Maurice Stans
Maurice Hubert Stans was an American accountant, high-ranking civil servant, Cabinet member, political organizer. He served as the finance chairman for the Committee to Re-elect the President, working for the re-election of Richard Nixon, he was convicted on multiple counts under the Federal Election Campaign Act that were revealed during the larger investigation into the Watergate scandal. Stans was born on March 22, 1908 in Shakopee, the son of James Hubert Stans and the former Mathilda Nyssen Stans, his father was the only child of Jan Hendrik Stans and Maria Catharina Crijns, a Belgian couple who immigrated to the United States in 1880. Stans graduated from Shakopee High School in 1925, he worked at a local foundry before traveling to Chicago to find work with Otto F. Schultz; the same year he began work as a stenographer and bookkeeper for a Chicago importer, while attending evening classes at Northwestern University. In 1928 he joined the Chicago-based firm of Alexander Grant and Company, certified public accountants, continued his part-time studies at Columbia University while working at the firm's New York City office.
He attended Columbia from 1928–1930. He was an executive partner with the Alexander Grant & Co. accounting firm in Chicago from 1940 until 1955. He was a Certified Public Accountant, licensed in New York and Virginia, he was President of the American Institute of Accountants from 1954-1955 and won the Gold Medal for Distinguished Service to the Profession in 1954. He was inducted into the Accounting Hall of Fame in 1960, he served as U. S. deputy postmaster general from 1955–1957, in the Dwight Eisenhower administration. He served as deputy director of the Bureau of the Budget from 1957 to 1958, director of the Bureau of the Budget from 1958 to 1961, still under Eisenhower, he joined the Nixon administration as Secretary of Commerce from 1969 to 1972. In 1961, Stans was one of the founders of the African Wildlife Foundation. In mid-February 1972, he resigned as Secretary of Commerce, to chair the finance committee of the Committee for the Re-Election of the President, Richard Nixon's re-election campaign.
Money that he raised for the campaign was used to finance some of the illegal Watergate activities. However, Stans always maintained, it has not been proven to the contrary, that he had no knowledge of the various Watergate crimes, it was rumored but never confirmed that Stans was the source for raising the million dollars in cash which Nixon kept in the White House safe. This cash was used to pay Howard Hunt and the other Watergate burglars, who blackmailed the White House, it was rumored, but never confirmed that Stans raised the cash from a list of large contributors by threatening IRS audits. He was indicted in 1973 for perjury and obstruction of justice, but was acquitted the following year. On 12 March 1975, Stans pleaded guilty to three counts of violating the reporting sections of the Federal Election Campaign Act and two counts of accepting illegal campaign contributions and was fined $5,000; the convictions were related to improperly giving campaign funds to G. Gordon Liddy, though Stans insisted that his guilt ended there and that he was not aware of Liddy's plan to use the money for what became the Watergate break in.
He authored a book, The Terrors of Justice: The Untold Side of Watergate, in which he detailed his side of the Watergate story. Maurice Stans died at the Huntington Memorial Hospital in Pasadena, California on April 14, 1998, at age 90, following a congestive heart failure, he was preceded in death by Maureen Stans Helmick. He was survived by his wife Penny, his daughter Terry, her husband Bill and their three children, his sons Steve and Ted, his son-in-law, Walter E. Helmick Jr. and his grandchildren, Shelia Helmick and Peter Helmick, Peter's wife Lois and their three children: Rebecca Tafline, Samantha Helmick, Deidre Helmick. Papers of Maurice H. Stans, Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library
Rose Mary Woods
Rose Mary Woods was Richard Nixon's secretary from his days in Congress in 1951, through the end of his political career. Before H. R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman became the operators of Nixon's presidential campaign, Woods was Nixon's gatekeeper. Rose Mary Woods was born in northeastern Ohio in the small pottery town of Sebring on December 26, 1917, her brother was Joseph I. Woods, a Cook County Sheriff, longtime member of the Cook County, Illinois Board. Following graduation from McKinley High School, she went to work for Royal China, Inc. the city's largest employer. Woods had been engaged to marry, but her fiancé died during World War II. To escape all the memories of her hometown, she moved to Washington, D. C. in 1943, working in a variety of federal offices until she met Nixon while she was a secretary to the Select House Committee on Foreign Aid. Impressed by his neatness and efficiency, she accepted his job offer in 1951, she developed a close relationship with the Nixon family First Lady Pat Nixon.
