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This podcast uses government documents to illuminate the workings of the American government, and offer context around the effects of government agencies in your everyday life.
NIA: Hi, Aughie.
Aughie: Good morning, Nia. How are you?
NIA: Well, I'd be fine if I could tell time, I have time problems these days.
Aughie: Do we need to go back?
NIA: I'm struggling seasonally I think, a good way to put it. Not so much with hours on the clock but so much with seasons.
Aughie: We need to go back to maybe kindergarten or first grade where we were we learned the seasons.
NIA: We learn to put the podcast episodes out in order of the season. Yes. Go ahead, Aughie.
Aughie: You're about to listen to or read the transcript for a podcast episode that we recorded a couple of months ago. Our intention was to have a sum or a favorites, where each episode would be a discussion of some of our favorite things related to government and politics. They weren't our normal fare of government documents or political science or facts.
NIA: They were facts, they were pretty much fact-free in most instances in terms of how the government runs or based in government documents which are generally what we do.
Aughie: Yes, and our intention was to record a number of these episodes and then release them during the summer.
NIA: For a get to know you summary of our summer favorites so that you can get to know us a little more personally of what we think of when we think of favorites. All good plans.
Aughie: The best laid plans of mice and men often go astray, right?
NIA: Yeah, and in this instance one of us man, no one of us is a mouse. I didn't want to take away your manhood by saying we were mice, we're both mice.
Aughie: The quote though is from Dickens, right?
NIA: Right.
Aughie: Anyways, so were recorded these episodes, our intention was to go ahead and release them during the summer. However, we received a bunch of emails from faithful listeners who wanted to know if and or when we were going to have podcast episodes, about the recently completed Supreme Court term that finished up the last week of June.
NIA: The reasonably non-controversial, completely boring nothing else after in the whole thing US Supreme Court.
Aughie: Yes.
NIA: That's so when you mean, right?
Aughie: Yes, exactly.
NIA: Several of our readers slash listeners were on fire basically it were like, oh my God you have to address this.
Aughie: What we did listeners is we scrapped or summer of favorites. But we didn't scrap it we delayed release of those episodes so what follows is one of those episodes.
NIA: Thank you for your patience for us with our timing, and let's work through our fall of favorites.
Aughie: Yes.
NIA: We'll come back with regularly scheduled episodes of normal list.
Aughie: Yes, where are we focused on government documents, government processes, things in the news.
NIA: Facts and figures and all the things that are true.
Aughie: Yes.
Aughie: Instead of all the things that are our opinions which you may or may not be true.
Aughie: True
NIA: Thanks, Aughie.
Aughie: Thank you, Nia.
Welcome to Civil Discourse. This podcast will use government documents to illuminate the workings of the American Government and offer contexts around the effects of government agencies in your everyday life. Now your hosts, Nia Rodgers, Public Affairs Librarian and Dr. John Aughenbaugh, Political Science Professor.
N. Rodgers: Hey, Aughie.
J. Aughenbaugh: Good morning, Nia.
N. Rodgers: How are you doing today?
J. Aughenbaugh: I'm good, because in part listeners, I've been thinking about where I store my extra money.
N. Rodgers: Where you store your extra money?
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: You know what? I have a suggestion for you.
J. Aughenbaugh: What's that?
N. Rodgers: I think you should put it in the freezer. Actually, there is this old adage about or old thing about freezing your credit cards so that you don't use them as much. But that's not quite what we're talking about here.
J. Aughenbaugh: No, in the expression cold hard cash, takes on a different meaning when you've been storing your ill-gotten booty in the freezer.
N. Rodgers: In the freezer. Today we're talking about political scandals, and we're doing this summer of favorites. Technically, these probably aren't favorites, so much as like we favor them, so much as they are things that had us amused or bemused by the the facts of each case.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes. Here's a word for our younger listeners. Chutzpah.
N. Rodgers: Chutzpah. That's right.
J. Aughenbaugh: The sheer chutzpah that some of these politicians exhibited in various scenarios that they found themselves or that they created.
N. Rodgers: This time we're going to take turns. Usually we've done block of Nia or block of Aughie, and this time we're going to take turns. I'm going first and then Aughie will come in. My first is what Aughie's referencing, cold hard cash. I love this scandal because I was like, "It was where?" Louisiana Congressman William J. Jefferson, the FBI taped him selling bribes to American businesses that wanted to work within African countries. He was on committees that allowed him to have access to African nations and countries that were like, "Hey, we'd like to do business there," he's like, "Well, it's going to cost you." To the tune of $90,000 that they found in his freezer. One of the things about that is, that is a really hard thing to explain if you are not a corrupt individual. You know what I mean?
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah.
N. Rodgers: Your average non-corrupt politician probably does not have $90,000 sitting in their freezer in a box marked pies.
