Tags:
Journalism of Courage
WASHINGTON, MARCH 20: Former President Richard Nixon was so paranoid about newsleaks that he once ordered one of his aides to “implement a theft” at the liberal Washington think-tank Brookings which, he believed, was holding some papers that could potentially show him in bad light.
All this and more is revealed by 168,000 pages of Nixon papers released by the National Archives on Wednesday.
In yet another incident, one of the White House memos expressed its anger over media which was critical of Nixon. It said “The New York Times is finished” at the White House. It complained that a wire service reporter, Peter Arnett, “has been bad for eight years”.
Nixon eventually had to resign over his attempts to cover up the break-in by his supporters at Democratic Party headquarters at Watergate. The papers reveal that media moghul Walter Annanberg, Nixon’s Ambassador to Britain, was such a Nixon loyalist that he sent a memo to Nixon saying that the level of media criticism of Nixon “turns mystomach”.
The Nixon papers portray fear of a “news plot”.
