...

sacnoradhq 4y ago

Remember: 1. The prohibition War on Drugs had nothing to do with public health, it was a cynical plot by the Nixon admin to attack its perceived enemies, African-Americans and leftist hippies, using the establishment and media. Ehrlichman admitted it in 1994 on tape. https://harpers.org/archive/2016/04/legalize-it-all/ https://harpers.org/archive/2016/04/legalize-it-all/ 2. The ideological cause of the Nixon admin was recreated by Roger Ailes in the vehicle of Fox News. It largely accomplished its goals of radicalizing millions of Americans towards their warped views and permitted the denigration and exploitation of women employees along the way. I would wager most nursing homes play Fox News constantly and their inhabitants, both worker and housed tend to lean that way. It's inexplicable how many poor whites believe/d Nixon and Trump were their saviors. 3. Nixon's alma mater's newspaper at Whittier College found an old listening device https://rense.com/general20/whi.htm https://rense.com/general20/whi.htm 4. The assassination of Fred Hampton in 1969 by the Cook County's State Attorney, state police, Chicago police, and the FBI (J. Edgar era). Surely, POTUS Nixon signed-off on it. https://chicago.suntimes.com/2021/1/24/22244731/new-fbi-records-black-panthers-police-reform-fred-hampton-mark-clark-editorial https://chicago.suntimes.com/2021/1/24/22244731/new-fbi-reco... 5. The first episode of the Nixon interviews drew a 45 share, the highest in history for a political documentary which still stands. The interviews has its own play and a movie, both named Frost/Nixon. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nixon_interviews https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nixon_interviews

flandish 4y ago
Adding to 2.: Reagan. My mother, born in 1961, adores him for some reason. I was born in 1979. Hell, my father has a room of trinkets to/about him. I’m a leftist. Reminding them he was an evil man and his wife was a wack-a-doo is.. fun.
- blue039 4y ago
  > Reminding them he was an evil man and his wife was a wack-a-doo is.. fun. Why do you feel the need to do this? Does it provide you some personal validation that lets you sleep better at night? That you "bested" your parents? I think your issue is deeper than politics. Militant atheists get the same kicks "besting" Christians. It's not a healthy way to go about living.

justinclift 4y ago

https://archive.is/Hm6Oj https://archive.is/Hm6Oj

refurb 4y ago

Nobody finds this story fantastical? "Poisoned with LSD?" Howard E. Hunt (the source of this) was a CIA officer with quite a checkered past including leading the failed Bay of Pigs invasion and involvement in Watergate. I'm not sure I'd take these stories at face value. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._Howard_Hunt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._Howard_Hunt

mzs 4y ago
Edward T. Gunn also corroborated much of this, some under oath even.

credit_guy 4y ago

So the assassination was supposed to be carried out by Hunt [1] and Liddy [2], two of the Watergate burglars. Both these guys served time in federal prison. And wrote books, did campus tours, gave interviews, made a lot of money telling people about Watergate and other stuff. Did they ever tell a lie, or embellish their stories for dramatic effect? In this case, it appears so, because the stories are inconsistent. The Washington Post article claims the idea came from Charles Colson, who contacted Hunt and proposed assassinating Anderson by using an untraceable poison, like LSD. After that, they brought Liddy in the conspiracy. But Washington Post also links to [3], where we learn that Liddy considered Anderson a "fit target for killing", not because Anderson was a pain in Nixon's neck, but because he doxxed some American spy who lost his life because of that. True or not, Liddy says he also planned to kill Hunt himself. To which Hunt states that Liddy was "a posturer with doubtful credentials as a killer " (one wonders if that was in comparison with his own "credentials") and "suggested he (Liddy) was mentally unbalanced". What a mess... I'll take anything these guys say with a big grain of salt. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._Howard_Hunt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._Howard_Hunt [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G._Gordon_Liddy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G._Gordon_Liddy [3] http://jfk.hood.edu/Collection/Weisberg%20Subject%20Index%20Files/W%20Disk/Watergate%20to%20File/Item%20176.pdf http://jfk.hood.edu/Collection/Weisberg%20Subject%20Index%20...

mzs 4y ago
Were the plots crazy, sure but there were people plotting it. Also Gunn confirmed parts of all this under oath shortly after the fact.

DoItToMe81 4y ago

Nixon also drunkenly attempted to order nuclear strikes on various southeast Asian nations. He was a pretty sick man.