When is a fluff piece not a fluff piece? When the Police Gazette publishes it. In this September 1972 issue of The National Police Gazette editors tell us all about the hidden horrors of vasectomies, how to make money playing craps in Las Vegas, and how to get rich in the nudist camp business. But of particular interest, to us at least, is the article on H.R. Haldeman, who is referred to as Richard Nixon’s hatchet man on the White House staff. It’s a curious designation timing-wise, because the general public was by now aware that several men connected to Nixon’s staff had broken into Democratic headquarters at the Watergate Hotel. The first set of indictments against the five burglars, as well as G. Gordon Liddy and E. Howard Hunt, would come down from a grand jury two weeks after The Gazette hit newsstands. Their Haldeman profile amounts to a sort of fluff piece, wherein his meanness is extolled as a virtue, but the story also has the effect of telling the Gazette’s vast readership that Haldeman is the man to point fingers at for Nixon’s mounting difficulties. Example: “You may not see him [snip] but Harry Robert Haldeman is there, behind the scenes, pulling the strings…” And later: “Organization is Haldeman’s talent and he knows how to use that talent. President Nixon will be its beneficiary.” Haldeman describes himself thusly: “I guess the term ‘sonofabitch’ fits me.” Never in the annals of 20-20 hindsight has someone looked so much like a fall guy. Haldeman, of course, was a major player in Watergate, but the timing of such an article, in America’s oldest magazine, in which Haldeman paints a target on his own back, is curious to say the least. By the beginning of 1973 the strings were unraveling at the White House and Nixon was in full ass-coverage mode. In April he asked for and received H.R. Haldeman’s resignation, along with that of John Erlichman. Eventually, Haldeman went to prison, where he served eighteen months for obstruction of justice and conspiracy. Richard Nixon managed to ride out the scandal for two years, but finally resigned in August 1974. Haldeman of course wrote a book about Watergate, and in it he shed some light on what had happened, and who had failed. But he also made it clear that he had few regrets: “There is absolutely no doubt in my mind today that if I were back at the starting point, faced with the decision of whether to join up, even knowing what the ultimate outcome would be, I would unhesitatingly do it.”
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The headlines that mattered yesteryear.
1986—Otto Preminger Dies
Austro–Hungarian film director Otto Preminger, who directed such eternal classics as Laura, Anatomy of a Murder, Carmen Jones, The Man with the Golden Arm, and Stalag 17, and for his efforts earned a star on Hollywood's Walk of Fame, dies in New York City, aged 80, from cancer and Alzheimer's disease. 1998—James Earl Ray Dies
The convicted assassin of American civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr., petty criminal James Earl Ray, dies in prison of hepatitis aged 70, protesting his innocence as he had for decades. Members of the King family who supported Ray's fight to clear his name believed the U.S. Government had been involved in Dr. King's killing, but with Ray's death such questions became moot. 1912—Pravda Is Founded
The newspaper Pravda, or Truth, known as the voice of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, begins publication in Saint Petersburg. It is one of the country's leading newspapers until 1991, when it is closed down by decree of then-President Boris Yeltsin. A number of other Pravdas appear afterward, including an internet site and a tabloid. 1983—Hitler's Diaries Found
The German magazine Der Stern claims that Adolf Hitler's diaries had been found in wreckage in East Germany. The magazine had paid 10 million German marks for the sixty small books, plus a volume about Rudolf Hess's flight to the United Kingdom, covering the period from 1932 to 1945. But the diaries are subsequently revealed to be fakes written by Konrad Kujau, a notorious Stuttgart forger. Both he and Stern journalist Gerd Heidemann go to trial in 1985 and are each sentenced to 42 months in prison. 1918—The Red Baron Is Shot Down
German WWI fighter ace Manfred von Richthofen, better known as The Red Baron, sustains a fatal wound while flying over Vaux sur Somme in France. Von Richthofen, shot through the heart, manages a hasty emergency landing before dying in the cockpit of his plane. His last word, according to one witness, is "Kaputt." The Red Baron was the most successful flying ace during the war, having shot down at least 80 enemy airplanes. 1964—Satellite Spreads Radioactivity
An American-made Transit satellite, which had been designed to track submarines, fails to reach orbit after launch and disperses its highly radioactive two pound plutonium power source over a wide area as it breaks up re-entering the atmosphere.
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