Time for Woodward and Bernstein

It’s time for a Woodward and Bernstein team – or for a team like Woodward and Bernstein.
by Charlie Leck

I can’t tell you how many hours I spent in front of the telly in the early seventies – ’73, to be exact – when I should have been out, productively working. I caught the Watergate disease and became fascinated with the extraordinarily colorful Senator Same Erving. On those days when I had to beat the streets, making my calls, I tried to have dinner in front of the television so I could watch the public television replays of the day's hearings, when the Senate committee chaired by Erving delved into the whole murky Watergate affair.

I don’t think many of you who remember the times will disagree with me when I give credit to those two young, energetic reporters, Bob Woodward and Carl Berstein, for breaking open the entire mess and bringing down the President and all his men. I don’t know where the whole investigation might have gone had it not for those two tenacious guys.

Woodward and Bernstein set out to find out what the President knew about the whole, rotten business and when he knew it. I’ve read their book, All the President’s Men, a number of times and I’m always fascinated by it. It would take us nearly 35 years to find out who Deep Throat was! Remember?

Enough reminiscing about those days! I’ve written about them here before. Now I just want to say we need another Woodward and Bernstein – or perhaps they need to team up again and find out for us just what has happened in the whole IRS vs the Tea Party Scandal.

I’m here to admit that it is messy and that it was wrong! However, I’m not yet ready to admit the President had a hand in it. If he did, the nation needs to know just how and how much he was involved.

No one has supported or cheered for the President more than I; yet I must know, beyond question, that he is innocent and unstained by the shameful actions of the Internal Revenue Service. It isn’t that the validity of their applications for non-profit status should not have been investigated; it is just that Tea Party organizations should not have been investigated while such organizations in the center and left of the political spectrum were ignored while doing the same thing. Is that what really happened? We must know! Was the President aware? We must have the answer! If so, when was he aware and what did he do about it? Every American needs to know – every American of all political persuasions!

We must not allow Congresswoman Michele Bachmann and her type to make these damning accusations if they are not true. She has no idea whether they are or not! She is merely a dunce! The U.S. Senate must find out the truth and report it clearly to the American people; and they need a leader as tenacious and honest as was Sam Irving. (You children don’t know about him, but we old geezers will never forget him. Nor will we ever forget Woodward and Bernstein! Bring them on again!)

I should only add that I am not afraid of the truth on this one.
There is a world of difference between Richard Nixon and Barack Obama!

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Watergate after 40 Years

June 17, 1972 – forty years ago – was an incredible and historic day in the United States and a bunch of criminals and political crackpots were responsible!
by Charlie Leck

“The good of man must be the end of politics!” [Aristotle]

You know, I read something somewhere that contended the nation’s production rate was seriously and negatively impacted by the Watergate Hearings of 1973 and 1974. Why? Because the nation was gripped by those hearings and couldn’t pull itself away from them – lawyers, doctors, teachers, researchers and government employees. We were hooked on Watergate.

I know I was. I was working for a Washington, D.C. company at the time and I can honestly admit that I wasn’t very productive for them on those days when Sam Ervin’s committee was in session and on TV.

It all led to the eventual resignation of the President of the United States – the only time such a thing has happened in our nation’s history.

Now, forty years later, the two reporters who broke so many big stories surrounding the Watergate investigation are looking back at it all and saying it was worse than we thought back then.

If you were a Watergate junkie, be sure to read this extraordinary account in the Washington Post by Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward: “Nixon was far worse than we thought!”

Wow! This article is loaded with good and deeply interesting stuff!

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I’m going back to Mississippi again this year, to recognize the 48^th anniversary of the murders of the three civil rights workers, James Cheney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner – and to call for justice in the cases of dozens of Mississippi and Arkansas martyrs whose murderers have never been brought to trial. I’ve been asked to speak a couple of times during the gatherings. I’ve been working on those presentations. If you have suggestions, please don’t hesitate to email them to me [my email address].

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Why not become a follower?
If you read my blog regularly, why not become a follower? All you have to do is click in the upper right hand corner and establish a simple means of communication. Then you'll be informed every time a new blog is posted here. If all that's confusing, here's Google's explanation of how to do it! If you don’t want to post comments on the blog, but would like to communicate with me about it, send me an email if you’d like.