by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2018 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night I watched the second part of the History
Channel’s multi-part documentary Watergate,
written and directed by Charles Ferguson and quite a good presentation of a
slice of political history I still remember vividly. Watergate (the event, not
the movie) so totally rewrote the book both on how political scandals happen
and on how the media covers them that for decades later the suffix “-gate” got
affixed to virtually every subsequent scandal in politics. The basic facts are
that Richard Nixon, beset from his earliest years with an intense degree of
status anxiety and a sense that the people really running things — the Ivy League-educated WASP elites
and their Jewish paymasters (one thing that comes across from Ferguson’s
documentary is the depth of Nixon’s anti-Semitism — even though his Mideast
policies favored Israel and Henry Kissinger was his top foreign policy advisor,
for the most part he hated Jews with a passion and bought into a lot of the
nasty anti-Semitic myths that were current when he was growing up, including
the one that they were the secret paymasters behind both capitalism and
Communism) — didn’t want him in their club, managed to claw and scratch his way
into the White House but didn’t feel comfortable there. Though he at least won
a plurality of the popular vote (unlike George W. Bush in 2000 and Donald Trump in 2016), he only got 43 percent
and he was determined that when he ran for re-election in 1972 he would not
only win but amass such a huge popular vote total and win in such a sweeping
landslide there would never again be any question about his legitimacy. (And he
didn’t necessarily intend to stop there, either; there are reports that Nixon
had people investigating what it would take to repeal the 22nd
Amendment to the Constitution — passed, ironically, in 1947 by Republicans who
wanted to make sure a future Democrat couldn’t repeat Franklin Roosevelt’s
achievement of winning four straight Presidential elections — so he could run
again and again in perpetuity.)
Some of the things Nixon did to ensure his
massive landslide victories were good things, like the diplomatic opening to
China (San Francisco Chronicle
satire columnist Art Hoppe did a great spoof in which Nixon announced to his
wife Pat, “Guess what? I’ve found China!” “Where was it, dear?” she asked, and
he said, “Right where Harry Truman and Dean Acheson lost it” — a reference to
decades of Republican propaganda that blamed Democrats in general, and
President Truman and his secretary of state, Dean Acheson, in particular for
having “lost China” when the Communist revolutionaries took over in 1949) and
the détente with the Soviet
Union, including starting the series of nuclear arms limitation treaties the
current Republican President is trying to break up. (In 1970 Nixon had also
signed into law the Clean Water Act, Clean Air Act and the bill creating the
Environmental Protection Agency — also things the current President is out to
destroy.) This episode of Watergate
— it’s not altogether clear whether there’s just one more episode in the
program (being shown tonight) or two — started where the first one ended, on
March 21, 1973, when Nixon’s White House counsel John Dean came into his office
and told him Watergate was becoming “a cancer on the Presidency” and that E.
Howard Hunt was immediately demanding $120,000 in hush money for his legal fees
or he’d blow the whistle on the whole White House cover-up; and the so-called
“Saturday Night Massacre” that October, in which Nixon determined to fire
Watergate special prosecutor Archibald Cox; Nixon’s attorney general, Elliot
Richardson, resigned rather than do so; Nixon fired the assistant attorney
general, William Ruckelshaus (who had previously been the first director of the
Environmental Protection Agency — back when there were still Republicans who believed in protecting the
environment — and then for three months interim director of the FBI) when he
also refused to fire Cox; and Nixon finally turned to Solicitor General Robert
Bork, the third in command at the Justice Department, who sacked Cox and issued
an order officially abolishing the Office of Special Counsel.
Among the interviewees
on this program are Office of Special Counsel veterans Richard Ben-Veniste,
George Frampton and Jill Volner (she’s now known as Jill Wine-Banks and as such
is a frequent guest on MS-NBC comparing Nixon’s and Trump’s obstructions of
justice) — Ben-Veniste and Frampton wrote Stonewall, in my opinion the best single book on Watergate
from the point of view of anyone involved in prosecuting it — and they recall
that during the run-up to the “Saturday Night Massacre” they and other members
of Cox’s staff had started taking files relating to the case out of their
offices and hiding them in their homes or the homes of their relatives
(Ben-Veniste recalled leaving one of the most sensitive sets of files with his
grandmother) to make sure that Nixon and Bork didn’t follow up on their order
abolishing the Special Counsel’s office by sealing its work space and denying
them access to their own work product. In Stonewall Ben-Veniste and Frampton said they decided that they
and the other staff members would continue to work as a prosecution team and
await developments — which just weeks later led to the appointment of a
replacement special counsel, Leon Jaworski, who remained on the job until the
key Nixon staff members who had masterminded the Watergate cover-up were put on
trial at the end of 1974. One of the most interesting parts of Ferguson’s
treatment of the Watergate story is how he documents, based on White House
tapes made between the resignations of H. R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman on
April 30, 1973 and the exposure and dismantling of the White House taping
system in mid-July, that the cover-up continued right along after Haldeman’s
and Ehrlichman’s departures (indeed, Haldeman secretly entered the White House
so Nixon could still confer with him at least once after his official
departure) and the so-called “second Watergate cover-up,” led by Nixon in
association with General Alexander Haig (Haldeman’s replacement as White House
chief of staff) and Henry Kissinger, was never prosecuted (Jaworski having
regarded his job as done once four of the five people he put on trial for the
first cover-up — Haldeman, Ehrlichman, former attorney general John Mitchell
and former deputy attorney general Robert Mardian — were convicted). This
episode of Watergate showed clips
from the famous hearings of the Senate Select Committee on Campaign Activities
— that was its official name, though it was generally referred to as the
“Senate Watergate Committee” — and in particular the explosive revelations
former White House counsel John Dean came up with after he switched sides and
turned state’s evidence in the case. The Watergate Committee’s staff, including
majority counsel Sam Dash and minority counsel Fred Thompson, also turned up a
witness named Alexander Butterfield, who revealed the existence of the White
House recording system by which virtually all the President’s conversations
were taped. My understanding based on how it was reported then was that
Thompson was conducting a routine private interview with Butterfield in which he
asked Butterfield if a particular White House conversation was recorded, and
was startled when Butterfield told him they all were.