J. Aughenbaugh: She's not making that up listeners.
N. Rodgers: That is where it was.
J. Aughenbaugh: That's where the money was located, in a huge box labeled pies.
N. Rodgers: In the freezer.
J. Aughenbaugh: In the freezer.
N. Rodgers: Dude. In 2009, he's tried on federal corruption charges, and he's found guilty of 11 of 16 counts, and he's sentenced to 13 years, which is the longest sentence given to a congressman for bribery or any other crime. But then in 2017, a whole bunch of the stuff was thrown out. Actually, after a case that we know here well in Virginia, McDonnell v. the US, which was about Governor McDonnell of Virginia whether he took bribes or not. They threw out his-
J. Aughenbaugh: Conviction.
N. Rodgers: Convictions, and he was done with time served at five-and-a-half years. Now, I as far as I can find, could not tell what happened to the money. I don't know if he got to keep the money. I don't know if he-
J. Aughenbaugh: No. Even when a conviction gets overturned, that money-
N. Rodgers: I think he's applying to get it back though. That's where my confusion is, is I'm not sure where it is now in court system. But I think he's like, "Hey, you took my money falsely, because look, all my convictions were overturned. I'm not bad at all. Give me back my $90,000, so I can put it back in the freezer."
J. Aughenbaugh: See, that's the important distinction when people say, I'm not guilty, when their conviction gets overturned. No, your conviction got overturned. It doesn't mean that you are innocent.
N. Rodgers: Not guilty. That's correct. It has nothing to do with whether you were guilty or not. That's right. That's a fair point.
J. Aughenbaugh: Because what the Supreme Court said in McDonnell v. United States was that federal prosecutors were using a law that they probably should not be using to go after corruption in government.
N. Rodgers: Which is not the same thing as McDonnell was innocent. It's not the same thing as Congressmen Jefferson. He was clearly not innocent. There's also these weird things in the law about being acquitted versus being found not guilty.
J. Aughenbaugh: Guilty, yes.
N. Rodgers: Also, two different meanings, and two very different scrabble board words. That's my first skin. What's your first skin?
J. Aughenbaugh: I'm sorry, I'm going to be predictable here, Nia. But for me, this will always be the gold standard, said tongue-in-cheek listeners. The gold standard of American political scandals, and that is the Watergate scandal in the early 1970s.
N. Rodgers: Go big or go home, Aughie. You're such a baseball player. Going to swing for the fence.
J. Aughenbaugh: I'm going to swing for the fence.
N. Rodgers: That is the big one at least for our generation. We should, by the way, pause here for a moment and say, scandals are generational. They affect different generations in different ways. We didn't dig back all the way to Washington, who actually who did have the scandal of, in his early days, Washington sent bills for his parties to Congress to pay. Eventually they were like, "Man, we need to give this guy a salary because he's costing us a lot of money." Here's a whole thing for Washington. There are regularly scandals generationally
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah, because there's going to be an honorable mention which you have at the end of your list, which is very generational for millennials and Gen Z. Whereas for you and me, and our generation, we're just like, this pedals in comparison to what some of our politicians did. But for me, Watergate is always been significant.
N. Rodgers: It's the one everybody measures by, modernly. Since it happened, since the '70s, Watergate has been sort of the, well, it's like Watergate, and it's why everything is called something gate.
J. Aughenbaugh: For me, because it led to President Nixon resigning from office, which is here to for the only time that has happened.
N. Rodgers: I like how you say up until now, as of this recording. Because who knows?
J. Aughenbaugh: For those of you who don't know the background, real briefly, five men who had been hired by the committee to re-elect the president. The acronym was CREEP. I kid you not. That was on their letterhead.
N. Rodgers: You know it's bad when your group is called creep.
J. Aughenbaugh: They were caught breaking into the Democratic National Committee's headquarters in the Washington DC Watergate Hotel and Office Complex on June 17th, 1972.
N. Rodgers: Hence, Watergate. It's shortened Watergate because of where it happened.
J. Aughenbaugh: Happened, yes. The trail of who knew what, eventually led to the Nixon administration, because there were tape recordings that he had of conversations in the Oval Office where he was clearly orchestrating the cover-up after they got arrested.
N. Rodgers: It should be noted, these were five men caught breaking back into the Democratic National Committee, because they'd already done it, like one or two times before
J. Aughenbaugh: Before, yes. Of course, as we will discuss another podcast, this led to Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein.
N. Rodgers: C-Note, our favorite movies.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes. All the President's Men, they wrote a book detailing how they broke the case. They had in a format that we later now or we now know was the FBI Deputy Director Mark Felt, who they labeled Deep Throat.
N. Rodgers: After a pornography movie of the same name that was popular at the time. But aside from that silliness, this probe exploded. Wasn't just the two of them, it was also on the government side.
J. Aughenbaugh: The cast of characters were numerous.
N. Rodgers: It goes from the break into, what is it?
J. Aughenbaugh: The Saturday Night Massacre.
N. Rodgers: The Saturday Night Massacre when a bunch of people got fired because they wouldn't fire other people. It would have been one thing if it had just been a break-in and the President tried to cover the break-in, that probably would have gone away. Don't you think?
J. Aughenbaugh: Well, because again, Nixon was so hands-on, a paranoid. That instead of creating distance between himself and his re-election committee, which by the way, and one of the great historical footnotes of Watergate, he did not need to break into the Democratic National Committee.
N. Rodgers: He won by a landslide.
J. Aughenbaugh: He absolutely. He ordered McGovern in 1972 election.
N. Rodgers: He didn't need to feel any kind of paranoia whatsoever. When we're talking numbers, he was not even remotely close.
