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The Pinochet Coup
At 6:00 a.m. on September 11, 1973, the Chilean Navy seized the port city of Valparaíso. By 7:00, the army had blocked the streets of Santiago. By 8:00, all radio stations except two had been silenced. At 11:52, Hawker Hunter jets bombed La Moneda, the presidential palace, while the democratically elected socialist president, Salvador Allende, was inside. Allende was dead by approximately 2:00 p.m. — by his own pistol, a 2011 forensic re-examination confirmed, in the second-floor Salón Independencia under bombardment. The man who replaced him, General Augusto Pinochet, ruled Chile for seventeen years. Between 1973 and 1990, the Chilean state's own subsequent commissions documented 3,200 killed or disappeared and 38,254 imprisoned-and-tortured. The United States, through documents declassified in waves from 1999 through 2023, had been working to remove Allende since before he took office.
The Pentagon Papers
In October 1969, a Defense Department analyst at the RAND Corporation in Santa Monica began making photocopies of a 7,000-page classified history of the Vietnam War. He worked nights, with a single accomplice. He took the documents home in stages. He photocopied them on a commercial Xerox machine that his daughter, age 13, helped him operate. Twenty-one months later, the New York Times began publishing them. The Nixon White House obtained the first prior-restraint injunction against an American newspaper in 154 years. The Supreme Court overturned it within fifteen days. The same White House unit set up to stop Daniel Ellsberg from leaking anything else became, eight months later, the unit that broke into the Democratic National Committee at Watergate.
Watergate
In the early hours of June 17, 1972, five men were arrested inside the Democratic National Committee's offices on the sixth floor of the Watergate complex. Two years and 54 days later, on August 9, 1974, Richard Nixon became the only sitting U.S. president to resign. Between those dates lies the most thoroughly documented presidential cover-up in American history — and the deliberate destruction of careers, evidence, and finally the office itself.
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