On this edition of Parallax Views, journalist Jefferson Morley returns to the show to discuss his new book Scorpion’s Dance: The President, the Spymaster, and Watergate, which details the dual lives and “clandestine collaborative relationship” between CIA director Richard Helms and President Richard Nixon culminating in the Watergate break-in. Among the topics discussed:
– The contrasting backgrounds of Richard Nixon, a man from a humble background who hated the Eastern Establishment, and Richard Helms, an Ivy League-educated man who came to head the CIA during the Cold War
– The role of secrecy and power in the lives of Nixon and Helms
– Cuba, AMLASH, covert assassination programs, organized crime, the military dictatorship of General Fulgencio Batista y Zaldívar, Fidel Castro, the Bay of Pigs, and America’s Cold War ideology
– Examples of the Central Intelligence agency finding ways to set policy and go over the head of President John F. Kennedy and President Lyndon Baines Johnson
– The CIA and the press
– Nixon’s national security policy, the Vietnam War, the antiwar movement, and CIA spying on antiwar activists
– CIA officer and infamous Watergate burglar E. Howard Hunt, his relationship with Helms, and Hunt’s James Bond-like pulp spy fiction
– Watergate, Daniel Ellsberg, and dirty tricks like blackmail operations
– Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s All the President’s Men
– National security legislation and Presidential abuse of unchecked power
– The cultural revolution of the 60s/70s and Watergate as a crisis of the national security state
– The assassination of JFK, the CIA, pre-assassination knowledge of Lee Harvey Oswald, Richard Helms and the Warren Commission, and James Jesus Angleton
– President Harry Truman’s “abolish the CIA” op ed.