Woods, as part of his staff, accompanied Vice-President Nixon on his 1958 goodwill tour of South America. She was injured by flying glass in the attack on Richard Nixon's motorcade when the windows in the car she was riding in were smashed. Woods was President Nixon's personal secretary, the same position she held from the time he hired her until the end of his lengthy political career. Fiercely loyal to Nixon, Woods claimed responsibility in a 1974 grand jury testimony for inadvertently erasing up to five minutes of the 181⁄2 minute gap in a June 20, 1972, audio tape, her demonstration of how this might have occurred—which depended upon her stretching to press controls several feet apart —was met with skepticism from those who believed the erasures, from whatever source, to be deliberate. The contents of the gap remain unknown. Forensic analysis in 2003 determined that the tape had been erased in several segments—at least five, as many as nine, she accompanied Nixon to California for a time following his resignation.
She returned to Washington and worked as a secretary to a Republican member of Congress on Capitol Hill. Woods died on January 2005, at McCrea Manor, a nursing home in Alliance, Ohio. A memorial service was held at the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum in Yorba Linda, California. Manolo Sanchez "Rose Mary Woods". Find a Grave. Retrieved June 15, 2013
Ben Bradlee
Benjamin Crowninshield Bradlee was an American newspaperman. He was the executive editor of The Washington Post from 1968 to 1991, he became a national figure during the presidency of Richard Nixon, when he challenged the federal government over the right to publish the Pentagon Papers and oversaw the publication of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein's stories documenting the Watergate scandal. At his death he held the title of vice president at-large of The Washington Post, he was an advocate for education and the study of history, including working for years as an active trustee on the boards of several major educational and archeological research institutions. A member of the Boston Brahmin Crowninshield family, Bradlee was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on August 26, 1921, his father was Frederick Josiah Bradlee, Jr. a direct descendant of Nathan Bradley, the first American Bradley, born in the colony of Massachusetts in 1631. His mother, Josephine de Gersdorff, was awarded the French Legion of Honour for starting an orphanage that sheltered children from Nazi Germany during World War II.
Bradlee's maternal grandfather, Carl August de Gersdorff, the son of a German immigrant, was a wealthy New York lawyer. Bradlee's maternal grandmother was Helen Suzette Crowninshield, daughter of artist Frederic Crowninshield, another member of the Crowninshield family, his great-great-uncle was U. S. lawyer Joseph Hodges Choate, 34th U. S. ambassador to Britain, his great uncle was Francis Welch "Frank" Crowninshield, the creator and editor of Vanity Fair, a roommate of Condé Nast. He had a brother named a writer and Broadway stage actor. Chevalier Josephine de Gersdorff, Bradlee's mother, was a direct descendant of Heinrich XXIX, Count of Reuss-Ebersdorf, a lineal descendant of Maximilian I, Holy Roman Emperor, King John of Denmark, King Casimir IV of Poland, John V, Prince of Anhalt-Zerbst. Through his father Frederick, Bradlee was a lineal descendant of King Henry VII of England by an unknown British woman through their son Sir Roland de Velville, his maternal great-grandfather was Dr. Ernst Bruno von Gersdorff, a third cousin of Queen Victoria of the United Kingdom through Heinrich XXIX.
Bradlee, the second of three children, grew up in a wealthy family with domestic staff. With his brother and sister, Constance, he learned French, took piano lessons, went to the symphony and the opera; the stock market crash of 1929 decimated the family's wealth however. During the Great Depression, Bradlee's father worked odd jobs to support his family, including keeping the books for various clubs and institutions and supervising the janitors at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. Bradlee attended Dexter School before finishing at St. Mark's School, where he played varsity baseball. While attending St. Mark's, he contracted polio, he exercised at home and developed strong arms and chest. He could walk without limping. Thereafter he attended Harvard College, where he was a member of the A. D. Club, a Greek–English major and joined the Naval ROTC. Bradlee received his naval commission two hours after graduating in 1942, joined the Office of Naval Intelligence, worked as a communications officer in the Pacific during World War II.
