Whistleblower Summit This Week Highlights 50 Years of the Pentagon Papers and Investigative Journalism

The annual Whistleblower Summit & Film Festival this week continues to empower whistleblowers and advocates and encourages others to stand for truth. Film presentations began July 23 and the panel program begins Sunday with the program extending to Aug. 1. Because of the continuing pandemic this year’s expanded, video-only program replaces the traditional live presentations on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC.

The event presents more than 50 film screenings and panel presentations over ten days.

The films focus on whistleblowing, free speech/press freedom, civil and human rights, or social justice themes. Some of the film titles and their respective directors include “Sallie Mae Not” by Mike Camon and a panel discussion on the student debt crises, “The New Abolitionists” by Christina Zorich, and the “Last Call for Tomorrow” by Gary Null, with Valerie Van Cleve as co-director. Check out Film Festival Flix to see more titles, which are also listed below.

This year’s keynote speaker on July 30 will be former U.S. Department of Defense analyst Daniel Ellsberg, thereby marking the 50th year anniversary of his courageous release of what are now known as “The Pentagon Papers” disclosing scandalous aspects of the Pentagon’s secret operations during the then-raging Vietnam War.

Ellsberg, shown at left in a photo by the University of Massachusetts, which now houses his collected papers, made disclosures first via the New York Times and later via other news organizations that risked federal prosecution, as endured by Ellsberg. The late U.S. Sen. Mike Gravel (D-Alaska), who died last month, helped publicize the revelations by reading excerpts on the Senate floor.

This year’s Summit and Festival includes more than 30 documentary films and shorts, plus special segments. The segments include sessions led by the Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ), a co-host of the event, and the Government Accountability Project, a long-time partner. A day-long segment on July 30 by the National Whistleblower Center features prominent U.S. elected and appointed officials regarded as welcoming to whistleblowers and their causes.

This year’s expanded Pillar Award ceremony recognizes notable civil and human rights champions among  politicians, community activists and journalists — including documentary filmmakers.

The main organizers of the event are former ACORN whistleblowers Michael McCray and Marcel Reid, who were both honored earlier this year by the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners at the world’s largest anti-fraud conference. The two were among the “ACORN 8″ activists who helped expose gross corruption and self-dealing in the inner circle of leadership at the community activist organization ACORN.

The Summit is organized in collaboration with such longtime partners as the Pacifica broadcast network. .

Click here for ticket information for the sessions, which may be accessed individually (some for free) or with a full-conference pass for $150. 

Our Justice Integrity Project, a member of the Summit host committee for a half dozen years, will open the panel segment at noon EDT on Sunday, July 25, with a major panel on Watergate that features former Washington Post editor Barry Sussman and two critics of the Post’s coverage, authors Jim Hougan and John O’Connor.

The session title is Watergate Revelations After Five Decades: What’s the Rest of the Story?

Sussman, right, was Washington Post city editor when DC police arrested burglars for breaking into a suite of the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate office and residential complex in Washington, DC. Sussman was soon named special Watergate editor, helping direct the coverage that won a Pulitzer grand prize for the newspaper. In 1974, he authored The Great Cover-up: Nixon and the Scandal of Watergate, a best-seller and widely praised account whose fifth edition will be published at the end of this year with an update focused on the enduring lessons for today of the abuses of presidential power that the scandal uncovered.

This panel is rare because critics such as Hougan and O’Connor of the Post’s coverage almost never appear alongside the most noted Watergate-era journalists or officials.

Hougan, former Washington editor of Harper’s Magazine, and O’Connor, a prominent San Francisco attorney who represented the late former FBI Associate Director Mark Felt, are at the forefront of such criticism, which tends to focus on the role of the CIA and on other elements of the scandal that critics regard as under-reported by major news organizations.

In 1984, Hougan, shown at left, authored Secret Agenda: Watergate, Deep Throat and the CIA. By then, he had authored two previous books, with one focused on private spies affecting American civic and government operations. In Secret Agenda, he reported that “accounts of the break-in have been deliberately falsified by a CIA cover story” and that “The President was spied upon by his own intelligence agents.” He reported also, “False evidence was planted for the FBI to find…Sexual espionage and not election politics was at the heart of it all.”

Hougan’s book is one of a score or so volumes since then illuminating such themes. Another pioneering effort was Silent Coup by the late Len Colodny and his co-author Robert Gettlin in 1991 (republished in 2015). These books included accounts by burglary participants such as G. Gordon Liddy and James McCord, and accounts by whistleblowers and historians.