J. Aughenbaugh: No. But that was Nixon.
N. Rodgers: He thought everybody was out to get him, and eventually he was right, but not at the beginning.
J. Aughenbaugh: Listeners, the timeline for this is two years. The Watergate break-in was June 17, 1972. On August 9, 1974, Nixon stepped down because Republican members of Congress came to the White House and basically told the president if he did not resign; one, there was enough support in the House for articles of impeachment. Then two, there were enough Republicans in the Senate who would be willing to vote him guilty in an impeachment trial. He steps down, nearly a dozen of Nixon's advisors in sick offense received prison terms.
N. Rodgers: Nixon went to prison, Dean went to prison.
J. Aughenbaugh: A whole bunch of them went to prison. Nixon was pardoned by his successor, Gerald Ford.
N. Rodgers: Controversially.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: There were people who didn't want them to be pardoned. But Ford's reasoning was, we need to move on. We need to move from this, we need to put this to bed. He will slink away quietly into private life, which he did in fairness to Nixon, he did not try to stay in the public eye. He didn't do public speeches very often. He quietly went back to California.
J. Aughenbaugh: That's right, San Clemente.
N. Rodgers: Was not heard from much again until he passed.
J. Aughenbaugh: But for me as a political scientist, most of my, if you will, profession traces the American lack of trust in government institutions to this scandal and the Vietnam War, which by the way, both occurred in roughly the same 10 year period, and the '60s, the first four years of the 1970s, where our leaders and our institutions let us down.
N. Rodgers: And Lied. His famous, I'm not a crook. I suppose it depends on how one defines crook.
J. Aughenbaugh: Couple that with LBJ saying over and over again, we're winning the war. Really Mr. President.
N. Rodgers: He's in Gulf of Tonkin incident to get us further in.
J. Aughenbaugh: No, for me, this is the quote-unquote. Said quite sarcastically, the gold standard of American political scandals.
N. Rodgers: It is the quintessential, I think. Aughie, you've got a couple of other good ones. I would argue that, my next one is also a point of distrust and discontent, but on a more personal level. The Chappaquiddick Bridge is where this incident took place. Ted Kennedy was the youngest of a bunch of brothers who were all Joe and Rosemary Kennedy had, I don't know, something like 400 children. Then a bunch of boys and he wanted his boys, he wanted one of them to be president. His oldest son Joe, was killed in World War II. He was a pilot and he died. Then that moved down to JFK, who did become president but was killed. Excuse me.
J. Aughenbaugh: Then was Bobby, and Bobby gets assassinated in the run-up to the 1968 presidential election. The apparent heir to the Kennedy political, if you will, dynasty becomes the youngest boy.
N. Rodgers: Ted Kennedy.
J. Aughenbaugh: Ted Kennedy.
N. Rodgers: In 1969, this is after the death of his brother Bobby, and he was grooming to run for president. Nineteen sixty-nine, he's leaving a party. He's with a young lady named Mary Jo Kopechne, who was a secretary or volunteer. I'm a little unclear on her actual role, but she was part of the political-
J. Aughenbaugh: He was gearing up to run for senate to represent Massachusetts in the United States Senate, and she was a part of the campaign.
N. Rodgers: I'm pretty sure, yes. They're driving home from this party.
J. Aughenbaugh: Mind you, he's already married.
N. Rodgers: He's very married.
J. Aughenbaugh: He's driving home late at night.
N. Rodgers: With a lovely young woman.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: Alone in the car.
J. Aughenbaugh: Who's not his wife.
N. Rodgers: Who is not his wife, and there is no reason to believe that Mary Jo Kopechne was doing anything catchy, but from his womanizing, and by the way, Ted Kennedy, known philanderer and womanizer.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: He might have been trying to make time with her. He might have been trying to get her to be interested or what. Who knows? We don't know what happened. What we do know is that he drove off that bridge.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah.
N. Rodgers: The car ends up in the water. He says he went back to try to save her a couple of times and could not get her out of the car. That's what he says happened. Then he says that he went home. He made a few phone calls and the next morning he called the police and told them where the car was and where she was and all that other stuff. Now, the other version of that is he skedaddled as quickly as he could because he didn't want to be found in a car with a woman not his wife, and he didn't save her. Either way he did not save her from the car.
J. Aughenbaugh: That's right.
N. Rodgers: Either way it was 11 hours before he reported it to the police.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: No one else could save her from the car either. It destroyed his presidential chances. Massachusetts still continue to elect him.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah, until he died.
N. Rodgers: As a senator until he died. He was beloved there, but he was not beloved anywhere else. Every time he tried to do anything on a national level, people would say, "Hey, aren't you that guy that killed that girl in the car?" It destroyed his ability to run for president in United States. Which if you can't tell by my tone, I'm okay with, because he left her in that car and went home and called advisors before he called the police. He called a lawyer.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: The first thing he did was lawyer up and then he called the police to tell them about the accident. If she had survived, there was no one who could have helped her.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: Or saved her life.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah, no one.
N. Rodgers: I consider Ted Kennedy to have gotten away with murder, or at least vehicular manslaughter.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah. This is part of a theme in many of these scandals that you have very prominent men in positions of government authority who think that they can get away with things that the rest of us for most of our days don't believe we can get away with. Then you talk about, for instance, the Kennedy clan, that he engaged in behavior to go ahead and protect his name and potentially his future and politics at the expense of the life of Mary Jo.
