By MICHAEL SLOVANOS
ROGER Stone, once the youngest staff member of President Richard Nixon, has set history straight in regard to Nixon’s allegedly monstrous scandal known as The Watergate Break-In, in which Republican supporters broke into the Democratic National Committee HQ. Stone has also reassured the world that the same people who shot JFK also tried to shoot Donald J. Trump.
Stone, in one of his Rumble broadcasts, says that while Americans are still fascinated by the Kennedy assassination, Watergate is regarded as settled history. However, the recent TV drama series Gaslit, based on the Watergate narrative and in which Nixon is typecast as the villain, is “completely historically inaccurate”.
In Gaslit, Julia Roberts plays Martha Mitchell, the controversial wife of Nixon campaign manager and Attorney General John Mitchell. Stone says conventional wisdom holds that Mitchell knew of and approved the break-in at the Watergate Hotel, however this is now denied in Strong Man, the book on Mitchell by James Rosen. Mitchell also denied it to his dying day, said Stone.
He went on to talk about his “Soviet-style show trial in Washington DC, of course” for allegedly lying to Congress about alleged Russian collusion with Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. Trump pardoned him of the conviction.
“Like Nixon I was railroaded. My sympathy with my old boss therefore extends to the book I wrote Nixon Secrets in 2024, in which I first tried to create the historical record about Watergate,” said Stone.
“The fundamental question of this entire affair is whether President Nixon knew about the hare-brained plan to break into the Watergate complex before the fact and all the evidence, with more and more emerging every year, suggests that this was not the case.”
Stone says Nixon’s long-time travelling companion and aide de camp, Dwight Chapin, also torpedoes the conventional story and documents that it was the White House counsel John Dean who conceived, pushed and lied to Nixon for more than nine months about the origins of the Watergate caper.
He says Dean reached out to Watergate prosecutors to make a deal for himself, which involved him being disbarred and given four months “incarceration” which merely involved going to the Department of Justice and working with prosecutors. “Dean is in fact the real villain,” said Stone.
Dean went on to commit perjury before the Watergate Inquiry but was not prosecuted and became a media darling because he turned on Nixon who was cast as the villain.
Many Cairns News readers will also be aware of the Hollywood movie All the President’s Men, which cements the mythology by retelling the story of the two alleged heroic Washington Post reporters Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward who exposed “the scandal”.