Presidents since Franklin Roosevelt had been
secretly recording some of their White House conversations, ostensibly for historical
purposes — though in FDR’s time the available recording technologies would have
been disc recorders or grooved Dictaphone belts, not tapes — but all the
Presidents from Roosevelt to Johnson had controls on the system so they could
push a button to record a particular conversation. Nixon was the first (and, so
far, the only — as far as is known, given what happened to Nixon no President
since has routinely taped himself and the people he was talking to in the Oval
Office or any of the President’s other work spaces) President who essentially,
as one commentator at the time put it, bugged himself: he set up the system to
record himself automatically, complete with “locator lights” that told the
staff running it where he was at any given moment so they could make sure the
appropriate recorders were turned on. (One writer at the time compared the
“locator lights” to the way the U.S. targeted Viet Namese soldiers for bombing
raids in the war.) Of course, once the existence of the tapes was revealed everyone — the special counsel’s office, the Senate
committee, the media and the public — wanted to hear them, and Nixon utterly
refused. John J. Sirica, who’d been involved as a judge in the Watergate case
since he drew the assignment to preside over the trial of the actual burglars,
ruled that Nixon could keep the tapes from the Senate committee but he had to
turn them over to the special prosecutor. The White House appealed, and the
Ninth Circuit federal appeals court in D.C. rejected their appeal. Then, rather
than appeal the case to the U.S. Supreme Court, Nixon and his people decided
that the way to make the whole pesky problem of the special prosecutor go away
was to fire him — only the principled stands of Richardson and Ruckelshaus
against doing so highlighted just out of control Nixon was and how determined
he was to set himself above the law, and that more than anything else was what
turned public opinion so dramatically against Nixon and led to his
near-impeachment and resignation from office a bit over a year later. Nixon’s
justification for not letting anyone hear the tapes — that the confidentiality
of executive communications had to be preserved, not only for him but for
future Presidents — might have had some credibility if it hadn’t begged the
question, “If you were so concerned about the confidentiality of White House
communications, why did you make the tapes in the first place?”
Of course, much
of the interest in a program about Watergate today — and no doubt central to
the History Channel not only green-lighting the show but telecasting it during
the run-up to the November 6 midterm elections — lies in the obvious
comparisons and contrasts between Richard Nixon and Donald Trump, both
Republicans, both consumed by personal status anxieties, both with an expansive
view of Presidential power that regards the President as virtually above the
law (after Watergate, Nixon was interviewed by David Frost and in the most
chilling remark answered Frost’s question about what would happen if the
President ordered someone in the Justice Department to do something illegal,
and Nixon matter-of-factly answered, “When the President does it, that means it
is not illegal” — and we’ve seen Trump go even farther in his recent statement
that he could end “birthright citizenship,” the law that says anyone born on
U.S. soil is a U.S. citizen, with an executive order even though that right is
established in the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution — even
Nixon never said a President could abolish part of the Constitution by
executive fiat!), and both highly controversial figures who were accused of
rigging their own elections. Nixon was accused of rigging the 1972 election
with his own people; Trump is accused of getting help from Russia to rig his
election, but in a lot of ways the accusations are similar: both Nixon and
Trump are accused of sabotaging American democracy by illegally putting thumbs
on the scales of political balance and thereby gaining unfair advantages over
their opponents. I’ve already pointed out some of the differences between Nixon
and Trump — and between technology as it existed in 1972 and in 2016,
particularly the way in which computer technology has made it much easier to get the kinds of information Nixon and his people
wanted on potential Democratic opponents and “weaponize” it against them. In
1972, if Nixon’s campaign wanted to eavesdrop on the personal communications of
their opponents, they had either to hire “moles” to infiltrate the campaigns,
steal written data and copy them (during Ed Muskie’s abortive run for the
Democratic nomination in late 1971/early 1972 there was a Nixon staffer in his
campaign doing just that!) or break into their offices and plant bugs (as
Nixon’s people had done successfully
in May 1972 — only the bug they placed on the phone of the chair of the
Democratic National Committee didn’t work and the one they placed on the
treasurer’s worked but mostly captured him making dates with various women, or
trying to — it was to fix the bug
on the chair’s phone that they broke in on June 17, 1972 and that time were
caught).
