"A generation which ignores history has no past — and no future."
--Robert A. Heinlein
This past couple weeks I've been reading Don't Know Much About History and earlier this week read about the Sixties, which was a remarkably disruptive decade. There were two main fronts that dominated the era, civil rights and Vietnam. Vietnam, however, was a subset of a bigger issue that weighed on the nation's leaders. That bigger issue was the fear of aggressive global communism.
So the decade began with an attempted coup in Cuba and the fiasco known as the Bay of Pigs invasion. For the purposes of this brief post, I will call the Watergate break-in in 1972 the completion of the cycle, even though that incident took a couple years to unravel during which time the Vietnam excursion would come to a much needed close.
Here are some interesting and strange facts that jumped out at me as I read this section of DKMAH.
1. E. Howard Hunt was one of the "plumbers" (along with G. Gordon Liddy and others) who had been tasked by President Nixon with the assignment of stopping security leaks after the Pentago Papers were published by the NY Times. Along with Liddy and others, he was implicated in the Watergate scandal. Four of these others were Anti-Castro Cubans, two were from the Committee To Re-Elect the President (CREEP).
2. Hunt was also part of the team that worked on the disastrous and misguided Bay of Pigs invasion (1961). Hence his connection with the Cubans later at Watergate.
3. Howard Hunt's wife died in a plane crash later in 1972 with $10,000 in one hundred dollar bills that she was conveying to someone in Chicago as hush money.
4. One of JFKs misstresses was Judy Exner, who was also intimately involved with Chicago mob bosses Sam Giancana and Sam Roselli.
5. Sam Giancana was murdered just before he was to testify at a Church Committee hearing. The Church Committee was a Senate committee created to investigate abuses by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), National Security Agency (NSA), Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). A primary motive for this exploration of shady dealings included all of Nixon's paranoid manipulations and scandalous activities. Numerous members of the Nixon team did time behind bars.
6. John Roselli was a Chicago mobster who helped control Las Vegas mob activities and Hollywood. Roselli's decomposing body was found on August 9, 1976, inside a 55-gallon steel fuel drum floating in Dumfoundling Bay near Miami, Florida.
* * * *
A friend asked if I were watching the impeachment hearings this week. I said no. I didn't watch the Clinton impeachment hearings either. (He was the second president impeached. Andrew Jackson was the first. Nixon was not impeached. He resigned.)
The House of Representatives has initiated impeachment hearings 62 times since the first Constitutional Convention. The impeachable offenses for Federal officers are "Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors." The House has impeached 19 Federal officers, two of them presidents: Andrew Jackson and Bill Clinton. Both were acquitted by the Senate.
In about 30 years we'll read about all the scandals that took place in the 90s through the present and our grandchildren won't believe it.
Hope this hasn't been too dour. I am still trying to process what I went through in my youth.
--Robert A. Heinlein
So the decade began with an attempted coup in Cuba and the fiasco known as the Bay of Pigs invasion. For the purposes of this brief post, I will call the Watergate break-in in 1972 the completion of the cycle, even though that incident took a couple years to unravel during which time the Vietnam excursion would come to a much needed close.
Here are some interesting and strange facts that jumped out at me as I read this section of DKMAH.
1. E. Howard Hunt was one of the "plumbers" (along with G. Gordon Liddy and others) who had been tasked by President Nixon with the assignment of stopping security leaks after the Pentago Papers were published by the NY Times. Along with Liddy and others, he was implicated in the Watergate scandal. Four of these others were Anti-Castro Cubans, two were from the Committee To Re-Elect the President (CREEP).
2. Hunt was also part of the team that worked on the disastrous and misguided Bay of Pigs invasion (1961). Hence his connection with the Cubans later at Watergate.
3. Howard Hunt's wife died in a plane crash later in 1972 with $10,000 in one hundred dollar bills that she was conveying to someone in Chicago as hush money.
4. One of JFKs misstresses was Judy Exner, who was also intimately involved with Chicago mob bosses Sam Giancana and Sam Roselli.
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| Don Michael Corleone |
6. John Roselli was a Chicago mobster who helped control Las Vegas mob activities and Hollywood. Roselli's decomposing body was found on August 9, 1976, inside a 55-gallon steel fuel drum floating in Dumfoundling Bay near Miami, Florida.
* * * *
A friend asked if I were watching the impeachment hearings this week. I said no. I didn't watch the Clinton impeachment hearings either. (He was the second president impeached. Andrew Jackson was the first. Nixon was not impeached. He resigned.)
The House of Representatives has initiated impeachment hearings 62 times since the first Constitutional Convention. The impeachable offenses for Federal officers are "Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors." The House has impeached 19 Federal officers, two of them presidents: Andrew Jackson and Bill Clinton. Both were acquitted by the Senate.
In about 30 years we'll read about all the scandals that took place in the 90s through the present and our grandchildren won't believe it.
Hope this hasn't been too dour. I am still trying to process what I went through in my youth.
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