1 result for (book:nome AND session:856 AND stemmed:presid)

NoME Part Three: Chapter 8: Session 856, May 24, 1979 5/30 (17%) Watergate President idealized nuclear fanatic
– The Individual and the Nature of Mass Events
– © 2012 Laurel Davies-Butts
– Part Three: People Who Are Frightened of Themselves
– Chapter 8: Men, Molecules, Power, and Free Will
– Session 856, May 24, 1979 8:23 P.M. Thursday

[... 7 paragraphs ...]

To some extent or another, I watched the program with our friends. Actually, I allowed myself to become aware mainly of Ruburt’s perceptions as he viewed the motion picture. By one of those curious coincidences that are not coincidences at all, another dramatic rendition of that same Watergate saga was simultaneously showing on another channel — this one depicting the second spiritual birth of one of the President’s finest cohorts.

[... 1 paragraph ...]

The President at the time, and through all of his life before (pause), was at heart a stern, repressed idealist of a rather conventionally religious kind. He believed in an idealized good, while believing most firmly and simultaneously that man was fatally flawed (loudly), filled with evil, more naturally given to bad rather than good intent. He believed in the absolute necessity of power, while convinced at the same time that he did not possess it; and further, he believed that in the most basic terms the individual was powerless to alter the devastating march of evil and corruption that he saw within the country, and in all the other countries of the world. No matter how much power he achieved, it seemed to him that others had more — other people, other groups, other countries — but their power he saw as evil. For while he believed in the existence of an idealized good, he felt that the wicked were powerful and the good were weak and without vigor.

(8:38.) He concentrated upon the vast gulf that seemed to separate the idealized good and the practical, ever-pervading corruption that in his eyes grew by leaps and bounds. He saw himself as just. Those who did not agree with him, he saw as moral enemies. Eventually it seemed to him that he was surrounded by the corrupt, and that any means at his disposal was justified to bring down those who would threaten the presidency or the state.

[... 1 paragraph ...]

It is obvious to most others that such paranoid views are not based on mass fact. (Pause.) Your President at that time, however, had at his command vast information, so that he was aware of many groups and organizations that did not agree with his policies. He used those as in other circumstances a paranoid might use the sight of a police car to convince himself that he was being pursued by the police, or the FBI or whatever. The President felt threatened — and not only personally threatened, for he felt that the good for which he stood in his own mind was in peril (intently). And again, since the idealized good seemed too remote and difficult to achieve, any means was justified. Those who followed him, in the Cabinet and so forth, possessed the same kinds of characteristics to some degree or another.

[... 15 paragraphs ...]

2. Early on the morning of June 17, 1972, five men were arrested inside the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee, located in the Washington, D.C., apartment-hotel-office complex known as the Watergate. The men were employed by the “plumbers,” a secret group working for the Republican President Richard Nixon’s Committee to Re-Elect the President, and their tasks were to photograph records and to check upon listening devices — “bugs” — that had been planted in the offices during a first illegal entry in May. The detection of the break-in at Watergate both uncovered and perpetuated a labyrinthian series of events that culminated in the resignation of President Nixon on August 9, 1974.

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