In O’Connor’s Postgate published in 2019, he argued that famed Post Watergate reporter Bob Woodward and his powerful allies within the news and publishing industries “betrayed” Woodward’s’ source Mark Felt, who became O’Connor’s client beginning in 2005 after O’Connor confirmed that the aging and memory-impaired former FBI executive had been “Deep Throat.”

O’Connor, left, argues that Woodward and his allies have sought to diminish Felt through malicious tactics to preserve what O’Connor describes as “historically significant misrepresentations woven throughout the Post’s Watergate journalism.”

The 64-minute panel was organized and moderated by this editor, a former newspaper reporter during the 1970s and more recently a member of the Colodny Collection Board of Advisors at Texas A & M University. The advisory board includes the university’s liberal arts college dean, Dr. Jerry Jones, among the 24 author, historian and other research members. The collection houses some 500 tape-recorded interviews by Colodny and his co-author Gettlin of key figures in the scandal and its follow-ups. Colodny died last month in Florida after working exhaustively for many years to help new researchers, including this editor and the university. Colodny and the university have been digitizing the research to make the materials more widely available, including via the site Watergate.com.

Shown below at the bottom of an appendix is additional information on this panel’s participants, their credentials and their views.

More generally, the Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ) published on Friday a lengthy account of the program, including a special focus on its own SPJ panel presentation July 27. That panel describes new government restrictions on reporters’ access to newsmaking officials and public records. The SPJ account, a listing of the films being shown and other event details are provided on a runover-page below.

The film program began on July 23 and continues through the weekend before the opening plenary session July 26. The schedule is here. Each film will be available at the scheduled release time and date, and available for viewing also 72 hours after its release window.

Related News Coverage

Whistleblower Summit Highlights 50 Years of the Pentagon Papers and Investigative Journalism. Members of the watchdog organization ACORN 8 and the Society of Professional Journalists co-host the annual Whistleblower Summit & Film Festival, held from July 23 through August 1. The gathering, which will be accessible virtually on Film Festival Flix, is themed “A Salute to the 50th Anniversary of Pentagon Papers and the rise of investigative journalism.” 

The Film Festival will host more than 50 film screenings and panel presentations over 10 days. The films focus on whistleblowing, free speech/press freedom, civil and human rights, or social justice themes. 

The Whistleblower Summit & Film Festival is an annual gathering of whistleblowers and their advocates, as well as civil rights community members on Capitol Hill. The event, formerly known as the Washington Whistleblower’s Week, is yearly organized in honor of whistleblowers and the first amendment activism. It is usually held during the week of July 30, the National Whistleblowers Day.

In line with the 50th anniversary of the Pentagon Papers, the Whistleblower Summit & Film Festival will have Daniel Ellsberg deliver the keynote presentation. Daniel Ellsberg (shown on a Time Magazine cover) is an American economist, political activist, and former United States military analyst and researcher.

In addition, the annual summit will feature panel discussions from the Watergate era journalists, academics, and whistleblower advocates. There will be plenary sessions on various topics such as blowing the whistle on immigration justice. The gathering will also discuss discrimination in the federal workplace, systemic discrimination at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and law enforcement whistleblowers.

Apart from the discussions and sessions, the summit also features some of the best films about whistleblowers, the First Amendment, and those that touch on human rights issues are related to the group’s advocacy. Some of the films include “The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers” and “Line in the Street – a film about Gerrymandering.”

The event aims to highlight its advocacy and build a sense of community and solidarity. “There is no free press without news sources. There can be no congressional oversight without government informants.

Whistleblowers are the Fifth Estate protecting freedom and liberty,” said Michael McCray, co-founder of the International Association of Whistleblowers.

Other than panel discussions and plenary sessions, the week-long summit usually includes workshops, book signings, film screenings, awards, and presentations, as well as luncheon and dinner. Its invited speakers and guests are distinguished whistleblowers, authors of whistleblower books, and other known personalities who are advocates of whistleblowing.
Its invited speakers and guests are distinguished whistleblowers, authors of whistleblower books, and other known personalities who are advocates of whistleblowing.

To know more, visit http://www.WhistleblowerSummit.com. The Whistleblower Summit & Film Festival is an annual gathering of whistleblowers and their advocates, and civil rights members. It is the largest gathering of whistleblowers and the only festival for honoring whistleblowers and their First Amendment activism. In 2019, the summit received a “Best Festival” (Arts, Culture & Film category) award from Fest Forum (Santa Barbra).

Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ), Whistleblower Summit and Film Festival, virtual events, begins with screenings starting Friday, July 23, and panel discussions starting Sunday, July 25; DC Pro president joins opening plenary July 26, Staff Report, July 23, 2021. SPJ DC Pro Chapter is a co-sponsor of the Whistleblower Summit and Film Festival this year, with a panel presentation on July 27. A chapter board member and a chapter Distinguished Service Award honoree will be participating on another panel July 30.

Here is a schedule for panels and screenings (subject to updates). All sessions will be held via Zoom; the film screenings will be streamed online.

Keynote speaker is whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg at noon on July 30 in recognition of his role in releasing documents that led to the publication of excerpts in the New York Times of what came to be called the Pentagon Papers, 50 years ago this summer.

SPJ DC Pro Chapter President Randy Showstack will represent the chapter during the opening plenary on Monday, July 26, at 10 a.m., joining other sponsors or collaborators. They include:

Panelists:

• Marcel Reid, Pacifica Foundation
• Michael McCray, ACORN 8
• Andrew Kreig (also a DC Pro Chapter member), Justice Integrity Project
• Randy Showstack, Society of Professional Journalists Washington, D.C., Pro Chapter
• Liz Hemperwitz, Project on Government Oversight
• Tom Devine, Government Accountability Project
• Siri Nelson, National Whistleblower Center

SPJ’s indefatigable chapter Recording Secretary and FOI advocate Kathryn Foxhall will moderate the 10 a.m. Tuesday, July 27 panel, “The Perils of PIO,” which is described thus: “Over 20-30 years, it’s become a cultural norm for various entities, public and private, to prohibit staff from communicating with reporters without oversight by authorities, often through public information officers (PIO). The basic part of this is quite fearsome: prohibition against any contact without notifying authorities. However, the rules also create a chokepoint severely limiting the number of contacts. They are also used to deliberately block unwanted contacts and constrain what can be said.

“This hampers whistleblowing by massively reducing reporters’ ability to get to know and be educated by staff; have staff come to trust them; and have confidential conversations. The Society of Professional Journalists has said it believes secrecy caused by these controls led to significantly higher COVID-19 death toll. An analysis by First Amendment attorney Frank LoMonte says the restrictions are unconstitutional and many courts have said so.”

Panelists:

• Kathyrn Foxhall (Moderator) The SPJDC.org website has articles about “Censorship by PIO” and resources.
• Frank LoMonte, head of the Brechner Center for Freedom of Information at the University of Florida
• Haisten Willis, freelance journalist and chair of national SPJ’s Freedom of Information Committee

Ahead of the keynote speech by Ellsberg — at 10 a.m. on Friday, July 30 — SPJ DC Pro Chapter board member and attorney Kenneth Jost will join chapter DSA awardee Gene Policinski, chief operating officer of the Freedom Forum Institute and the institute’s First Amendment Center, on a panel looking at the “Ramifications of the Pentagon Papers Today.” The panel description says that the July 3, 1971, publication in The New York Times of what is now known as the Pentagon Papers prompted a series of events that ultimately resulted in the resignation of President Richard Nixon and changed the landscape for American journalism due to a landmark decision on freedom of the press (New York Times Co. v. United States). This informative panel will examine the long-term impact of the publishing of the Pentagon Papers on free speech, whistleblowing, investigative journalism and American society overall.

Panelists:

• Gene Policinski, JD (Moderator)
• Mark Zaid, JD
• Kenneth Jost, JD

Access to streaming of panels and the films is here. More information on the Summit can be found here. Specific questions may be directed to [email protected] or by calling (202) 370-6635. July 30 also is National Whistleblower Appreciation Day. The National Whistleblower Center invites you to register here for its virtual all-day event marking the occasion.

  Festival Films

This year’s presentations at the Whistleblower Summit and Film Festival include the following, with films either individually priced or available as part of the $149.95 full conference pass.

