AUSTIN -- The Watergate scandal struck a mortal blow to the administration of President Richard Nixon, who announced to millions of Americans on the evening of August 8, 1974, I shall resign the presidency effective at noon tomorrow.
More than 40 years since burglars broke into the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate Hotel in Washington, D.C., what precisely they had hoped to obtain remains unclear. Phil Stanford, whose book White House Call Girl was released in paperback this month, believes he has a clue.
We don't know for sure what the White House team was looking for, but it had something to do with the call girl ring that was servicing the Democratic National Committee, said Stanford. After years of research and interviews, Stanford concludes the break-in was actually an attempt to find sexual blackmail material linking both Democrats and Republicans to a nearby call girl operation run by a woman named Heidi Rikan.
To prove his theory, Stanford says he managed to track Rikan's trail to her sister's residence in Texas, where he obtained her little black book listing the names of high-profile clients. What's more, Stanford says Rikan's Texas connection included a stint working with the mob in Dallas during Lyndon Johnson's presidency.
The mob put her to work meeting football players. They were interested in getting behind the scenes information on the stars -- their state of mind, any injuries you don't know about -- because the football betting business is big business. Really big business. And went from there to meeting politicians, said Stanford. So she was meeting politicians out here, went back to Washington D.C. after Nixon was elected and started meeting politicians there.
It's a controversial theory that has been dismissed by many involved in the original scandal and subsequent investigation. Convicted Watergate conspirator G. Gordon Liddy has publicly supported the prostitution ring explanation and was sued for defamation by former White House counsel John Dean, who has argued Rikan had nothing to do with the scandal. The lawsuit was settled out of court. Stanford's publisher released a letter purportedly sent by Dean concerning the current book on their website.
Stanford's belief is that many of the parties involved in the scandal and how it was portrayed view his book as threat, and says anyone with doubts should read it and analyze his notes. So why return to a scandal forty years later and after most see it as settled?
To me the lesson is that the first story you get and the second story you get and the third story you get, they're usually cover-ups, said Stanford. Especially when it comes to politics, and you have to look a lot deeper.
