1969 May 9

The Road to Watergate Begins: NY Times Exposes Secret Bombing of Cambodia; President Nixon Orders Illegal Wiretapping

 

A New York Times article on this day reported secret American bombings in Cambodian as part of the Vietnam War. The story led President Richard Nixon to order illegal wiretaps on members of the National Security Agency staff who he thought had leaked the information about the bombing.

Historians generally believe that Nixon’s illegal wiretapping in this instance was the first step in a long chain of abuses of power that led to the Watergate Scandal (see the original Watergate burglary on June 17, 1972), which ended with Nixon’s resignation as president on August 9, 1974.

President Nixon authorized the secret bombing on March 15, 1969 and the bombing began on March 18th in Operation Breakfast. Over the next 14 months, the U.S. conducted 3,630 flights over Cambodia, dropping 110,000 tons of bombs. (By comparison, the U.S. Air Force and British Royal Air Force dropped a total of 3,900 tons of bombs in the notorious bombing of Dresden, Germany, between February 13th and 15th, 1945.)

One of the people wiretapped in this episode was Morton Halperin, a staff member of the National Security Council under Henry Kissinger, President Nixon’s National Security Advisor. Halperin left the administration four months later, in September 1969. The wiretapping continued until early 1971, and Halperin was later placed on Nixon’s infamous “enemies” list. After the wiretapping was revealed in 1973, Halperin sued and was eventually awarded symbolic damages of $1.00.

Halperin served as director of the ACLU Founded: Fight For Civil Liberties Begins Washington Legislative Office from 1984 to 1992, and then served in the administration of President Jimmy Carter.

Watch Morton Halperin discuss “Who Decides About War?”: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GS6nCqTDHn4

Read: Stanley Kutler, The Wars of Watergate: The Last Crisis of Richard Nixon (1990)

Learn about warrantless wiretapping: https://www.aclu.org/blog/tag/warrantless-wiretapping

View a timeline on the Watergate scandal here

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