You Can Fool the People
One of the questions always asked by the beginning student of America's political assassinations is, "How is it possible that all of this could be happening in our country without our knowing about it?" The "It couldn't happen here" belief has been extended to, "It couldn't happen here without our knowing about it." This is usually buttressed by such arguments as, "The Kennedys would have done something about it, if it were true", or "Such a giant conspiracy would have been exposed by someone within the conspiratorial group", or "The news media would have found out about it and told all of us by now."
The fact that it is possible to fool a majority of the American people for a long period of time and to cover-up a high level conspiracy involving many, many individuals, can easily be demonstrated by using Watergate as an example. In fact, some published articles [1] show that the entire truth about Watergate has yet to be revealed.
We do know now about the cover-up of the original crimes in Watergate and the cover-up of the cover-up. We tend to forget the attitude of the majority of the American people, the Congress and the media, toward Richard Nixon and the Nixon administration during the period between the June 1972 Watergate break-in and the November 1972 election and beyond into 1973. Long before Woodward and Bernstein and others began the Watergate expose, a few researchers were calling the Watergate conspiracies to the attention of a small portion of the public.[2] It was not until late 1973 that the research done by these researchers and their hypotheses about high-level conspiracies were proven correct and were generally accepted. How did it happen that for more than a year a majority of the American people were not only fooled by Mr. Nixon and his friends, but also re-elected him? Some of the same ingredients present in that situation were like those used in the taking of America. We can all learn a lot by observing what they were.
What follows is a reproduction of an article by the author. (Because the article was written in l972, some of the material in it is now obsolete. However, it is reproduced here without changes to illustrate the situation and attitudes of the pre-Watergate revelation era.) It was originally written during the Watergate cover-up era (late 1972), after Nixon was re-elected and before Bernstein and Woodward were noticed by anyone. It should be noted that even in 1976, Mr. Nixon still had his vehement supporters who were blind to the ingredients required to fool the people.