Word: coverups
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...center of the turmoil was H.R. ("Bob") Haldeman, once the crewcut, fiercely loyal chief of staff to President Nixon, now serving a minimum one-year term at California's Lompoc prison farm on a conviction of perjury in the Watergate coverup. Last May Haldeman had fumed as he watched his former chief imply in televised interviews with David Frost that he might have saved his presidency if he had just had the heart to fire earlier his two closest aides, Haldeman and Domestic Adviser John Ehrlichman. Haldeman vowed then and there to turn his pro-Nixon memoirs into...
Haldeman does admit some wrongs. The coverup, he concludes, was "morally and legally the wrong thing to do-so it should have failed." But then he suggests that the problem actually was tactical-"Too many people knew too much"-and that the one man who knew the most (Richard Nixon) had not told his aides enough...
...plan can be developed to handle almost any problem," Haldeman states, and if Nixon had only provided "a key part of the puzzle ... most of us would have been willing to sacrifice ourselves, if necessary, to save the presidency that we believed in." The coverup, in short, was not such an evil to Bob Haldeman that he would refuse to try it again if he thought he could make it work. Says he: "There is absolutely no doubt in my mind today that if I were back at the starting point, faced with the decision of whether to join...
Nixon sometimes offered the retreat to others?to Henry Kissinger to ponder the state of the world and to John Dean to whitewash the state of the coverup. Dean, like his boss, found Camp David conducive to "hard reflective work. It's as close to being away and still being plugged in as anything the Government...
...picture postcards take their place. For the rest of the film, then, Varda allows herself to jump back and forth in time, from Suzanne to Pomme to Suzanne again, making the transitions through shots of a map or a postage stamp. Such a device is really only a flimsy coverup, justifying the connection of two largely unrelated stories. The film fails dramatically because no working relationship is even established between the two women; their friendship, like the solutions to their problems, exists only in the fairytale world of Varda's imagination...