Last Call For Tomorrow
Giving Voice: A Black Lives Matter Musical
The New Abolitionists
Father, daughter, and old woman
Chicago: America’s Hidden War
A crime in Book fair
ALL IS ONE. EXCEPT 0.
Medicating Normal
We Want the Airwaves
This Is My Brave

Homeopathy Unrefuted?
Oversight
Jungle Cry
Frenemies – Cuba and the U.S. Embargo
I ELECT: Power Every Four Years
The Zoom Call
Sallie Mae Not
Line in the Street – A Film About Gerrymandering
“I’m Just a Layman in Pursuit of Justice” Black Farmers Fight Against USDA
Protest / Justice for George Floyd

Defense Contract
Under Threat
Turkey: Breaking the Silence
A Place in the world
A Breast Expose’: The Breast Kept Secret
Trapped: Cash Bail in America
The Son
SPARK: A Systemic Racism Story
The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers
Dirty Banking
Four Motherless Children

Sessions: Opening Plenary (10 a.m., EDT, Monday, July 26)

Watergate Revelations After Five Decades: What’s the Rest of the Story? (Noon, EDT, Sunday, July 25)
An Introduction to the House Office of the Whistleblower Ombuds
Student Debt Crisis
Virtual Happy Hour
The Perils of PIO: Free Speech and Public Information Officers (PIOs)
Law Enforcement Whistleblowers
Pentagon Papers Panel: Discussing ‘the Most Dangerous Man In America’

National Whistleblower Appreciation Day Keynote Speaker: Dr. Daniel Ellsberg

Blowing the Whistle on Propaganda Networks: analysis and studies of suppression tactics against academics & scientists
Working More Effectively with Congress
Guardianship Abuses
Working Effectively with The Office of Special Counsel
Combating Systemic Discrimination at U.S. Department of Agriculture
Addressing Discrimination in the Federal Workplace
Whistleblower Books / Film Distribution
Music Industry Whistleblowers: Pioneers of Atlanta

The Dark Side of Dialysis
Whistleblowers & Immigration Justice: Challenges, Victories, and the Work Still to be Done
Global Whistleblowing: Emerging International Whistleblower Rights
The Ramifications of the Pentagon Papers—Today

Closing Plenary

  Honors This Year For Summit Leaders: ACORN 8 Whistleblowers

Michael McCray and Marcel Reid ACFE Ant-Fraud Keynote Speakers (Image by Association of Certified Fraud Examiners).

OpEdNews, ACORN 8 Whistleblowers Honored with Cliff Robertson Sentinel Award at the Largest Anti-Fraud Conference, June 28, 2021. Marcel Reid and Michael McCray, two of the ACORN 8 whistleblowers, addressed more than 5,000 anti-fraud professionals at the virtual 32ndAnnual ACFE Global Fraud Conference on June 21-23.

Attendees also heard from cybersecurity expert Robert Herjavec and former U.S. Attorney of the Southern District of New York Preet Bharara, shown at left in an official photo. In addition to hearing from these keynote speakers, attendees chose from more than 90 sessions taught by leaders in the anti-fraud field. The conference was emceed by Kate Snow, anchor of NBC Nightly News Sunday and an award-winning senior national correspondent for NBC News.

Reid and McCray received the Cliff Robertson Sentinel Award on behalf of the ACORN 8. The Sentinel was first awarded to Oscar-Winning actor Cliff Robertson in 2003, the ACFE’s Sentinel Award carries the inscription “For Choosing Truth Over Self.” This award is bestowed annually on a person who, without regard to personal or professional consequences, has publicly disclosed wrongdoing in business or government.

ACORN 8 discovered a multi-million-dollar embezzlement at the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) and ignited a media firestorm that engulfed the venerable association in 2008. A boogie man of the right, numerous detractors engaged the non-profit. Some were disgruntled, others fought for political or partisan advantage, only the ACORN 8 stood the test of time as credible whistleblowers.

“Without the A8 whistleblowers creed: Truth, Transparency & Accountability democracy cannot survive and justice is unattainable. I am deeply honored to receive the Cliff Robertson Sentinel Award because it perfectly describes what the A8 did–we told the truth” states Marcel Reid, ACORN 8. “I am proud to be associated with his memory.”

Cliff Robertson was a frequent critic of the movie industry. He once said he went to Hollywood only to work and never to live. He went on to blow the whistle on David Begelman, the president of Columbia Pictures, in 1977 after he discovered that Begelman had forged his name to a $10,000 studio check.  Begelman was subsequently accused of embezzling more than $61,000 from the studio. Robertson pressed his complaint against the advice of many in Hollywood who did not want Begelman to become a liability to the movie industry. Begelman pleaded no contest to charges of grand theft and was fined $5,000 and sentenced to three years’ probation. He was first suspended by Columbia Pictures and then fired.

