Mayhem: The 1970s You Never Knew, Episode 4

The Preamble

Sharon McMahon

Government, History, Storytelling, Education

4.9 • 15.1K Ratings

🗓️ 30 October 2023

⏱️ 35 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Deep Throat, Operation Gemstone, two valiant reporters, and a secret 30 years in the making. Watergate was not a single scandal, but rather an avalanche of events and co-conspirators, all engaged in corruption to keep President Nixon in office. The stakes were so high that Nixon’s Special Security Advisor, G. Gordon Liddy, lived under fear of being assassinated, and the wife of Nixon’s Campaign Director & Attorney General was drugged and held captive in a hotel room to keep her silent. What was the “smoking gun” that led to the toppling of this enterprise? Was it the tapes Nixon secretly recorded, and the 18-minute gap, that ultimately pushed Nixon to be the first and only President to resign?

Writer, Host, and Executive Producer: Sharon McMahon

Audio Producer: Jenny Snyder

Writers and Researchers: Amy Watkin, Mandy Reid, and Kari Anton

Production Coordinator: Andrea Champoux

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey listener, do you have a story to tell? Just like the podcast you're listening to now?
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0:25.0	Get started with a three month trial of our paid plant using the promo start. Just visit go.acast.com slash start.
0:38.0	Hello friends and welcome to the fourth episode in our series about the 1970s.
0:45.0	It was a secret 30 years in the making.
0:50.0	When the Watergate scandal broke two intrepid reporters sought to find and reveal the truth.
0:58.0	And to do that, they spent years cultivating a source.
1:05.0	Over time, this source has grown beyond a mere person with a role in bringing the corruption and watergate to life in popular culture.
1:14.0	The source became mythical, someone whose identity was unknown for over three decades.
1:23.0	And the myth had a name deep throat.
1:29.0	I'm Sharon McMahon, and here's where it gets interesting.
1:36.0	There are two things you need to know about Watergate from the outset.
1:39.0	It wasn't just one scandal, hearing or event, but numerous things that snowballed into one giant entity.
1:49.0	It involved many people engaged in a conspiracy to keep President Nixon in office.
1:55.0	And what you need to know about conspiracies is that they invariably collapse.
2:02.0	Because eventually, evidence is discovered and participants admit what they did out of fear.
2:12.0	Earlier in this series, we explored the Pentagon papers, a 7,000-page document about a three decade-long US involvement in Vietnam.
2:21.0	Daniel Ellsberg and Anthony Russo leaked the 7,000 pages to the press at great personal risk because they believed Americans had a right to know that their government was not being truthful with them.
2:37.0	Nixon was outraged and in response, created a special investigations unit, later nicknamed the plumbers, because their job was to stop leaks.
2:49.0	The plumbers were tasked with breaking into Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist's office and later the office of the Democratic National Committee, which was housed in the Watergate building.
	...

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