Memorandum
To: Professor Alex Siwiecki
From: Cole Awasthi CA
Subject: Significance of Memo Genre
Date: February 24, 2018
The Washington Post published an article entitled “James Comey’s Memo Has Shaken A Presidency. Here’s Why Memos Have Always Mattered.” It detailed the records kept by former FBI Director James Comey in the wake of his firing scandal. The article started out by discussing the politics associated with the situation, but also delved into the history of the memory format. As it turns out, Comey kept a record via memo format about some of the requests made of him from the President of the United States. These memos detailed accounts of meetings that made Comey uncomfortable or those that he felt crossed a line professionally.
The mistrust most Americans feel toward the government officials and political parities of today can be traced back to the Watergate scandal of 1972, which led to the resignation of an American president. The crimes of the Watergate scandal included political burglary, bribery, extortion, wiretapping (phone tapping), conspiracy, obstruction of justice, destruction of evidence, tax fraud, illegal use of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI), illegal campaign contributions, and use of taxpayers' money for private purposes.
A defining moment in American history, the Watergate scandal, dramatically transformed the way Americans view politicians and government. In the eyes of most Americans, trust, honor and integrity, vanished from the political landscape.
details to the press during the height of the Watergate scandal, especially to Washington Post’s
Watergate Political scandals are not strangers to the United States. They date back as far as 1830, with the presidential sex scandal and Thomas Jefferson, and in 1875 with the Whiskey Ring and President Ulysses S. Grant (Time and Again 1). Today we have the Iran-Contra affair with Ronald Reagan and Whitewater with Bill and Hillary Clinton. Even with these, it can be argued that Watergate could possibly be the worst scandal in the history of the United States.
These memos are an accumulation and explanation of events of torture or as the CIA calls Enhanced Interrogation. “The basic problem with the presidency is the possibility that the occupant of the White House is too unconstrained and can all too easily engage in dramatic exertions of power, especially in the realm of foreign policy" (Pp.107,Levinson) The President is the Commander In Chief of the military. The president is the highest rank in the military and most of the time has no military training with rein over it. The President might not have the right to go to war, but he certainly has the privilege. Regarding presidential removal, Levinson has section titled “On Malfeasance and Misfeasance: Why Criminal Presidents Less of a Threat than an Merely Incompetent Ones”(pp.114-21). In this section, He explains in Great Britain, that the prime minister can be “unceremoniously dumped”(p116,Levinson) In the United States, that is not an option. In the cases of going to war without consent, it could be interpreted that He has the authority over the military so he needs to make the ultimate decision for them. We need to have criminal charges for the declaration of war, so if we made it law he can’t do instead of about what he can do, then maybe more control will be held by the people and not one man.
Watergate is the popular name for the political scandal and constitutional crisis that began with the arrest of five burglars who broke into the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate office in Washington D.C. on the night of June 17, 1972. It ended with the resignation of president Richard M. Nixon. The burglars and two co-potters-G. Gordon Liddy and E. Howard Hunt were indicated on charges of burglary, conspiracy, and wiretapping. Four monthes later, they were convicted and sentenced to prison terms by District Court Judge John J. Sirica, who was convicted that pertinent details had not been unveiled during the trial and proffered leniency in exchange for further information. As it
At this time, only one other impeachment inquiry existed, so Bernstein and Woodward’s work had to be as accurate as possible. They made sure of this through a few precautionary measures. First, they agreed never to let an article go to print unless they both fully agreed the article was worthy of printing should. When they were investigating the truth of a fact or statement, they always made sure that they checked it with at least two sources. When they made a large implication, such as that of H.R. Haldeman, Assistant to the President, they investigated with as many as four or five sources. To make sure that they were not overly ambitious or biased, they frequently ran their story ideas, topics, and facts, over with their editors, Sussman and Rosenfeld.
Named by Calvin Coolidge as the sixth director of the Bureau of Investigation, J. Edgar Hoover quickly rose to greatness. In 1935, he was appointed by U. S. Attorney General Stone as the first director of the newly conceived F.B.I. For the next 36 years he made all of the rules, declared war on everything he disliked or that opposed his morals and personal beliefs from “Bolshevik radicals” to Martin Luther King, he hindered the progress of the civil rights movement, and used force to eradicate every suspected communist. While he brought about myriad investigative technology, including fingerprints, wire-tapping, and forensics labs that forever changed the criminal justice system, he also used the F.B.I. to intimidate celebrities and public figures, harass political activists, and illegally collect secret files of evidence and scandals against everyone. In truth, Hoover was a malicious and hypocritical man; under the guise of protecting the “American way,” his motto was “knowledge is power,” but after the Great Depression when the world changed, he didn’t
Our client, Dr. Thomas Furlow examined John Brown on August 3 and realized that his tooth was infected. Dr. Furlow recommended Mr. Brown return because of the infected tooth. However, Mr. Brown went on vacation and disregarded Dr. Furlow’s recommendation to return.
“A Review of the FBI’s Use of National Security Letters” by the Office of the Inspector General.
Approximately 2,800 records, including field reports, cables, and interview summaries, have been released to the public by National Archives. Conversations from the FBI, CIA, and congressional investigators discussing dead ends, exhausted leads, interviews, as well as the checking and rechecking of sources, are just a snippet of information now available to the public.
”2 The Undersecretary of State’s calling the Gulf of Tonkin incident a “charade” is very strong wording, as he was
While writing this paper, I attempted to follow the forms and models put forth in the research papers we read in class during this unit. It was helpful to have something to follow while writing this report because I focused more on the “how” and “why” instead of the “what” of the research report structure. Overall, I found that this paper was much more organized than my last and I hope that this also improved the quality of my writing.
The term “Watergate” has become a common household name in correlation with people's thoughts about corruption in government. President Nixon was in office at the time of this scandal and is often thought to be the most famous face in America's conspiracy of wickedness in the government. The Watergate scandal had rocked everything our country thought we knew about the American Presidency because it had forfeited the common vision of the leader of the nation. Watergate had replaced the image of elegance and worldliness of the U.S. President with a scattered vision of corruption and extreme competitive measures that the country had never been a part of. Richard Nixon and his men had taken
While these studies do not fully exemplify the harmful reality of false memories, they take a step towards understanding how these false memories might occur in real-world settings. As Loftus (1997) discusses, it is only natural to wonder whether or not this research is applicable to real-world situations such as being interrogated by law officers or in psychotherapy. What researchers have learned, and can apply to this practical problem is that there are social demands on individuals to remember and come up with detailed memories. Not only that, but memory construction through suggestion and imagining events has been shown to be explicitly encouraged when people are having trouble remembering events (Loftus, 1997).