His duties included handling classified and coded cables, serving on the destroyer USS Philip fighting off the shore of Guam and arriving at Guadalcanal with the Second Transport Group, part of Task Group 62.4, commanded by Rear Admiral Norman Scott. Bradlee's main battles were Vella Lavella, Saipan and Bougainville, he fought in the biggest naval battle fought, the Battle of Leyte Gulf in the Philippines Campaign, in the Borneo Campaign, made every landing in the Solomon Islands campaign. Bradlee's first marriage was to Jean Saltonstall, who came from a wealthy and prominent Boston Brahmin family, they married on August 8, 1942, had one son, Ben Bradlee Jr. who became a deputy managing editor of The Boston Globe. After the war, in 1946, Bradlee became a reporter at the New Hampshire Sunday News, a venture he helped launch. After he sold the paper, in 1948 he started working for The Washington Post as a reporter, he got to know associate publisher Philip Graham, the son-in-law of the publisher, Eugene Meyer.
On November 1, 1950, Bradlee was alighting from a streetcar in front of the White House just as two Puerto Rican nationalists attempted to shoot their way into Blair House in an attempt to kill President Harry S. Truman. In 1951 Graham helped Bradlee become assistant press attaché in the American embassy in Paris In 1952, Bradlee joined the staff of the Office of U. S. Information and Educational Exchange, the embassy's propaganda unit. USIE produced films, research and news items for use by the CIA throughout Europe. USIE controlled the Voice of America, a means of disseminating pro-American "cultural information" worldwide. While at the USIE, according to a Justice Department memo from an assistant U. S. attorney in the Rosenberg Trial, Bradlee was helping the CIA manage European propaganda regarding the spying conviction and execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg on June 19, 1953. The memo, addressed to U. S. Attorney Myles Lane and dated December 13, 1952, states that " further advised that he was sent here by Robert Thayer, the head of the CIA in Paris... he stated that he was supposed to have been met by a representative of the CIA at the airport but missed connections" and that "he has been trying to get in touch with Allen Dulles."
This memorandum was cited as evidence of Bradlee's CIA connections
Georgia (U.S. state)
Georgia is a state in the Southeastern United States. It began as a British colony in 1733, the last and southernmost of the original Thirteen Colonies to be established. Named after King George II of Great Britain, the Province of Georgia covered the area from South Carolina south to Spanish Florida and west to French Louisiana at the Mississippi River. Georgia was the fourth state to ratify the United States Constitution, on January 2, 1788. In 1802–1804, western Georgia was split to the Mississippi Territory, which split to form Alabama with part of former West Florida in 1819. Georgia declared its secession from the Union on January 19, 1861, was one of the original seven Confederate states, it was the last state to be restored to the Union, on July 15, 1870. Georgia is the 8th most populous of the 50 United States. From 2007 to 2008, 14 of Georgia's counties ranked among the nation's 100 fastest-growing, second only to Texas. Georgia is known as the Empire State of the South. Atlanta, the state's capital and most populous city, has been named a global city.
Atlanta's metropolitan area contains about 55% of the population of the entire state. Georgia is bordered to the north by Tennessee and North Carolina, to the northeast by South Carolina, to the southeast by the Atlantic Ocean, to the south by Florida, to the west by Alabama; the state's northernmost part is in the Blue Ridge Mountains, part of the Appalachian Mountains system. The Piedmont extends through the central part of the state from the foothills of the Blue Ridge to the Fall Line, where the rivers cascade down in elevation to the coastal plain of the state's southern part. Georgia's highest point is Brasstown Bald at 4,784 feet above sea level. Of the states east of the Mississippi River, Georgia is the largest in land area. Before settlement by Europeans, Georgia was inhabited by the mound building cultures; the British colony of Georgia was founded by James Oglethorpe on February 12, 1733. The colony was administered by the Trustees for the Establishment of the Colony of Georgia in America under a charter issued by King George II.