N. Rodgers: The dignity, leaving her there even if she had died in the accident. Leaving her there for multiple hours. What he pled to was a charge of leaving the scene of an accident and he got a two-month suspended jail sentence. He never did any time.
J. Aughenbaugh: No. He was never disqualified for running for elected office again.
N. Rodgers: He said about himself, "My conduct that day makes no sense to me now." I'm like, "Really? You were CYing." That's what you were doing. There was a grand jury that was convened to see if he would be indicted in 1970 and he was not indicted.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah.
N. Rodgers: He did get his license revoked for 16 months. I have bitterness about it in some ways because I think what it is an example of is, as you said, powerful men getting away with covering themselves and doing pretty much what they want. Which my third example is also one of those. But we're going to go to Aughie's next example. Which is again about powerful men who make bad choices.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: You're like, these people need to learn to pick their friends better.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah.
N. Rodgers: That's the theme of your scandal. The theme of your scandals. The theme of my scandals is powerful men acting badly on a personal gain level and yours is powerful men choosing bad friends.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes. I mean, because let's face it, Nixon's re-election committee.
N. Rodgers: He chose poorly with the friend group that he surrounded himself with.
J. Aughenbaugh: Well, what was it? The one description in one of the first Washington Post articles was this was a third-rate burglary.
N. Rodgers: Getting around with third-grade criminals.
J. Aughenbaugh: But my next one is the infamous Teapot Dome Scandal. This occurred in the early 1920s during the administration of Warren G. Harding. Who by all accounts was apparently a very nice guy. He also, by the way, there were numerous allegations of him running around on his wife.
N. Rodgers: I know I'm starting to think that there is the rarity of powerful men who do not run around.
J. Aughenbaugh: Run around your wife. [LAUGHTER].
N. Rodgers: That is more the unusual.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah. Right.
N. Rodgers: But that's not the scandal?
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah. The problem he had was he didn't know how to pick his friends. He was, before he was President, a well-known politician in the fine state of Ohio. When he got elected president, the newspapers started referring to him filling up a lot of his cabinet positions with members of the Ohio gang. Who basically went ahead and hitched their political wagons to his star. He becomes president and almost immediately his Attorney General, Harry Doherty, gets accused of selling government supplies of alcohol during prohibition.
N. Rodgers: Somebody's got to do it.
J. Aughenbaugh: But that's not the Teapot Dome. By the way another one of his cabinet officials, Charles Forbes, who was head of the Veterans Bureau, was convicted of bribery and corruption. But the Teapot Dome was engineered by his Secretary of Interior, Albert B. Fall. As the Secretary of the Interior, as we discussed in a previous podcast episode, the Department of the Interior manages all of the federal government's property. Some of this property has rich, plentiful sources of oil, of minerals, etc.
N. Rodgers: Natural resources.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah. Natural resources. Two large oral reserves, which were on federal property. Elk Hills, California, and then the infamous Teapot Dome near Casper, Wyoming, had been preserved or reserved for the energy needs of the United States Navy. Post-world War I, we're slowly moving into a more prominent global role for the country. Paul persuaded Harding to transfer control of their reserves from the Navy to the Department of the Interior. Then in 1921 and 1922, without getting competitive bids, the Secretary of the Interior Fall lists Elk Hills to an oil tycoon, Edward Doheny and the Teapot Dome to Harry Sinclair of mammoth oil.
N. Rodgers: Without,
J. Aughenbaugh: Competitive bids.
N. Rodgers: Right. That's the key here. Yeah, that's not who you listen to. It's that you listen to your friends.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: Instead of putting it out for bid. When the government has any big contract that's out there in the world and it's over a certain amount of money. I can't remember how much it is, but it's not a huge amount of money. You have to put things at the state level. If you want to build a building, you have to put that out for bid. Then a whole bunch of local construction companies put in their bids and say, I can build the new library for $80 million. I can build it for $70 million, I can build it for whatever and you look through all their plans and you pick one. That's theoretically how the process is supposed to work.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah, it's supposed to promote accountability.
N. Rodgers: Instead he called Aughie and said, "Hey, Aughie, you want to build a library for the state?" Aughie said, "Sure, I''ll do that."
J. Aughenbaugh: Even though you have absolutely no experience whatsoever. In this particular case, Congress gets a whiff of this and starts doing some investigations. It was revealed that Secretary Fall received as much as $400,000 in payments in loans?
N. Rodgers: I'm just saying that would be hard to fit in the freezer.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes. To facilitate the leases.
N. Rodgers: I like facilitate.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah, facilitate.
N. Rodgers: With little air quotes.
J. Aughenbaugh: The air quotes.
N. Rodgers: What he did was hand them over.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: $400, considering how much money those guys made off of those oil fields for them, that is the price of doing business. That's nothing.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: I mean, comparatively like these days, a lot of corporations are like, Oh, the fine might be five million dollars, but we're going to make eight billion dollars. Pay the fine.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah.
N. Rodgers: For them $400,000 is probably nothing.
J. Aughenbaugh: By the way. Here's bribes in loans total $400,000 in 1921. Today, it would be the equivalent of over $6,744,000.
