Cover-ups never end
: So Nixon flunkie Jeb Stuart Magruder says — finally — that Richard Nixon ordered the Watergate break-in.
Why didn’t he say it before? “Nobody ever asked me . . . about that.”
Once a slimy operative, always a slimy operative.
: I met Magruder after he got out of jail. He was attending Princeton Theological Seminary and working as a student minister in Princeton’s Presbyterian church, where my sister was associate pastor. She had a party one night and invited me and there I met Magruder. We chatted about this and that. And then he asked what I did for a living.
I write for People magazine, I told him.
It was as if he had just learned that I had anthrax, bad breath, body odor, and a loaded pistol. I’ve never seen anyone back away from me so fast and with such fear in his eyes.
: I’ve often quoted a story Magruder told in Princeton about the moral relativism of working in the Nixon White House. I tell this story whenever someone I’m working with admits that something’s not right but justifies it by saying that at least they saved the situation from being even worse.
Magruder said that working at the White House he’d spend all day shooting down crazy scheme after crazy scheme from the likes of Howard Hunt. He’d get home at night, put up his feet, and pat himself on the back: “I killed nine crazy Hunt schemes today.”
The only problem was, the tenth crazy Hunt scheme was Watergate.
