Silent Coup: The Removal of a President [Hardcover]

Len Colodny (Author), Robert Gettlin (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 1991

This important political history throws out all previously accepted views of Watergate and reveals the personal motives and secret political goals that combined to cause the downfall of Richard Nixon. "A careful, meticulously sourced and reported exhumation of some of this country's foulest secrets."--Village Voice. HC: St. Martin's.

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 507 pages
• Publisher: St Martins Pr; First Edition edition (May 1991)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0312051565
• ISBN-13: 978-0312051563
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.3 x 1.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.8 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (29 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #354,577 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

59 of 84 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars In a Nutshell, The Truth about Watergate, August 2, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Silent Coup: The Removal of a President (Paperback)

"Silent Coup" is the result of one of the most important journalistic research efforts of the modern era. It details an alternative view of the Watergate Affair, and blows a mile-wide hole in the commonly-accepted account of Woodward & Bernstein.

As distasteful as it may be to some readers, the work generally supports the long-held claims of the G. Gordon Liddy camp, i.e. that Woodward & Bernstein's accounts in "The Washington Post" and their following books were merely an extension of John Dean's version of Watergate, wherein Dean is innocent and everyone else is guilty. However, while the book vindicates Liddy's testimony as to fact, it does not paint much of a flattering picture of the convicted felon otherwise.

Colodny & Gettlin expose Dean's supposed role of "fall guy" for what it is: self-serving lies, and lies that were (or should have been) known to the Watergate prosecutors who used his perjured testimony, given in exchange for leniency, to bring down the Nixon Administration. A carefully researched and meticulously documented thesis is posited by the authors, namely that Dean essentially sent the White House up the river in order to save his own neck and conceal his own critical involvement in literally every aspect of the Watergate crimes and cover-ups.

Specifically, an overwhelming case is made that Dean, in order to squash his own involvement in a seperate legal matter pertaining to the surreptitious use of DNC headquarters in Washington as a front for a high-class call-girl service, and in which his own future wife Mo was complicit, instigated the burglaries at the DNC in hopes of removing evidence belying his association therein. The DNC burglaries were conveniently tucked into the overall dirty tricks program against the advice of most of the operative conspirators, who, as Liddy has stated, saw no value in hitting the DNC. The value of the break-in, the authors show, was to Dean and Dean alone.

The other primary bombshell dropped in "Silent Coup" is the very under-reported fact that journalist Bob Woodward was, astonishingly, a former Naval Officer involved in extremely sensitive communications intelligence, and that Woodward almost certainly briefed Alexander Haig and others in the Nixon White House in an official capacity prior to his departure from the Navy and rapid rise to the unlikely position of star reporter for the Post, and, conveniently, the lead newsbreaker in the Watergate matter! This direct link between Woodward and the Nixon White House should have disqualified Woodward from reporting on the matter. It did not disqualify him, because those who should have known about the link apparently either didn't know, or didn't care.

This fine history of the Watergate era covers many other pertinent related topics, including the establishment of a top-secret communications "back channel", which Nixon instituted in order to sidestep the State Department and Pentagon in sensitive dealings with the former USSR, Red China, and in the prosecution and settlement of the Vietnam War. The evidence shows that the back channel was illegally compromised by Haig and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The implications with respect to the larger Watergate scandal are addressed in detail by the authors.

The work also touches many historical issues exposed by the Watergate investigations, not the least of which is the implication that Nixon may have known the truth behind the Kennedy Assassination, and that some those connected to Watergate may have been directly involved, namely E. Howard Hunt, Frank Sturgis, and perhaps some of the Cuban "Plumbers". Again, this history encompasses more than just Watergate by virtue of the enormous amount of studious research that was necessary to document the central arguments contained within.

The importance of this book is further magnified by the fact that a large number of the players in the Watergate affair are deceased; fortunately for history, the authors had the opportunity to interview most of the now-dead key players prior to their passing.

This book is must reading for anyone interested in Watergate. The book's radical rethinking of the common wisdom of Watergate is both refreshing and disturbing, not only in its treatment of the facts of the case, but as an expose' of the secret agenda of Bob Woodward.