In 2010, ACORN filed for bankruptcy to thwart public calls for transparency and accountability. “After the fall of ACORN, Wade Rathke dismissively asked ‘how are the A8 going to stay relevant?’ said McCray of ACORN 8. “I want to thank the ACFE for this award because it answers Rathke’s question — the truth will always be relevant. A8 is a group of the best community organizers in the association. Consequently, we organized the most unlikely community of all — whistleblowers.”

About the ACFE Conference and Awardees

ACORN 8 remains a grassroots watchdog organization but their most enduring contribution is the A8 hosts the Annual Whistleblower Summit & Film Festival, which is an award-winning festival and the largest gathering of whistleblowers in the county. This year’s theme is a Salute to the 50th Anniversary of the Pentagon Papers and Rise of Investigative Journalism. The Whistleblower Summit & Film Festival will be presented virtually on Film Festival Flix from July 23rd – August 1st.

The Association of Certified Fraud Examiners, Inc., is the world’s largest anti-fraud organization and premier provider of anti-fraud training and education. Together with nearly 90,000 members, the ACFE is reducing business fraud worldwide and inspiring public confidence in the integrity and objectivity within the profession. Visit FraudConferenceNews.com for video clips, articles and live updates from the conference.

Sunday Opening Summit Panelists: Watergate Revelations After Five Decades: What’s the Rest of the Story?

Andrew Kreig

Panel moderator Andrew Kreig, right, is an investigative reporter, attorney, author, business strategist, and non-profit executive based in Washington, DC. He has served a half dozen years on the host committee for the Whistleblower Summit & Film Festival.
 
After an early career in newspaper reporting, law and business Andrew co-founded and leads the Justice Integrity Project, which fosters investigative reporting about under-reported legal and political issues.
 
The project’s initial focus was upon major federal cases and their implications. The mission has since expanded to encompass the elected officials and interest groups who arrange judicial and prosecutorial appointments, as well as the hidden influencers both domestic and international, such as in finance, manufacturing, media, intelligence sectors work.
 
His first career as a newspaper reporter coincided with, and benefited from ,the explosion in political and legal investigative reporting during the Pentagon Papers and Watergate era of revelations.
 
Upon graduation from Cornell University in 1970, Kreig began as a reporter for the Hartford Courant, where he worked the next 14 years interrupted by a fellowship to Yale Law School. He primarily focused on court and other legal coverage but also wrote many book reviews and feature stories. Among these was a favorable book review in 1974 of Barry Sussman’s The Great Cover-up and a 90-minute interview of Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Scott Armstrong (a former investigator for the Senate Watergate Committee) about their research methods, most relevantly regarding their 1979 best-seller The Brethren, an insider investigative portrayal of the U.S. Supreme Court.

More recently as a Washington-based lawyer, non-profit executive and reporter since 1991, he has worked cooperatively with several former Watergate journalists and critics of the original reporting. One of the founding directors of the Justice Integrity Project (www.justice-integrity.org) was the late John Kelly, who covered Watergate for CBS News. Another was former Washington Post editor Robert Ames Alden, who worked at the newspaper for 49 years. Both died in the last year but had been strongly supportive of the project’s work in general. As part of an active freelance career, Andrew also contributed two investigative columns to the Nieman Watchdog publication that was founded and edited by Barry Sussman before it concluded operations.
 
Separately, Kreig also came to know Len Colodny and Robert Gettlin, co-authors of the 1991 best-seller Silent Coup: The Removal of a President, which is based in part on some 500 tape-recorded interviews by Colodny and Gettlin that now housed at the Colodny Collection in the Texas A&M University library system. Kreig is one of 24 members of the advisory committee of the collection.
 
For this Whistleblower Summit pre-recorded Zoom panel, Andrew has displayed behind him about fifty of his books about Richard Nixon, nearly all of them focused on Watergate and its oft-continuing implications.
 
Regarding Andrew’s other work, he published in 1987 an investigative book, Spiked: How Chain Management Corrupted America’s Oldest Newspaper. It was a case history that wove the history of the newspaper and region into critical analysis of certain reporting by the Courant following its acquisition in 1979 by Times Mirror Corp. (later Tribune Media) for a then-record price during a wave of acquisitions of locally owned newspapers and broadcast outlets. The author undertook the work as a freelance magazine writer, assisted by a grant from the Fund for Investigative Journalism. Also, he was a special reporter on assignment from Connecticut’s major CBS-affiliate, WFSB in Hartford

At first controversial, the book documented now-familiar themes underscoring dangers to a community when roving management teams responsible to distant shareholders control the news agendas of their regions, including on sensitive investigative stories whereby key “facts” may be inflated or suppressed for what might seem to be dubious reasons. Upon publication, his first interview about the whistleblowing book was by then-local WFSB noon anchor Gayle King. The book had been endorsed by the station’s vice president, Richard Ahles, a longtime Hartford-based executive who had hired Andrew as a special reporter for the project because the Washington Post-owned, CBS affiliate had been investigating some of the same dubious news stories and their civic implications.
 