The Trustees implemented an elaborate plan for the colony's settlement, known as the Oglethorpe Plan, which envisioned an agrarian society of yeoman farmers and prohibited slavery. The colony was invaded by the Spanish during the War of Jenkins' Ear. In 1752, after the government failed to renew subsidies that had helped support the colony, the Trustees turned over control to the crown. Georgia became a crown colony, with a governor appointed by the king; the Province of Georgia was one of the Thirteen Colonies that revolted against British rule in the American Revolution by signing the 1776 Declaration of Independence. The State of Georgia's first constitution was ratified in February 1777. Georgia was the 10th state to ratify the Articles of Confederation on July 24, 1778, was the 4th state to ratify the United States Constitution on January 2, 1788. In 1829, gold was discovered in the North Georgia mountains leading to the Georgia Gold Rush and establishment of a federal mint in Dahlonega, which continued in operation until 1861.
The resulting influx of white settlers put pressure on the government to take land from the Cherokee Nation. In 1830, President Andrew Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act, sending many eastern Native American nations to reservations in present-day Oklahoma, including all of Georgia's tribes. Despite the Supreme Court's ruling in Worcester v. Georgia that U. S. states were not permitted to redraw Indian boundaries, President Jackson and the state of Georgia ignored the ruling. In 1838, his successor, Martin Van Buren, dispatched federal troops to gather the tribes and deport them west of the Mississippi; this forced relocation, known as the Trail of Tears, led to the death of over 4,000 Cherokees. In early 1861, Georgia became a major theater of the Civil War. Major battles took place at Chickamauga, Kennesaw Mountain, Atlanta. In December 1864, a large swath of the state from Atlanta to Savannah was destroyed during General William Tecumseh Sherman's March to the Sea. 18,253 Georgian soldiers died in service one of every five who served.
In 1870, following the Reconstruction Era, Georgia became the last Confederate state to be restored to the Union. With white Democrats having regained power in the state legislature, they passed a poll tax in 1877, which disenfranchised many poor blacks and whites, preventing them from registering. In 1908, the state established a white primary, they constituted 46.7% of the state's population in 1900, but the proportion of Georgia's population, African American dropped thereafter to 28% due to tens of thousands leaving the state during the Great Migration. According to the Equal Justice Institute's 2015 report on lynching in the United States, Georgia had 531 deaths, the second-highest total of these extralegal executions of any state in the South; the overwhelming number of victims were male. Political disfranchisement persisted through the mid-1960s, until after Congress passed the Voting Rights Act of 1965. An Atlanta-born Baptist minister, part of the educated middle class that had developed in Atlanta's African-American community, Martin Luther King, Jr. emerged as a national leader in the civil rights movement.
King joining with others to form the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in Atlanta in 1957 to provide political leadership for the Civil Rights Movement across the South. By the 1960s, the proportion of
E. Howard Hunt
Everette Howard Hunt Jr. better known as E. Howard Hunt, was an American intelligence officer and published author of 73 books. From 1949 to 1970, Hunt served as an officer in the Central Intelligence Agency. Along with G. Gordon Liddy, Frank Sturgis, others, Hunt was one of the Nixon administration "plumbers", a team of operatives charged with identifying government sources of national security information "leaks" to outside parties. Hunt and Liddy plotted the Watergate burglaries and other clandestine operations for the Nixon administration. In the ensuing Watergate scandal, Hunt was convicted of burglary and wiretapping serving 33 months in prison. Hunt was born in Hamburg, New York, United States, the son of Ethel Jean and Everette Howard Hunt Sr. an attorney and Republican Party official. He graduated from Hamburg High School in 1936 and Brown University in 1940. During World War II, Hunt served in the U. S. Navy on the destroyer USS Mayo, the United States Army Air Corps, the Office of Strategic Services in China.