N. Rodgers: Yeah, but six million to two oil companies, is probably,
J. Aughenbaugh: Nothing.
N. Rodgers: If you said to Shell that we're going to fine you six million dollars. Shell would be like here, let me shake the couch and get out some coins and pay you.
J. Aughenbaugh: Moreover, they would go ahead and write it off as an expense in their taxes. Fall was convicted of accepting bribes. He became, in our country's history, the first sitting cabinet member to be imprisoned. Harding was never personally implicated. But the stress of all the scandals in his administration took a toll and he died in office.
N. Rodgers: Well, I mean, I feel bad for him. Because you're right. He chose friends badly.
J. Aughenbaugh: Poorly. Yes
N. Rodgers: I'm sure he was embarrassed.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah.
N. Rodgers: I'm sure that every time he went out, reporters asked him about it.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: When we talked about the stress level of being president it's already stressful to be president. Then if every time you show up there saying, what about this, sir? What about this? I would imagine just collapse.
J. Aughenbaugh: In the room. The Teapot Dome Scandal was like one.
N. Rodgers: Of a bunch in his.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah. I mean, come on now.
N. Rodgers: Well, good Lord.
J. Aughenbaugh: Some politician today took six million dollars.
N. Rodgers: Well, I mean, think about all the predicate steps. You first had to go ahead and get the oil reserves transferred from the Navy.
J. Aughenbaugh: Right. He had to plan for this to happen.
N. Rodgers: Yeah, to the Department of the Interior.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah.
N. Rodgers: It's not like it was a crime of, Oh, well, it's here. I'm just going to take it because I'm going to engineer this.
J. Aughenbaugh: This wasn't a discretionary judgment call.
N. Rodgers: How you know.
J. Aughenbaugh: I didn't take into account this particular variable. No. You took into account a lot of variables.
N. Rodgers: All the variables except getting caught.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes. Right.
N. Rodgers: That's the one you didn't take into account?
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah. For a lot of convicted criminals, that's the thing that snags them.
N. Rodgers: That's the one.
J. Aughenbaugh: You have a third one. Then by the way, we still have an honorable mentioned. But the third one, again, Nia, is yet another example of a very powerful member of our federal government. The sheer hypocrisy.
N. Rodgers: That's what gets me about this book, that's what makes me angry about it. Strom Thurmond was a senator from South Carolina, and Strom Thurmond lived to be approximately 965 years old, actually he lived to be 100. He was very long-lived and very long serving, I don't know if he's the longest serving senator, but he was pretty close, that's probably actually Grassley now. But anyway, Strom Thurmond was a segregationist, he was very much a black people and white people should not be,. By segregation in the South, that doesn't take into account any other folks of color, it's basically black and white in the South when you're talking to segregation and he wanted them separated, separate schools,
separate everything. He was that way his whole life like up to the end of his life. The reason I'm saying that with such emphasis is because Strom Thurmond, when he was 22 years old, had an affair with a domestic servant in his parent's house, 16 year old African-American girl, named Carrie Butler and with her, he had a child. Now, Strom Thurmond was not married at the time, so I will hand him that he was not having an affair. He wasn't screwing around on his wife, I don't know whether he did that later or not. That's not what the scandal is about. The scandal was about, so he has this child with this woman, Carrie Butler, who's 16. He's 22, she's 16, which anybody counting by the way, that statutory rape, but that's neither here nor there. They had what is, by all accounts, a consensual affair which results in a child, Essie Mae Washington Williams. Essie Mae was then given to her aunt to raise and was not told who her parents were.
J. Aughenbaugh: Correct.
N. Rodgers: Until 1938 when her mother came to visit and explained that she was her mother and who her father was.
J. Aughenbaugh: Correct.
N. Rodgers: Essie Mae held that secret until Strom Thurmond died. She didn't come out with it until she was 78, shortly after he died, she came out and said, and by the way, I'm Strom Thurmond's, daughter. A good note from the family is they updated his headstone, his headstone used to say, and his four children, I can't remember, something got proud of his four children and they scraped that out, put five and added her name there. They recognized her as Strom Thurmond daughter because she is or was, she's deceased. The shear dripping hypocrisy of wanting to keep people separate and the whole idea of separate but equal except it was never equal and having a child of mixed race. I don't know how he slept at night. That's your kid, that is you're daughter. He did pay for her to go to college, he did quietly pay for her to go to college.
J. Aughenbaugh: Not many differences than what we see today. From what I've read, journalists in South Carolina either had suspicions or knew for years but never reported it. They never reported it.
N. Rodgers: They kept the whole thing not secret, but I would say private and part of that has to do with her privacy. Part of that has to do with Miss Washington Williams and her not being, 'outed' as it were. But she's lived in South Carolina, I believe her whole life. She went away to college and he did pay for her college. She was a social worker, and she had a storied career, I believe, in social work. She did awesome cool things and did it without his help, so go her. She didn't rely on him to open doors for her or anything like that. But it's such an appalling. At the time that we found out about it, which was in the early 2000s, late 1990s, early 2000s was when she announced.
J. Aughenbaugh: Because he died in 2003.
N. Rodgers: It was 2003, 2004 that she announced. It says the father of five children instead of the father four. They fixed his headstone and they added her. At least the family has done the right thing. By including her as an equal and being respectful.
