As law enforcement and government officials — and everyday citizens — around the world scour the Jeffrey Epstein document dumps, it’s illuminating to take a look at attempts to cover up scandals of yore.
On March 22, 1973, President Richard Nixon met with a number of his advisers, including John Dean, Bob Haldeman, and John Erlichman, to discuss the White House’s connection to the June 1972 break-in at the Democratic National Headquarters at the Watergate complex in Washington, D.C. The burglars had been caught red-handed, but Nixon steadfastly denied any knowledge of this politically motivated crime.
However, having had their bullshit meters tripped one too many times by Tricky Dick’s self-serving oratory, much of the public had already been questioning this know-nothing stance. At that Oval Office gathering in March, Nixon cast about for ways to get past this growing threat to his power. His in-house taping system recorded the conspirators discussing the tactic of allowing some of Nixon’s underlings to testify, with the understanding that when asked to say anything too revealing about the initial crime and the subsequent cover-up, they would respond that they could not answer “because of executive privilege.”
The tape captures Haldeman worrying that this might raise even more questions for “the guy sitting at home who watches [news anchor] John Chancellor say that the president is covering this up … the widest exercise of executive privilege in American history, and all that. He says, ‘What the hell’s he covering up? If he’s got no problem, why doesn’t he let them go and talk?’”
Even among themselves, the White House brain trust understood that Nixon had a growing credibility problem, and they fished around for a way to let selected morsels of information out:
PRESIDENT: You think, you think we want to, want to go this route now? And the — let it hang out, so to speak?
DEAN: Well, it’s, it isn’t really that —
HALDEMAN: It’s a limited hangout.
DEAN: It’s a limited hangout.
EHRLICHMAN: It’s a modified limited hangout.
PRESIDENT: Well, it’s only the questions of the thing hanging out publicly or privately.
DEAN: What it’s doing, Mr. President, is getting you up above and away from it. And that’s the most important thing.
PRESIDENT: Oh, I know. But I suggested that the other day and we all came down on, uh, remember we came down on, uh, on the negative on it. Now what’s changed our mind?
DEAN: The lack of alternatives, or a body.
[Laughter]
A day earlier, Dean, whose official title was White House Counsel, had tried to impress on his boss that serious complications were arising from the ongoing cover-up of the break-in, including threats from the jailed Watergate burglars:
DEAN: Now, where, where are the soft spots on this? Well, first of all, there’s the, there’s the problem of the continued blackmail —
PRESIDENT: Right.
DEAN: — which will not only go on now, it’ll go on when these people are in prison, and it will compound the obstruction of justice situation. It’ll cost money. It’s dangerous… .
A bit later in the conversation, Nixon gets blunt:
PRESIDENT: How much money do you need?
DEAN: I would say these people are going to cost, uh, a million dollars over the next, uh, two years.
(Pause)
PRESIDENT: We could get that.
DEAN: Uh huh.
PRESIDENT: You — on the money, if you need the money, I mean, uh, you could get the money. Let’s say —
DEAN: Well, I think that we’re going —
PRESIDENT: What I mean is, you could, you could get a million dollars. And you could get it in cash. I, I know where it could be gotten.
DEAN: Uh huh.
It’s helpful to remember that Nixon’s veep, Spiro Agnew, resigned seven months after this conversation, mired in his own personal bribery scandal, which included bags of cash given to him by construction contractors; this only buttressed public opinion that corruption was a leitmotif of the Nixon administration. The president himself would resign 10 months after Agnew, noting early on in an address to the nation, “Throughout the long and difficult period of Watergate, I have felt it was my duty to persevere, to make every possible effort to complete the term of office to which you elected me. In the past few days, however, it has become evident to me that I no longer have a strong enough political base in the Congress to justify continuing that effort.” Later, he adds, “I leave with no bitterness toward those who have opposed me, because all of us, in the final analysis, have been concerned with the good of the country, however our judgments might differ.”
British journalist Stephen Knight, who published Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution, ropes together freemasons, royal security forces, the painter Walter Sickert, and other conspirators in the princely cover-up.
Fast forward half a century, and it is doubtful that any American could imagine Donald Trump being so gracious to those who disagree with him. Certainly, Trump’s attack-and-never-apologize brand of politics is a factor in his administration’s erratic handling of the Epstein scandal, but it might also be a function of the fact that whatever crimes Nixon committed — his secret military attacks on Laos and Cambodia during the Vietnam War further contributed, when revealed to the public, to his eventual downfall — none involved the sexual abuse of girls and young women. The ghastly revelations already found in the still-incomplete release of the Epstein documents give insight into the mindsets of those who think great wealth and positions of power and privilege shield them from even their most depraved actions.
The Trump administration’s drip-drip-drip, then deluge strategy of releasing the Epstein documents is as erratic a “hangout” gambit as has ever been tried, one that is now ensnaring business moguls, legal titans, government officials, and royalty around the world. The arrest of the former Prince Andrew in relation to the Epstein scandal — after a decade and a half of denials of any wrongdoing, whether sexual or related to nefarious business dealings — calls to mind another alleged royal cover-up, which, while disputed by most scholars, did provide the backbone of one of the past century’s greatest graphic novels.
In 1976, British journalist Stephen Knight published Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution, a book positing that the late-1880s Ripper killings in London were committed to cover up the fact that Prince Albert, grandson of Queen Victoria and second in line for the throne, had secretly married a young working-class woman who’d had his child. If true, the scandal would have rocked the royal family to its foundations, but most historians reject the theory because, among other facts, Prince Albert was absent from London on most of the nights that the murders occurred. Knight ropes together freemasons, royal security forces, the painter Walter Sickert, and other conspirators in the princely cover-up, and despite challenges to the book’s veracity, writer Alan Moore and artist Eddie Campbell used Knight’s thesis as the basis for From Hell, a rip-snorting tale contrasting obscene wealth and privilege with a Victorian hellscape of brick walls, soot, and poverty in a London shot through with sadistic occult psychogeographies.
The Epstein saga, grounded in Epstein’s conviction as a child sex offender, his intimate association with convicted sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell, and surrounded by a miasma of suicides (or murders made to look like suicide) of both perps and victims, blackmail accusations, and a cast of the rich and powerful at their most degenerate, only confirms the adage that truth is indeed stranger than fiction.
Of course, to this day, no one knows who Jack the Ripper was or why he committed his horrific crimes. The five women who were butchered, however, are facts, as are Epstein’s victims. Hopefully, the American public will continue to demand that the co-conspirators and enablers of Epstein end up in courts of law, rather than fading into a fog of innuendo that serves only to provide sensational fiction in the 2100s. ❖
