No wonder Mae Brussell was so excited. The attempted burglary of Democratic headquarters at the Watergate Hotel in Washington in June 1972 had suddenly brought her eight-and-a-half years of conspiracy research to an astounding climax.
At last she could trace connections leading inevitably from the assassination of John F. Kennedy to the Watergate break-in. She recognized names, methodology, patterns of cover-up. In my capacity as editor of The Realist, I assigned her to write an article.
Six weeks later while the mainstream press was still referring to the incident as a "caper" and a "third-rate burglary" (and while Richard Nixon was fighting to postpone an investigation until after the election) I published Brussell's lengthy manuscript.
In it, she documented the conspiracy and delineated the players, from the burglars all the way up to FBI Director L. Patrick Gray, Attorney General John Mitchell and President Nixon. "The significance of the Watergate affair," she concluded, "is that every element essential for a political coup d'état in the United States was assembled at the time of their arrest."
But the Watergate story was more than a professional achievement for Brussell: It brought her true love.
A year before the Watergate break-in masterminded by E. Howard Hunt, who had worked for the CIA for 21 years Hunt promoted a "bag job" (surreptitious entry) into the office of Dr. Lewis Fielding. Fielding, a Beverly Hills psychiatrist, was refusing to cooperate with FBI agents investigating Daniel Ellsberg, one of his patients. Ellsberg, with Tony Russo, had leaked the Pentagon Papers
to the press.
It was the function of the White House "plumbers" to plug such leaks, and they wanted Ellsberg's psychiatric file. The burglars, led by G. Gordon Liddy, scattered pills around the office to make it look like a junkie had been responsible. The police assured Dr. Fielding that the break-in was made in search of drugs, even though he found Ellsberg's records removed from their folder.
An innocent black man, Elmer Davis, was arrested, convicted and sent to prison for the Fielding office break-in while Liddy remained silent.
Mae Brussell, in the course of her research, corresponded with Davis. That's how they met. After he finished serving Liddy's time behind bars, he ended up living with her a romance made in Conspiracy Heaven.