J. Aughenbaugh: Again, listeners to Nia's point, Nia, you weren't engaged in hyperbole. Strom Thurmond was a governor from South Carolina from 1947 to 1951, then he was a senator for 48 years. He was a member of the Democratic Party, and mind you he was a Southern Democrat.
N. Rodgers: Which would make him a Republican now.
J. Aughenbaugh: Until 1964 when he switched parties and became a Republican. But throughout the '40s, '50s and '60s, he was quite clearly a segregationist. He claimed he wasn't racist, that he was a supporter of states rights, and he didn't like federal authority, but the end result was he was advocating for policies where white and black people were not supposed to intermingle. Even though quite obviously he had already intermingled in his own personal life.
N. Rodgers: Understood the love and attraction that can happen between people of different races.
J. Aughenbaugh: That's right.
N. Rodgers: That can produce a lovely child that does well in the world. It's so weird to me he had the perfect example in his daughter of this going well. That's my third biggie. I have a couple of little ones we're going to bring up at the end when Aughie finishes with his.
J. Aughenbaugh: My third one. I just loved the title, The Whiskey Ring scandal.
N. Rodgers: Is this is another one where people pick friends badly?
J. Aughenbaugh: Very poorly.
N. Rodgers: That's what I thought. Your whole theme is dude, that guy is not your friend.
J. Aughenbaugh: This one occurred during the presidential administration of Ulysses S. Grant, the well-known prominent Civil War general on the Union side. Again, by all accounts.
N. Rodgers: Stand up guy.
J. Aughenbaugh: He was a stand-up guy, but he was a poor judge of character, and his presidential administration, I love this verb, was a wash in corruption.
N. Rodgers: I think that one of the failures of some stand-up guys is that they think that everybody else is a stand-up as they are.
J. Aughenbaugh: Right.
N. Rodgers: I think Harding probably felt that way, I think Grant, I think that lots of folks have thought, well, there is good a person as I am. Then you look around the corner and you're like, no. But anyway.
J. Aughenbaugh: Before the 1872 presidential election, Grant dispatched the supervisor of the Internal Revenue Service, General John McDonald, to Missouri because he was concerned that support in Missouri for his re-election was not going well. McDonald rewarded, air quotes, rewarded Grant's trust by establishing what became known as the Whiskey Ring, which was a multiple state criminal network in which whiskey distillers, Treasury, and Internal Revenue Agents, shopkeepers, and others, work together by manipulating liquor taxes to defraud the federal government of some 1.5 million dollars per year and they did this.
N. Rodgers: Is that 1.5 million dollars in 1873 money.
J. Aughenbaugh: Eighteen seventy three money Nia.
N. Rodgers: We're talking.
J. Aughenbaugh: Serious coin by today's standard. In 1875 after this ring had been going on for three-plus years, Treasury Secretary Ben Bristow, who was a part of the conspiracy, was starting to break up the ring. Grant appoints a special prosecutor, a guy by the name of John Henderson. Henderson lead the Whiskey Ring as far up as Grant's personal secretary, and I love this name, Orville Babcock. Orville, okay.
N. Rodgers: We do love us a name on this podcast.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes. Grant did what Nixon did in the Saturday Night Massacre. Grant fired the special prosecutor, Henderson. All told, Nia, 110 various government officials, shopkeepers, whiskey distillers were indicted and convicted, 110.
N. Rodgers: But Grant saved Orville Babcock.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes, he did.
N. Rodgers: His personal secretary. He went and said, "No, no. He would never be involved in something like that."
J. Aughenbaugh: Testified on his behalf. It was one of the last things that Grant did because Grant died shortly after his second term in office and wrote by the way, just as historical aside, in my estimation and according to a number of scholars, one of the best presidential memoirs.
N. Rodgers: Oh, really?
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah, it was a really good memoir. It wasn't the shined on gloss of, hey, I'm a great person and I did-
N. Rodgers: I did the best things ever.
J. Aughenbaugh: Grant, actually, warts and all. By the way, he wrote the book in part because he had financial difficulties, and he wanted to take care of his family. He reached out to his good friend Mark Twain. Twain actually negotiated the publishing deal. Yes.
N. Rodgers: So that it would benefit his-
J. Aughenbaugh: His family.
N. Rodgers: His family when he died.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah. Just think about that, $1.5 million per year for over three years. You're talking about a lot of people.
N. Rodgers: That's a big freezer. You need a really big freezer for that.
J. Aughenbaugh: By the way, that's going to be the subtitle. That's going to come after the colon in the podcast episode title.
N. Rodgers: It's right.
J. Aughenbaugh: We're going to need it.
N. Rodgers: Political Scandal: We're Going to Need a Bigger Freezer.
J. Aughenbaugh: If we ever do a merch line, a merchandise [LAUGHTER].
N. Rodgers: That's going to go on one of our T-shirts.
J. Aughenbaugh: That's going to be on-
N. Rodgers: We're going to need a bigger freezer.
J. Aughenbaugh: It almost sounds like the catchphrase in a Coen Brothers movie, right?
N. Rodgers: Yeah, it does. Well, and apparently that line in Jaws was actually made up. Like he just made it up on the spot and they kept it, and it turns out to be one of the best lines in the entire movie.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah, we're going to need a bigger boat.
N. Rodgers: We're going to need a bigger boat because that shark is huge. Can we mention are special mentions?
J. Aughenbaugh: Oh, yes. We do have some honorable mentions.
N. Rodgers: Dishonorable mentions. First of all, I want to dishonorably mentioned Monkey Business. I almost put Monkey Business as one of my mains, and then I realized I had a theme going.
J. Aughenbaugh: You certainly did.
N. Rodgers: Although Monkey Business is a sex scandal. And it is a stupid sex scandal. Very, very briefly, Gary Hart was running for president of the United States. He said to reporters, "See if you can catch me doing something wrong" basically. He basically went na-na-na-na to the reporters.
J. Aughenbaugh: Wait a minute, you've got to give the context here, Nia. Gary Hart's running for the Democratic Party nomination, I believe, in 1988. He was a senator from Colorado, and the Washington scuttlebutt was Gary Hart was a serial philanderer.
N. Rodgers: Catting around.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes. He was getting asked all the time at press conferences, "Who are you dating, Senator?"
N. Rodgers: Gary Hart was married.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes. Listeners, as Nia just pointed out, Gary Hart basically said to the entire Washington press corps, I dare you to find me in a in a compromising position.
N. Rodgers: In a compromising position. They went, "Challenge accepted." He was on a boat and we are not kidding you. The name of the boat is Monkey Business. You're like "Really?" Writers, if they wrote that into a drama, somebody would say, "That is totally unrealistic. We're not naming the boat Monkey Business, that's stupid. Nobody will buy that." That is how dumb that is.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: Yet there he is with-
J. Aughenbaugh: What was her name? Donna Rice.
N. Rodgers: Donna Rice sitting on his lap on that boat and they got pictures of it.
J. Aughenbaugh: They got pictures? And they didn't even have to work hard.
N. Rodgers: Right. It was on the open deck of the boat with its name visible. That's the other thing. Reporters were like, "Are you setting us up?" I'm sure they felt a little bit punked.
J. Aughenbaugh: They were concerned they were being punked before-
N. Rodgers: Punking existed.
J. Aughenbaugh: Being punked even existed.
N. Rodgers: Right. So stupid. I also want to mention everyone in the Reagan administration. Reagan administration had, what, like 744 indictments. It was some huge number. The only person who came out of the Reagan administration completely clean was Vice President Bush.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: Vice President Bush was not implicated in any scandals.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: But, man, he was the only one. Like [OVERLAPPING] and Reagan and-
J. Aughenbaugh: Oliver North and-
N. Rodgers: What was the general, who was this?
J. Aughenbaugh: You're talking about Ollie North?
N. Rodgers: No, I'm talking about Haig.
J. Aughenbaugh: Well, yeah, Al Haig.
N. Rodgers: When the president was shot and Haig was like, "I'm in charge." And we're like, "That's not how the Constitution works."
J. Aughenbaugh: But in particular folks, for those of you who want to do a little bit more background and a little bit more investigation, you got to look up Iran-Contra.
N. Rodgers: Right. The hearings were some of the first shown on CNN. We get Watergate and then we get Iran-Contra. Iran-Contra was wall-to-wall coverage.
J. Aughenbaugh: What you had going on in Iran-Contra is the fact that the Reagan administration wanted to support the Contras in Nicaragua, "freedom fighters." But Congress refused to give money to the Reagan administration. Reagan administration takes surplus weapons, and they sell them to the Iranians who by the way the Iranians held a whole bunch of Americans, over 500 Americans hostage in the late 1970s.
N. Rodgers: For 444 days. By the way, if you're young, you might have seen the movie Argo, that's getting people out of Iran. He directly, not him directly, but his administration, dealt directly with our open enemy to sell then arms to get the money to give to the Contras.
J. Aughenbaugh: In direct contradiction of congressional will. This has separation of powers, this has checks and balances. By the way, what all comes out in Reagan was deposed by the special prosecutor, Kenneth Waltz.
N. Rodgers: How many times did he say, "I don't recall"?
J. Aughenbaugh: Nearly 100 times. This was the first, if you will, indication that President Reagan was beginning to suffer from Alzheimer's.
N. Rodgers: Right. He really didn't in some instances recall. Probably. In some instances, he might have been fibbing. But he was also unwell. They did a lot of stuff around him because he-
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah, he was a delegator. He basically went ahead and told a lot of his subordinates, "We need to support the Contras." And they're like, "Okay, fine, Mr. President, we will". He wasn't a detail person. He wasn't like Bill Clinton, where Clinton wanted to know all the details. He wasn't like Jimmy Carter.
N. Rodgers: Tell me everything.
J. Aughenbaugh: Reagan was the CEO and like many CEOs, he was just like, "Hey, if you make it happen, I don't care." Terrible.
N. Rodgers: They said, "Okay."
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes. But then they have- [OVERLAPPING] Or less dishonorable mentioned and you and I we've gone back and forth on this one.
N. Rodgers: Al Franken is hard.
J. Aughenbaugh: Al Franken was a comedian. He was a writer for Saturday Night Live, and a lot of his jokes were political, and eventually, he gets recruited to run for the United States Senate, as a Democrat from the fine state of Minnesota, and he gets elected.
N. Rodgers: He wrote a book called Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them.
J. Aughenbaugh: What was?
N. Rodgers: Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them or something like that. Anyway, and by all accounts, he was serious as a senator.
J. Aughenbaugh: Senator, yes.
N. Rodgers: Then he took that seriously. He was not a comedic. Then it's like the President of Ukraine is an actor who played a President of Ukraine and now he's the President of Ukraine, and he's not acting,
he's not playing at it, he's being serious. Al Franken was being serious, but Al Franken, he also was caught on in a picture pretending to putting his hands near a woman's breasts as if he were going to grab her and making a stupid face when he was doing it, like tongue out and dumb grin thing, and it was just at the beginning of the Me Too movement when women were starting to say, you know what, men in power need to stop treating women like this. Men in power need to stop thinking that they could grab women, that they can touch women without their choice, all these things, and he resigned. He resigned from the Senate, and the one of the reasons that Aughie and I go back and forth on that is I think he probably could have weathered that in a different way. But I also think that the movement at that point was wildly intolerant.
J. Aughenbaugh: Fine distinctions at the early stages of the Me Too movement.
N. Rodgers: Did not exist.
J. Aughenbaugh: Did not exist.
N. Rodgers: But the thing is there was no trial. There was no hearing. He was tried in the court of public opinion.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yet well, and in particular in the court of the Democratic Party, because it was members of his own party who call for him to resign.
N. Rodgers: Aughie and I believe truly that you are innocent until you are proven guilty of something.
J. Aughenbaugh: The fact that there was not a senate ethics hearing where, evidence could have been presented, and they could have gone ahead and said, so what was going on here? Was it a stupid act? Yes. Was this a pattern of Franken acting incorrectly, terribly towards women? From what I've read, it was not a pattern. But again, the Me Too movement was this like, decades, if not centuries of men in power treating women poorly has to end.
N. Rodgers: It had built up to a point of intolerance like there is no nuance here. You're either a the good guy or the bad guy? Al Franken was caught up in the early part of it. We're not by the way, and Aughie and I would like to be very clear. We do not support men abusing women. We don't support women abusing men. No one in power should be abusing the people "Beneath them". In whatever place that is, male to male, female to male, whatever, none of that is acceptable. But also leaping to judgment without any corroborating evidence, without any discussion, we don't do that in this country. We don't look at you and say, well, you look guilty to me. Like that's not how it works and, it shouldn't be how it works because when it works like that, people get railroaded and then they get lynched or they get destroyed in some way and there was no reason to do that. We have to be really careful about that thing.
J. Aughenbaugh: Then it gives evidence for those who are skeptical of the movement to go ahead and say, well, this movement has gone too far. When the movement itself was unnecessary correction for again, years, decades, centuries of men behaving badly simply because they were in positions of power.
Again, listeners Nia and I are of the political generation of, the Clarence Thomas hearings, and the allegations made by his former subordinate Anita Hill. Then we had the Clinton administration where it becomes known that we elected a president who basically from the time he took office as governor of Arkansas, through his time as president, basically thought any woman in his orbit was a potential bed mate. We already talked about in this podcast episode, Ted Kennedy, even after Chappaquiddick, Ted Kennedy's womanizing did not end.
N. Rodgers: It didn't end until the day he died.
J. Aughenbaugh: Strom Thurmond, I'm an upright Southern Senator who doesn't believe that the racist should intermingle, except for when I was 22.
N. Rodgers: The domestic servant in our house was hot.
J. Aughenbaugh: This exceptionalism for men in power.
N. Rodgers: Is Venus.
J. Aughenbaugh: Is bullshit, I'm sorry.
N. Rodgers: Revive the same token, by the flip of that. Men in power still deserve to have a hearing. If we just decide that we're not going to give people a fair hearing, then I don't know how we function as a society. Just an accusation is not enough. I need to have a reasonable hearing on this, and then if they are found guilty, punish them, and we need to fix the system such that they can be found guilty, which we are seeing now, Harvey Weinstein went to prison. Jeffrey Epstein went to prison. People are going to prison and they should be. I'm not entirely sure that what Al Franken did rose to the level of and he should not be a senator considering the work that he did for Minnesota, I don't know but we'll never know.
J. Aughenbaugh: He stepped down.
N. Rodgers: We didn't mention here a scandal that is currently potentially in the making, because we're not Nostradamus and we cannot predict where this is going, although that will be cool, because they'll make it win the lottery. That is the judiciary and as we are recording, people are starting to say, hey, shouldn't there be ethics rules for justices and judges and that's starting to be a discussion. Years from now, people will look back and it'll be like the teapot or there'll be like other things where they would say all of this factors.
J. Aughenbaugh: More than likely listeners will probably have an episode later this year where we will go ahead and discuss because as Nia just pointed out, it's just starting. But anyways, Nia, this is a great episode. Not great in the fact that we got to discuss all these four bowls.
N. Rodgers: But also shows that scandals happen every so often in politics and it's not about one generation, and also if you think that what you're living through is the worst scandal ever, we would like
to have a discussion with you. Because there's always a bigger, better one either in the past are just around the corner.
J. Aughenbaugh: The corner, yes. Thanks Nia.
N. Rodgers: Thank you Aughie.
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