From Nixon to Castro
How Was I to Know? 
Portfolio runs an excerpt from John Rosen’s The Strong Man: John Mitchell and the Secrets of Watergate, focused on colorful 70s corporate bandit Robert Vesco.
Vesco’s currently doing the last years of a 13 year sentence in Cuba, jailed on murky charges after years of gilded exile in socialism’s southern redoubt. 
But once he was somebody, with the SEC investigation of his activities to prove it. Leading to the scene where Vesco’s bag men deliver wads of cash to Richard Nixon’s chief re-election fundraiser Maurice Stans.
“Here were three upright members of the Greatest Generation, one carrying a briefcase stuffed with $200,000 in $100 bills. No one present likely harbored any delusions that the cash was being delivered—anonymously and past the lawful date—because Vesco had such passionate beliefs about détente or wage and price controls.”