Now all they have to do is hack the other campaign’s computer files —
or get a volunteer from this country or another one to do it for them — the
current special counsel, Robert Mueller, seems to be focused on an alleged
pipeline in which Russia hacked the e-mail accounts of Hillary Clinton and her
key campaign officials, notably John Podesta, then turned them over to the
supposedly independent WikiLeaks organization headed by Julian Assange (a
Swedish native who settled in Britain and became a hero to the American and
worldwide Left when his group exposed video of U.S. war atrocities in Iraq,
then a villain when he decided that between Clinton and Trump, Trump was the
lesser of two evils and he was going to do whatever he could to ensure that
Trump won), which in turn allegedly coordinated the releases of Clinton’s and
Podesta’s e-mails with longtime Trump confidant and dirty-trickster
(essentially Trump’s Donald Segretti) Roger Stone so they could be timed with maximum
effectiveness to destroy Clinton’s election chances and boost Trump’s.
Computers have facilitated political espionage the same way they facilitated
identity theft — once upon a time, if you wanted to assume someone else’s
identity, you had to forge physical documents saying you were that person; now
all you have to do is hack into their online accounts and take them over. The
other obvious contrasts between Nixon and Trump are the sheer unscrupulousness
and boorishness of Trump compared to Nixon, who for all his own ethical
challenges still wanted to appear
to the public as a man of moral rectitude: Trump couldn’t care less, and one of
the most striking things about the re-creations of the White House
conversations of the Nixon years in this show (with a cast of actors playing
Nixon and his staff) is how vividly they demonstrate that Trump is willing to
say in public things Nixon only dared say in private, including denouncing the
media and major celebrities as “enemies.” (One oddly wince-inducing moment is a
clip from a TV news broadcast announcing the release of Nixon’s “enemies’ list”
in which Bill Cosby is among the names on it. Today, of course, Cosby is
notorious for something quite apart from his politics!)
The other big
difference between Nixon and Trump — though this is one that America’s voters
may be able and willing to change on November 6 — is that Nixon had to face a
Congress controlled by the opposition political party, and Trump has not.
What’s more, Nixon lived in an era in which there was much less partisanship in
Washington, D.C. than there is now; there were three Republicans on the Senate
Watergate committee — Howard Baker, Lowell Weicker and Edward Gurney (though in
this program Gurney is misidentified as a Democrat) — and of these three only
Gurney was a total Republican loyalist. Weicker staked out a position as an
independent early on and made it clear he was going to be as tough in his
questioning of White House staff people as any of the committee’s Democrats;
and Baker, after starting the investigation as Nixon’s point man on the
committee (he was secretly leaking documents about where the investigation was
going to the White House), stepped back early on as he was personally appalled
by what the White House had done and became a tougher, more independent
committee member. Today the committees in Congress supposedly “investigating”
Trump are controlled not only by Republicans but by Republican toadies as well
— there doesn’t seem to be anyone
in Congress with the level of independence of Weicker (who ultimately got
driven out of the Republican Party and continued his political career as an
independent), Baker, Congressmember Tom Railsback (who became the weather vane
on the House Judiciary Committee as to whether there would be any Republicans
willing to vote to impeach Nixon, and whose other claim to fame was carrying
the bill to authorize a government apology and financial compensation for the
Japanese-Americans interned during World War II) and Senators Barry Goldwater
and Hugh Scott, who met with Nixon after the release of the so-called “smoking
gun” tape (from June 23, 1972, just six days after the Watergate break-in, in
which Nixon O.K.’d the plan to have CIA director Vernon Walters tell acting FBI
director L. Patrick Gray not to investigate Watergate because it was a
“national security” issue) and told him he would need to resign or there would
be enough Republican votes in the Senate for the two-thirds majority to convict
him and remove him from office.
The Republican fealty to Donald Trump — even
among people who opposed him originally, and even among people he viciously
insulted when they ran against him for the Republican Presidential nomination
in 2016 (like Texas Senator Ted Cruz, who’s eagerly accepting Trump’s help in his
re-election campaign even though Trump once called him “Lyin’ Ted” and accused
Cruz’s father of being part of the conspiracy to assassinate President John F.
Kennedy on the basis of a photo in the National Enquirer, supposedly taken in 1963, of two blurry figures in
a restaurant together which the Enquirer said were Cruz’s father and Lee Harvey Oswald) — is amazing by
comparison and the biggest thing Trump has going for him. Indeed, I am
convinced that if the Republicans maintain control of both houses of Congress
this year (they are virtually certain to keep and even expand their majority in
the Senate and have a good chance
of holding on to the House of Representatives as well), Trump will respond by
staging a “Saturday Night massacre” of his own, firing attorney general Jeff
Sessions and deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein and installing a new
attorney general who will in turn fire special counsel Mueller and make the
entire Trump-Russia investigation go away — and Republicans throughout the
country will applaud the move while Democrats will stew helplessly in their own
juices.
