First, it wasn't known in 1972 just what "papers" there were. That material started coming out AFTER Watergate.
Second, virtually every president that has come after the assassination has been compromised in some way, usually relating to the assassination itself. Nixon acknowledges this himself when he asks on the recording was it Ly…
First, it wasn't known in 1972 just what "papers" there were. That material started coming out AFTER Watergate.
Second, virtually every president that has come after the assassination has been compromised in some way, usually relating to the assassination itself. Nixon acknowledges this himself when he asks on the recording was it Lyndon? was it Dick? Nixon had a rather ill-timed meeting at the Pepsi bottlers convention in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963. And he may have been at that suspect party with HL Hunt and LBJ the night before. Doesn't look good. The point of the call to Helms is that he doesn't know what's in the CIA records ... that's why he's asking -- pleading really -- them to tell him.
And of course Nixon had run the anti-Castro operations as VP and so was mixed up with many implicated in Dallas. Everyone in the circle of knowledge is compromised. That's how the secrets stay secret. Every so often it becomes necessary to sacrifice a member or two, for violating the agreement, because they have lost their usefulness, or because the public inquiries become too much to resist and a bone or two needs to be thrown to the public.
The bitter irony is that 99 percent of the story can be told today, through open-source and declassified materials -- owing largely to Moynihan (!) -- but no journalistic organizations will undertake the task, owing to the shallow model of the news business and their own complicity. As a philosopher said once: "Hell is truth found out too late."
First, it wasn't known in 1972 just what "papers" there were. That material started coming out AFTER Watergate.
Second, virtually every president that has come after the assassination has been compromised in some way, usually relating to the assassination itself. Nixon acknowledges this himself when he asks on the recording was it Lyndon? was it Dick? Nixon had a rather ill-timed meeting at the Pepsi bottlers convention in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963. And he may have been at that suspect party with HL Hunt and LBJ the night before. Doesn't look good. The point of the call to Helms is that he doesn't know what's in the CIA records ... that's why he's asking -- pleading really -- them to tell him.
And of course Nixon had run the anti-Castro operations as VP and so was mixed up with many implicated in Dallas. Everyone in the circle of knowledge is compromised. That's how the secrets stay secret. Every so often it becomes necessary to sacrifice a member or two, for violating the agreement, because they have lost their usefulness, or because the public inquiries become too much to resist and a bone or two needs to be thrown to the public.
The bitter irony is that 99 percent of the story can be told today, through open-source and declassified materials -- owing largely to Moynihan (!) -- but no journalistic organizations will undertake the task, owing to the shallow model of the news business and their own complicity. As a philosopher said once: "Hell is truth found out too late."