Andrew then finished his legal education at the University of Chicago School of Law and became law clerk from 1990-91 to a Boston federal judge. He became an associate attorney for a law firm in the nation’s capital, where he worked heavily on communications issues and also as a volunteer helping more senior attorneys — including future Clinton Administration Federal Communications Commission Chairman Reed Hundt — on the 1992 Clinton-Gore presidential campaign and transition.

Next, Andrew became vice president and general counsel of the Wireless Communications Association in 1993 and then WCA president and CEO in 1996 for a dozen years as he helped lead its entrepreneurial companies and educators in their efforts to foster a new platform of wireless Internet providing advanced services in a sector then dominated by wired, broadcast and satellite providers. Highlights of that work include organizing major conventions in Washington, Silicon Valley and abroad, and his lectures about advanced communications on five continents. In 2008, he co-keynoted with AOL’s chairman the annual “Futures Summit” for broadcast leaders organized by the National Association of Broadcasters in Pebble Beach, CA.

Later that year, he resigned from the association and undertook research fellowships at two universities to research current affairs. Listed continuously since the mid-1990s until now in both Who’s Who in the World and Who’s Who in America, Andrew has focused heavily on the high tech information economy and such lingering national tragedies as the 1960s Kennedy and King assassinations and Watergate, with a special attention to their implications for the present.
 
In 2013, he published Presidential Puppetry: Obama, Romney and Their Masters.  It documented the largely hidden influence of financial, manufacturing and other leaders, sometimes working with intelligence and law enforcement officials, on American presidents and candidates during the previous half century. The work grew out of the Justice Integrity Project’s reporting on isolated legal cases revealing disturbing patterns that are neglected or hidden from normal scrutiny by watchdog institutions.

Barry Sussman

Barry Sussman, left, is an American editor, author, and opinion analyst who deals primarily with public policy issues.

He was city news editor at The Washington Post at the time of the Watergate break-in and was detached to spend full time directing the coverage that led to the Post’s Pulitzer Prize for public service in 1973. His book, The Great Coverup: Nixon and the Scandal of Watergate, now in its fourth edition, was named one of the best books of the year by the New York Times and Washington Post when it first came out. It has continued to receive high praise through four editions.

As its publisher has described: It is a dramatic case study of tenacious reporting and suspenseful twists and turns in the political crime of the century.

John Dean, Nixon’s White House counsel, said ten years after the break-in, “When people ask me which book they should read to understand Watergate, I recommend this one… Serious Watergate students report this is the best overview of the subject. I heartily agree. Anyone who wants to understand Watergate, and not make a career of it, should read The Great Coverup. (Reviews and excerpts are here)

Commentators say:

A key Nixon goal was to limit the Watergate investigation to the break-in alone, making it appear to be little more than politics as usual. But by September, 1973, as Sussman, who was the Washington Post’s special Watergate editor, spells out:

Under Nixon (below), the CIA had been dragged into domestic affairs; the investigation and findings of the FBI had been subverted; the Justice Department had engaged in malicious prosecutions of some people and failed to act in instances where it should have; the Internal Revenue Service had been used to punish the President’s alleged enemies while ignoring transgressions by his friends and by the President himself; the purity of the court system had been violated; congressmen had been seduced to prevent an inquiry into campaign activities before the election; extortion on a massive scale had been practiced in the soliciting of illegal contributions from the nation’s great corporations; the President had secretly engaged in acts of war against a foreign country… and agents of the President were known to have engaged in continued illegal activities for base political ends.

Wrote David Halberstam when this book was first published: “From the start, the Post was thus unusually lucky. It had the perfect working editor at exactly the right level.” In their book, Woodward and Bernstein noted that Sussman was “given prime responsibility for directing the Post’s Watergate coverage,“ and added:

“Sussman had the ability to seize facts and lock them in his memory, where they remained poised for instant recall. More than any other editor at the Post, or Bernstein and Woodward, Sussman became a walking compendium of Watergate knowledge, a reference source to be summoned when even the library failed. On deadline he would pump these facts into a story in a constant infusion, working up a body of significant facts to support what otherwise seemed like the weakest of revelations. In Sussman’s mind, everything fitted. Watergate was a puzzle and he was a collector of the pieces.”