7 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Well researched, disturbing hypothesis - but is it correct?, January 3, 2010

By 

Earth that Was - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Silent Coup: The Removal of a President (Paperback)

"Silent Coup" is an important work of "Watergate Revisionism" that brings the Radford spy ring into the picture. In short, senior Pentagon officials at the Joint Chiefs of Staff level authorised what amounted to an "unofficial" spy operation targeted at the White House. They wanted to keep tabs on Kissinger and his secret diplomacy. Kissinger's moves were shaking the way US foreign policy had been conducted for a generation, the Chiefs believed they were being left out of the loop.

The authors see US national security chiefs as going beyond this illegal, unconstitutional and somewhat amateur snooping on Kissinger to a more sinister, and ultimately successful, effort to remove Nixon, or at least, deflect fall-out from the downfall of an administration already heading for a crash, away from themselves. Central to their thesis are the numerous links between various Watergators and the CIA, a VIP Call Girl ring (itself under CIA influence) used by the DNC and the past relationship between former USN briefing officer Woodward to both Admiral Radford and General Alexander Haig, whom the authors picked as "Deep Throat". The label "coup" however may be somewhat misleading. The authors are not so much talking about a Latin American putsch so much as political jujitsu by Haig and the Joint Chiefs.

Much of this material is discussed by other Watergate revisionists, for example, Jim Hougan in "Secret Agenda", although often framed in a different explanatory narratives. "Silent Coup" to it's credit provides numerous references and attachments as evidence, especially for the Radford spy ring. This isn't always the most enjoyable reading experience.

There are some benefits beyond Watergate revisionism too. In detailing the Radford spy ring they outline some of Kissinger and Nixon's tactics in laying the foundations for detente. We learn, for example, that the US tilt towards Pakistan in the Indo-Pakistan dispute was related to Kissinger's use of Islamabad as a back channel to Peking. This tilt became important under later administrations as Pakistan's General Zia emerged as the empressario of US-UK- Chinese support for the Afghan rebels. As the US may be drawn deeper into Pakistani politics in the years ahead, this episode may receive greater attention from historians.

During the Nixon / Frost interviews, Nixon mentions a national security dimension to Watergate. Was he alluding to the Radford spy ring?

Since "Silent Coup" the identity of Deep Throat has been revealed to be the FBI's Mark Felts, not Haig. But as Jim Hougan has pointed out via his web site, Felt was formerly the head of the Bureau's controversial "Cointelpro" program. So Hougan casts reasonable doubt on the explanation that Deep Throat's motives were those of an outraged constitutionalist.

Despite more recent developments and revelations, "Silent Coup" is likely to be a valuable reference for students of the Radford affair and Watergate generally, even if some of the authors' more disturbing conclusions are themselves due for revision.

4 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Woodward out of the woodwork, December 12, 2010

By 

P. I. Marder - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Silent Coup: The Removal of a President (Hardcover)

If Bob Woodward didn't exist, he would have to be invented. And he was.

SILENT COUP is not a perfect book--by the very nature of the subject perfection or certainty are excluded. But there is a lot of plausibility here; the ideas and main thrust of the authors fit in quite well with a lot of other pieces.

Robert Woodward, a mainstream icon of what passes for journalism nowadays, is a significant piece of this puzzle.

**It turns out that this darling of the 'liberal' media, has solid conservative credentials, bourgeois upbringing, Yale, US Navy; one Yale professor described Woodward as a "crypto-fascist"

**Woodward's cozy comfortable relationship with, and access to numerous presidents and administrations (what would you conclude if you constantly saw a policeman being welcomed to the home of a notorious gangster; is it plausible that presidents would invite an 'investigative reporter' to shadow them, if they had even the remotest doubt as to his pliability and docility?)

**his repeated failure to point out blatant, fundamental policy misdeeds that would not have eluded a bright 12 year old

**My uncle worked on the Post for years; the fundamental conservatism of this paper's owners and therefore of its editorial policy--as distinct from its cosmetic public 'image' as a progressive news outlet--was well known to insiders. Stories that didn't fit the establishment world-view of the paper simply didn't get written; the popular notion of Woodward as a fiery, risk-taking champion of the truth is Hollywood tripe

**the CIA and FBI had long-standing and quite successful programs to cooperate and co-opt members of the press; Woodward's instrumental role in channeling leaks engineered to bring down Nixon (whose detente with the USSR and overtures to the People's Republic were distasteful to the Pentagon-Industrial complex) and recent activities to legitimate and act as a well-respected 'fig-leaf' to the engineered 'Global War on Terror' follow a long and inglorious tradition dating back to Walter Winchell.