The lesson: don't work for a bad President

The New York Times published a correction, forty years late:

Because of a cover-up, cowardice and scapegoating in the Nixon White House, editorials in this paper in the early 1970s misstated the role of an Air Force general in a series of bombing raids of North Vietnam. The general, John D. Lavelle, commander of the Seventh Air Force, acted with direct authorization from President Nixon when he ordered more than twenty airstrikes against North Vietnamese antiaircraft missile sites between November of 1971 and March of 1972. As General Lavelle insisted then, he was not a rogue officer waging his own “massive, private air war”. He did not willfully violate rules of engagement, nor did he authorize flight crews to file false reports.
This correction was delayed because Mr. Nixon; his national security adviser, Henry Kissinger; and top cabinet and Pentagon officials never revealed evidence that would have exonerated General Lavelle. The truth lay hidden for nearly forty years in the squalid thickets of the Nixon tapes. Researchers brought the facts to light in 2007, leading to revised accounts of the case, explained in a Defense Department announcement last week.
The question at the time was whether Air Force pilots were allowed to bomb enemy missile sites whose tracking radar had not locked onto their planes. The rules of engagement then supposedly forbade it, though Mr. Nixon, the commander in chief, had issued a secret order— conveyed to General Lavelle by his Pentagon superiors— to bomb dangerous targets at will.
News of the general’s apparently defiant raids caused a scandal. Hearings were held. This paper fretted about what might have happened: Was it “a military takeover” of foreign and defense policies? Or had the government lied about its bombing rules, so as not to jeopardize peace talks in Paris? Or was it all miscommunication and ineptitude?
The tapes show Mr. Nixon agonizing privately over General Lavelle’s fate in conversations with Mr. Kissinger in June 1972, after the general had been disgraced and demoted. “I just don’t want him to be made a goat, goddamnit,” the president says. And later: “It’s just a hell of a damn. And it’s a bad rap for him, Henry.”
Mr. Kissinger, ever the enabler of his boss’s criminal streak, says, “I think this will go away.” It did. Mr. Nixon chose to stifle his guilt, and lied: “It was proper for him to be relieved and retired.” Soon enough the president was back to bombing North Vietnam anyway, without restrictions. General Lavelle died in 1979, having always said he acted on orders. His widow, Mary Jo, 91, and their seven children learned last year that the Air Force had granted their request to have General Lavelle’s military records cleared. It is now up to the Senate to posthumously restore his four-star rank, which President Obama asked it to do on Wednesday.
“The case of General Lavelle cannot be allowed to rest until all the facts have been placed before the public,” this page said in 1972. It’s time.

"A hell of a damn"? Rico says he's sure it is, and hopes General Lavelle is in a place to know he's been exonerated; Nixon, hopefully, is in a place where his lying is being properly punished...