If there was a “politics as usual” aspect to Watergate, Sussman writes, it was in the help Nixon got from members of both political parties. Therein lies one of the book’s many lessons: Watergate would have been brought to a close much sooner except “for the help powerful men on Capitol Hill extended to their President.”

Among other awards, Sussman was named editor of the year by the Washington-Baltimore Newspaper Guild for his work on Watergate, and he has lectured and written widely on the subject over the years.

He is also the author of What Americans Really Think, published by Pantheon in 1988, based on columns he wrote while pollster and public opinion analyst at the Washington Post, and Maverick, A Life in Politics, written with and about the former U.S. Senator and governor of Connecticut, Lowell P. Weicker, Jr., published in 1995 by Little, Brown.

Jim Hougan

Jim Hougan, right, is an American author, investigative reporter and documentary film producer. A best-selling novelist in both the United States and Europe, his books have been translated into more than a dozen languages.
 
He is best known for Secret Agenda: Watergate, Deep Throat and the CIA, first published in 1984 by Random House and regarded as the first investigative work to question “the orthodox narrative” of the Watergate scandal as propounded by the Washington Post. Hougan’s critique depends throughout on a source that was unavailable to both the Washington Post and the Senate Select Committee investigating the affair. This was the FBI’s Watergate investigation, consisting of more than 30,000 pages of interviews, memos and air-tels that Hougan wrested from the Bureau using the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).
 
The generally accepted belief about Watergate has been that White House spies bugged the Democratic National Committee’s headquarters — supposedly in search of political intelligence.

The New York Times chose Secret Agenda upon publication as “one of the year’s most noteworthy books.”
 
Of Spooks, the Washington Post called the book “admirable,” adding that “Hougan is a superb storyteller and the pages teem with unforgettable characters. The result…is a work crammed…with superb tales…rich documentation.” The L.A. Times agreed: “Frank and racy and documented to the hilt, it is the Guinness rascal record book…a monument of fourth-level research and fact-searching.”

As the author of Spooks: The Haunting of America (William Morrow, 1978), and as Washington Editor of Harper’s Magazine from 1979 to 1984, Hougan had written extensively about the U.S. intelligence community.
 
He went on to help produce the Emmy award-winning documentary “Confessions of a Dangerous Man.”
 
In the mid-1980s, Hougan and author Sally Denton formed a company that provided investigative research for law firms and labor unions. The projects included the discovery that the Ravenswood Aluminum Corporation in West Virginia, which had locked out more than 1,700 workers, was secretly controlled by Marc Rich, a fugitive billionaire and commodities broker then living in Switzerland. The Steelworkers’ successful (and sometimes dangerous) “corporate campaign,” mounted on both sides of the Atlantic, was credited labor scholars at Cornell University with no less than “the revival of American Labor.”

Hougan returned to mainstream investigative reporting in the 1990s with work on articles, video documentaries and for CBS “60 Minutes,” among other outlets.
 
In recent years, his work has included a number of thrillers co-authored with his wife, the novelist Carolyn Johnson Hougan, using the pseudonym, “John Case.” The first of these of these was The Genesis Code, a New York Times best-seller that was succeeded by five others and Kingdom Come.
 
These and others were published in the United States by Ballantine Books, a division of Random House, Inc., as well as by publishers in Europe, Asia, South America, Australia and New Zealand. He and his late wife have twice been short-listed for the Hammett Prize, honoring literary excellence in crime writing.
 
Hougan was born in Brooklyn, New York. In 1966, he earned a degree in philosophy from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Soon afterwards, he wed Carolyn A. Johnson (shown together) and began work as a newspaper reporter and photographer for the Prince George’s County Sentinel in suburban Washington.
 
Later, while working at the Capitol Times in Madison, Wisconsin and as a stringer for the New York Times, he was named an Alicia Patterson and Rockefeller Foundation fellow. His foreign affairs reporting on “contemporary Western youth movements” appeared in newspapers and magazines throughout the United States.

John O’Connor

John O’Connor, right, is a San Francisco-based lawyer whose clients have included the late high-ranking FBI executive Mark Felt, with whom the lawyer collaborated on articles and books revealing and documenting why Felt should be regarded as the iconic “Deep Throat” whistleblowing source for major revelations in the Washington Post’s Watergate scandal coverage.
 
