Wallowing in Watergate

I just finished watching White House Plumbers on HBO.

I admit I was obsessive about it, since there are so few programs/movies about Watergate other than All The President’s Men and Oliver Stone’s Nixon, and I am especially interested in the E. Howard Hunt - G. Gordon Liddy axis for a variety of reasons.

I’m not sure the dark comedy aspect of White House Plumbers really did it for me, though.  I admit the reality of the Watergate affair was closer to a dark comedy in some respects than to high drama, so I can’t really fault the direction they wanted to take with this, except that it sorta kinda belittled the affair as just some goofy stuff a couple of has-been government employees tried to get away with.  It was more than that, as numerous studies since then have shown, with tentacles reaching into a lot of strange places, and the series could have made more of that instead of reaching for exaggerated effect and the occasional uncomfortable laugh, but that’s just me, I guess.  (I mean, wouldn’t a reference to “Deep Throat” have been good for a chuckle, too, since Mark Felt – the putative Deep Throat source for Woodward and Bernstein – did make an appearance?)

But my problem might be the casting of Woody Harrelson as a kind of neanderthal version of E. Howard Hunt (do you really see Woody Harrelson as a spy novelist? Or as an intellectual elitist?  He got the anti-Kennedy, Bay of Pigs veteran schtick down pat, sure, but he is upstaged as a spy by his wife who in the series seemed more like the real thing compared to his characterization as a stridently political but ultimately naïve operative), but I have to admit Harrelson as Hunt resonates on so many other levels that my “sinister forces” radar kept pinging back and forth.

This was due, of course, to the fact that Harrelson’s father Charles Harrelson was a convicted political assassin who once claimed that he was the shooter at Dallas who killed President Kennedy. In the series, Hunt is teased as having himself been at Dallas on that day and we know he had a motive: Hunt was involved with the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, which ended in a disaster that he and many others blamed on President Kennedy’s refusal to provide air cover for the invasion when he was advised that it was already underway.  Thus, Harrelson the actor was the son of a man who claimed responsibility for the JFK assassination, playing another man – Hunt – who (on his deathbed) also claimed responsibility for the JFK assassination, or so it was reported at the time.

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I admit my proximity to some of these things seems eerie in retrospect.  I once worked at a weird little office in Queens where a colleague, Arthur Hochberg, worked at the same office – Mullen and Company – where E. Howard Hunt was employed at the time of the Watergate affair.  In the series, not much is made of Mullen except that it was some kind of PR firm.  Oddly, this was not precisely true.

Mullen was a CIA front.  It provided cover for a number of overseas Agency operations, including one in Singapore.  Hochberg ran the Singapore office in the 1970s, and when I was in Singapore 20 years later I looked up the corporate particulars in Companies House (which is their equivalent of a County Clerk’s office in the States).  Mullen was still listed, but when I tried to get the names of the corporate officers I was told to come back the next day as it was near closing time.  I left the office, went to my hotel, and got a phone call about an hour later from Companies House regretting that they had no further information on Mullen. 

That was about what I expected, as I knew Mullen in Singapore was a CIA front operation for debriefing Chinese defectors, which was what Hochberg did there.  (He was fluent in Mandarin.) What I had not expected was the phone call since I had not told them where I was staying!

I did not own a television set for the entire decade of the 1970s.  I was though, and remain, an avid reader of books and a passionate viewer of film.  During Watergate, I did not watch the hearings or any kind of news, but I read three newspapers daily with an emphasis on the New York Times and the Washington Post.  I also worked for Bendix, a Fortune 100 company at the time, that was heavily involved in US government and Defense Department contracts both in the States and everywhere overseas. So, I had a kind of privileged perch to listen and learn a great deal about how government worked and about the interface between government and business. Many of my coworkers had security clearances.  Others were “consultants” or “business agents” abroad.  Some of our company offices had been used as fronts as well, something that was known to us rank and file since we had to field phone calls and other communications from concerned wives and family members from time to time.  One of our district managers in Uruguay, for instance, was kidnapped by the Tupamaros.  Another escaped Beirut just as his office was being bombed in the civil war.

It was during my employment with that company that I made my infamous visit to Chile, to investigate Colonia Dignidad.  A month after my return Stateside, and my reception at Miami International Airport by two members of the US intelligence community, I was let go from Bendix and wound up working for the small automotive firm in Queens where I met Arthur Hochberg, former CIA agent and the colleague of E. Howard Hunt at Mullen.

That was in 1979.

But in 1969 I was involved with a strange religious operation in the Bronx that numbered David Ferrie and Jack Martin among its members. Ferrie and Martin were believed to have known about the Kennedy assassination and Oswald’s role in it and were both investigated by District Attorney Jim Garrison’s office in New Orleans, Louisiana.  Thus, I was a few handshakes away from Oswald and the JFK assassination in 1969, and then working alongside Arthur Hochberg 10 years later I was a few handshakes away from not only Watergate but the Bay of Pigs and possibly the JFK assassination again. 

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Those familiar with my published work know that I picked the term “sinister forces” from Alexander Haig’s reference to the suspicious 18-1/2-minute gap in Nixon’s Oval Office tapes as being due to those “sinister forces.”  The ambiguity and dread of the term is delicious, and we live after all in deadly ambiguous times where there are connections between people and events, and we have no friggin’ clue what it all means so that paranoia seems like the only reasonable reaction.

But that’s not true, is it?  In order to understand how these things are related, and why, we have to step outside our comfort zone a little and realize that there are other influences at work in the world that we usually ignore;  that conspiracies are ubiquitous, but not omniscient, and are constantly in flux, and if you don’t know that you will be led easily and fatally astray; that consciousness factors are the missing piece in much that passes for political analysis; and that America is a haunted house, a land where civilizations disappeared unseen and unrecognized as we pushed further and further west, whipping our slaves, trampling on the evidence – the bones and the blood spatter and the vast earthen temples to unknown gods – like rookie cops at a crime scene, and that eventually these ghosts rise from their graves and tap us on the shoulders and whisper “boo!” into our fever-addled brains as we turn and stare at our neighbors in our mohawks and shoulder holsters and spit “Are you talking to me?”. 

Why do I reference Taxi Driver in this discussion of Watergate?  Because Robert DeNiro played Travis Bickle, who was modeled on a real-life assassin, Arthur Bremer, who tried to kill Governor George Wallace (who was running for president at the time).  And then John Hinckley – who tried to assassinate President Reagan – was inspired by Taxi Driver and his obsession with DeNiro’s co-star in the film, Jodie Foster.  Thus, we have this tight little circle of attempted political assassinations and a feature film, but you can’t claim “conspiracy” as a working theory here at all.  You have to find another explanation. And “sinister forces” is as good as any right now.  And, you know, just for shits and giggles, there’s Jodie Foster in the new season of True Detective: a series whose first season featured Woody Harrelson as a detective trying to solve a murder mystery in Louisiana with occult references and overtones.

(Of course, you can go one step further and discover that, at a press conference for the new film Killers of the Flower Moon during the Cannes Film Festival this year, the same Robert DeNiro referenced a book called Ratline about the underground post-war SS network … a book written by … well, me.)

And the circle gets tighter and tighter and … and … and so it goes.

Boo.