Hunt was a prolific author. During and after the war, he wrote several novels under his own name, including East of Farewell, Limit of Darkness, Stranger in Town, Bimini Run, The Violent Ones, he wrote, more famously, several spy and hardboiled novels under an array of pseudonyms, including Robert Dietrich, Gordon Davis and David St. John. Hunt won a Guggenheim Fellowship for his writing in 1946; some of his writings found parallels in his Watergate experiences. Warner Bros. had just bought rights to Hunt's novel Bimini Run when he joined the CIA's Office of Policy Coordination in October 1949 as a covert action officer specializing in political action and influence, in what came to be called the CIA's Special Activities Division. The CIA was the successor organization of the OSS. According to David Talbot, "Howard Hunt prided himself on being part of the CIA’s upper tier, but that's not. Hunt liked to brag that he had family connections to Wild Bill Donovan himself, who had admitted him into the OSS, the original roundtable of American intelligence.
But it turned out that Hunt’s father was a lobbyist in upstate New York to whom Donovan owed a favor, not a fellow Wall Street lawyer. Everyone knew Hunt was a writer, but they knew he was no Ian Fleming. To the Georgetown set, there would always be something low-rent about men like Hunt—as well as William Harvey and David Morales; the CIA was a cold hierarchy. Men like this would never be invited for lunch with Allen Dulles at the Alibi Club or to play tennis with Dick Helms at the Chevy Chase Club; these men were indispensable—until they became expendable." Hunt became the OPC Station Chief in Mexico City in 1950, recruited and supervised William F. Buckley Jr. who worked in Hunt's OPC Station in Mexico during the period 1951–1952. Buckley and Hunt remained lifelong friends and Buckley became godfather to Hunt's first three children. In Mexico, Hunt helped lay the framework for Operation PBFORTUNE renamed Operation PBSUCCESS, the successful covert operation to overthrow Jacobo Árbenz, the democratic elected president of Guatemala.
Hunt was assigned as Chief of Covert Action in Japan. He afterwards served as Chief of Station in Uruguay. Hunt was subsequently given the assignment of forging Cuban exile leaders in the United States into a broadly representative government-in-exile that would, after the Bay of Pigs Invasion, form a pro-American Puppet state to take over Cuba; the failure of the invasion temporarily damaged his career. Hunt was undeniably bitter about what he perceived as President John F. Kennedy's lack of commitment in attacking and overthrowing the government of Cuba. In his semi-fictional autobiography, Give Us This Day, he wrote: "The Kennedy administration yielded Castro all the excuse he needed to gain a tighter grip on the island of José Martí moved shamefacedly into the shadows and hoped the Cuban issue would melt away." After the Bay of Pigs fiasco, Hunt was reassigned as Executive Assistant to Director of Central Intelligence Allen W. Dulles. While Hunt was working on Brigade 2506, he helped. After President John F. Kennedy fired Dulles in 1961 for the Bay of Pigs failure, Hunt served as the first Chief of Covert Action for the Domestic Operations Division from 1962 to 1964.
Hunt told The New York Times in 1974 that he spent about four years working for DODS, beginning shortly after it was set up by the Kennedy administration in 1962, over the "strenuous opposition" of Richard Helms and Thomas H. Karamessines, he said that the division was assembled shortly after the Bay of Pigs operation, that "many men connected with that failure were shunted into the new domestic unit." He said that some of his projects from 1962 to 1966, which dealt with the subsidizing and manipulation of news and publishing organizations in the US, "did seem to violate the intent of the agency's charter." In 1964, DCI John A. McCone directed Hunt to take a special assignment as a Non-Official Cover officer in Madrid, tasked to create the American answer to Ian Fleming's British MI-6 James Bond novel series. While assigned in Spain, Hunt was covered as a retired U. S. State Department Foreign Service Officer who had moved his family to Spain in order to write the first installment of the 9-novel Peter Ward series, On Hazardous Duty.
After a year and a half in Spain, Hunt returned to his assignment at DODS. Following a brief tenure on the Special Activities Staff of the Wes
Bob Woodward
Robert Upshur Woodward is an American investigative journalist. He is now an associate editor there. While a young reporter for The Washington Post in 1972, Woodward teamed up with Carl Bernstein; these scandals led to numerous government investigations and the eventual resignation of President Richard Nixon. The work of Woodward and Bernstein was called "maybe the single greatest reporting effort of all time" by longtime journalism figure Gene Roberts. Woodward continued to work for The Washington Post after his reporting on Watergate, he has since written 19 books on American politics. Woodward was born in Geneva, the son of Jane and Alfred Eno Woodward II, chief judge of the 18th Judicial Circuit Court, he was a resident of Illinois. He enrolled in Yale College with a Naval Reserve Officers Training Corps scholarship and studied history and English literature. While at Yale, Woodward joined the Phi Gamma Delta fraternity and was a member of the prestigious secret society Book and Snake, he received his B.
