Volume 20, Number 7 · May 3, 1973
The World Behind Watergate
By Kirkpatrick Sale
The bedfellows politics makes are never strange; it only seems that way to those who have not watched the courtship. In Richard Nixon's case, notwithstanding his presence in national politics for the last twenty-five years, those courtships have remained remarkably unexamined—or, when examined, remarkably misunderstood—and as a result the bedfellows he has acquired have remained unusually obscure both to the public and to the political pundits who are supposed to conjure with such things. Certain obvious relationships, to be sure, have been given attention—the back-scratching of Nixon and his old friend and Pepsico chairman Donald Kendall, for example,[1] the latest evidence of which is Washington's gift of the Soviet soft-drink franchise to Pepsi-Cola. But the wider pattern of his associations, the character of his power base, remains essentially obscure. This seems particularly dangerous in view of the evidence that these people will be influential in American government not only for the next four years but for the foreseeable future.
Feature, 5943 words
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