That story was presented in the 2006 book A G-Man’s Life: The FBI, Being ‘Deep Throat,’ And the Struggle for Honor in Washington, published by Felt and his attorney as co-authors. The publisher was Public Affairs Press.
 
In November 2019, O’Connor published a sequel, Postgate: How the Washington Post Betrayed Deep Throat, Covered Up Watergate, and Began Today’ s Partisan Advocacy Journalism. The book published by PostHill Press reflected his dismay with his publisher’s treatment of the 2006 book and the alleged reluctance of the Post and its key personnel, including associate editor Bob Woodward and former Post reporter Carl Bernstein, to support Felt’s role and account.

According to the publisher’s summary:

The conventional wisdom of Watergate is turned on its head by Postgate, revealing that the Post did not uncover Watergate as much as it covered it up. The Nixon Administration, itself involved in a coverup, was the victim of a journalistic smoke screen that prevented mitigation of its criminal guilt. As a result of the paper’s successful misdirection, today’s strikingly deceptive partisan journalism can be laid at the doorstep of the “Washington Post.”
 
After Deep Throat’s lawyer, author John O’Connor, discovered that the Post had betrayed his client while covering up the truth about Watergate, his indefatigable research resulted in Postgate, a profoundly shocking tale of journalistic deceit.
 
In an era when numerous modern media outlets rail about the guilt of their political enemies for speaking untruths, Postgate proves that the media can often credibly be viewed as the party actually guilty of deception. Americans today mistrust the major media more than ever. Postgate will prove that this distrust is richly deserved.

O’Connor’s two books draw on his long litigation experience, including work as an Assistant U.S. Attorney in California’s Northern District from 1974 to 1979 during Watergate’s aftermath, albeit assigned to other cases.

He recounts how he encountered the aging Felt by happenstance via family connections and set about persuading the former FBI executive and his family to reveal his identity as “Deep Throat” to receive just recognition for his historical role. Felt was suffering from dementia at the time but O’Connor, with the former agent’s cooperation, developed a manuscript that documented also a long career that brought Felt close to the very top of the FBI hierarchy.

The first book, A G-Man’s Life, was summarized by its publisher as follows:

This absorbing account of Felt’s FBI career, from the end of the great American crime wave through World War II, the culture wars of the 1960s, and his conviction for his role in penetrating the Weather Underground, provides a rich historical and personal context to the “Deep Throat” chapter of his life. It also provides Felt’s personal recollections of the Watergate scandal, which he wrote in 1982 and kept secret, in which he explains how he came to feel that the FBI needed a “Lone Ranger” to protection it from White House corruption.

Much more than a Watergate procedural, A G-Man’s Life is about life as a spy, the culture of the FBI, and the internal political struggles of mid-20th century America.
 
Only as he neared the end of his life did Felt confide his role in our national history to members of his family, who then shared it with their lawyer, John O’Connor. The answers to the questions — Who is Mark Felt? And why did he risk so much for his country? — are brilliantly answered in A G-Man’s Life.

O’Connor’s Postgate takes readers inside a little-discussed aspect of book publishing whereby some authors claim that their own publishers undermine their books to appease entities more powerful than authors.

Here, O’Connor states that his first publisher, Public Affairs Press, was secretly controlled by the owners of the “Post,” for whom its publisher Peter Osnos formerly worked as an eminent reporter. O’Connor alleges that his book publisher thwarted the success of A G-Man’s Life in order to provide a clearer path for a Bob Woodward book covering some of the same ground. The Secret Man: The Story of Watergate’s Deep Throat by Woodward was published in 2005 by his longtime publisher Simon & Schuster.

(Justice Integrity Project Editor’s Note: We have unsuccessfully sought a response from the book publisher, Peter Osnos, and shall update this biographical reference if one is received.)
 
O’Connor has tried over 70 cases in federal and state venues throughout the country following his 1972 graduation from the University of Michigan Law School, where he served as an editor on the law review. His clients have included R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company, a California Attorney General, and a Golden State Warriors basketball head coach. His successes have included a $1.3 million verdict for his client in a defamation and wrongful termination counterclaim. He has held the highest Martindale-Hubbell “AV” rating for over 25 years, and has consistently been named a “SuperLawyer” by his Northern California peers.

Contact the author Andrew Kreig