A. began a five-year tour of duty in the United States Navy. During his service in the Navy, Woodward served aboard the USS Wright, was one of two officers assigned to move or handle nuclear launch codes the Wright carried in its capacity as a NECPA. At one time, he was close to Admiral Robert O. Welander, being communications officer on the USS Fox under Welander's command. After being discharged as a lieutenant in August 1970, Woodward was admitted to Harvard Law School but elected not to attend. Instead, he applied for a job as a reporter for The Washington Post while taking graduate courses in Shakespeare and international relations at George Washington University. Harry M. Rosenfeld, the Post's metropolitan editor, gave him a two-week trial but did not hire him because of his lack of journalistic experience. After a year at the Montgomery Sentinel, a weekly newspaper in the Washington, D. C. suburbs, Woodward was hired as a Post reporter in 1971. Woodward and Carl Bernstein were both assigned to report on the June 17, 1972, burglary of the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee in a Washington, D.
C. office building called Watergate. Their work, under editor Ben Bradlee, became known for being the first to report on a number of political "dirty tricks" used by the Nixon re-election committee during his campaign for re-election, their book about the scandal, All the President's Men, became a No. 1 bestseller and was turned into a movie. The 1976 film, starring Robert Redford as Woodward and Dustin Hoffman as Bernstein, transformed the reporters into celebrities and inspired a wave of interest in investigative journalism; the book and movie led to the enduring mystery of the identity of Woodward's secret Watergate informant known as Deep Throat, a reference to the title of a popular pornographic movie at the time. Woodward said he would protect Deep Throat's identity until the man died or allowed his name to be revealed. For more than 30 years, only Woodward, a handful of others knew the informant's identity until it was claimed by his family to Vanity Fair magazine to be former Federal Bureau of Investigation Associate Director W. Mark Felt in May 2005.
Woodward confirmed the veracity of this claim and subsequently published a book, titled The Secret Man, that detailed his relationship with Felt. Woodward and Bernstein followed up with a second book on Watergate, entitled The Final Days, covering in extensive depth the period from November 1973 until President Nixon resigned in August 1974; the Woodward and Bernstein Watergate Papers are housed at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin. In September 1980, a Sunday feature story appeared on the front page of the Post titled "Jimmy's World" in which reporter Janet Cooke wrote a profile of the life of an eight-year-old heroin addict. Although some within the Post doubted the story's veracity, it was defended by the paper's editors including Woodward, assistant managing editor, it was Woodward who submitted the story for Pulitzer Prize consideration, Cooke was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing on April 13, 1981. The story was found to be a complete fabrication, the Pulitzer was returned.
In retrospect, Woodward made the following statement: I think that the decision to nominate the story for a Pulitzer is of minimal consequence. I think that it won is of little consequence, it is a brilliant story -- fraud that it is. It would be absurd for me or any other editor to review the authenticity or accuracy of stories that are nominated for prizes. China's alleged role in the 1996 United States campaign finance controversy first gained public attention when Woodward and Brian Duffy published a story stating that a United States Department of Justice investigation into the fund-raising activities had uncovered evidence that Chinese agents sought to direct contributions from foreign sources to the Democratic National Committee before the 1996 presidential campaign; the journalists wrote that intelligence information had shown the Chinese embassy in Washington, D. C. was used for coordinating contributions to the DNC. Woodward spent more time than any other journalist with former President George W. Bush, interviewing him six times for close to 11 hours total.
Woodward's four books, Bush at War, Plan of Attack, State of Denial, The War Within: A Secret White House History are detailed accounts of the Bush presidency, including the response to the September 11 attacks and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq
