Last night the History Channel showed the first two parts of a quite fascinating four-part (four-hour) documentary on the Watergate scandal, produced, directed and written by Charles Ferguson and noteworthy for the sheer number of people he got to interview — including Bob Woodward, Carl Bernstein, Pat Buchanan, Daniel Ellsberg and John Dean. (He also reached out to Henry Kissinger and Donald Segretti, but they declined.) The show was one of the better Watergate documentaries I’ve seen, focusing largely on Richard Nixon’s “dark side” — his penchant for “dirty tricks” and unscrupulous campaign tactics that dated back from his earliest days in politics (his 1946 and 1948 campaigns for the House and his 1950 run for the Senate against Helen Gahagan “Pink Lady” Douglas) — indeed, though the name Murray Chotiner (Nixon’s first political consultant) wasn’t mentioned in this program, it was he who basically wrote the playbook later followed by H. R. Haldeman, Lee Atwater, Karl Rove and others. The imdb.com page on the show features a synopsis contributed by Mike Rankin, who writes, “Numerous current-day parallels are elegantly understated.” That’s probably the biggest strength of this program: instead of tapping us on the shoulder and continually pointing out the comparisons (and the contrasts) between Richard Nixon and Donald Trump, we’re allowed to see them for ourselves.
The show also makes clear that Watergate — the June 17,
1972 break-in at the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee and the
resulting cover-up that literally reached into the Oval Office and ultimately
took down Nixon’s presidency less than two years after his triumphal landslide
re-election in November 1972 — was just part of a much broader plan to rig the
1972 election. As I’ve pointed out in these pages before, Richard Nixon won the
presidency with only 43 percent of the vote — though at least he, unlike Donald
Trump, got more popular votes than any of his opponents — and this made him
determined to do whatever it took to get the stain of illegitimacy off of his
administration. His first attempt was to win the U.S. Senate for the
Republicans in 1970, and when that failed — largely because a lot of voters
were turned off by the bellicose rhetoric and character assassination he used
in that campaign — he then decided that he would not only seek re-election, he
would seek to be re-elected by such a huge margin there would no longer be any
question about whether he deserved the office. Nixon was also a man from a poor
background and he’d grown up with a heavy sense of status anxiety, at once
envious and bitterly hateful of people with Ivy League backgrounds who had
never had to worry about whether there’d be food on their tables that night.
Nixon’s 1960 loss to John F. Kennedy (the first election he’d ever lost) stung
him precisely because Kennedy was the embodiment of everything Nixon hated —
except for one thing: Kennedy wasn’t Jewish, and Nixon was bitterly
anti-Semitic (the White House tapes, excerpts from which are extensively
dramatized on this show with a cast of actors that don’t always match their
real-life prototypes that well — though Nixon is one of the most excruciatingly
difficult roles for any actor to play
because so much footage exists of the real one to which the performance can be
compared) and regarded the Jews as the masterminds of all the conspiracies
against him. He was particularly convinced that one reason the media were
against him was that the major news outlets were all owned by Jews — the
Sulzberger family at the New York Times,
Katharine Meyer at the Washington Post
(she inherited the paper following the suicide of her husband, Philip Graham,
so she was known as “Katharine Graham” during the Watergate era but she was
still from a Jewish background), and William Paley at CBS in particular.
Nixon
anticipates Donald Trump in a lot of ways but not in others; unlike Trump,
Nixon was an experienced politician when he was elected President, and there
were many positive things he wanted to accomplish: not only the ones mentioned
in this show — the U.S. opening to mainland China and détente with the Soviet Union — but a few others: he seriously
proposed a guaranteed annual income and a universal health-care plan (these
were both the brainstorms of Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who briefly worked for
Nixon in 1969-1970 and tried to sell him on the idea of being another Disraeli,
a conservative who would put the liberals out of business by co-opting their
programs), and it was Nixon who signed into law all the landmark environmental
bills (the Clean Water Act, Clean Air Act and the creation of the Environmental
Protection Agency) Trump is so enthusiastically attempting to sabotage. Nixon’s
campaign not only to win re-election in 1972 but to do so with such a landslide
margin his legitimacy could never again be questioned and he’d have more
leverage to get his program through than he’d had in his first term encompassed
both positive and negative things — in
one sense, he compares to Trump as Napoleon compares to Hitler: both Napoleon
and Hitler occupied much of Europe and imposed their rule on other countries,
but Napoleon’s occupations had some positive aspects (many of the countries
Napoleon had conquered kept some of his social and legal reforms after his
final defeat) while Hitler’s were just
destructive. Nixon’s positive accomplishments have largely endured — mainland
China is a major industrial power (with the ironic result that they decimated
the U.S. industrial economy by offering American corporations much cheaper
workers and thereby moving much of our production there), the Soviet Union
ultimately collapsed and, despite Trump’s best efforts, so far there is at
least some remaining commitment on the
part of the federal government actually to protect the environment.
One of the
things about Watergate is how technologically primitive the whole thing seems
to be by comparison with what the Russians allegedly did to hack the 2016
Presidential election — and, paradoxically, how much easier Watergate is to
understand than the current scandal. When five people, including the head of
security for the Republican National Committee, were arrested for burglarizing
and attempting to bug the Democratic headquarters, people reading the news
coverage didn’t need elaborate explanations as to why that was a crime. The
charges being brought by current special counsel Robert Mueller are so
intricate and complicated he’s had to resort to what prosecutors call
“narrative indictments” — not just bare statements of what the person or
persons are alleged to have done and a simple citation of the criminal statutes
that make it illegal, but elaborate explanations of how the crimes were done.
It’s also sobering to realize how much the rise of computer technology has made
it easier for campaigns to spy on each
other electronically: instead of going to the trouble of breaking into
opposition headquarters and risking physical arrest, modern-day political
saboteurs (domestic or foreign) can
“break in” electronically. One of the most interesting parts of this program is
the revelation that Nixon’s campaign had a “mole” inside the primary campaign
of Ed Muskie, the front-runner for the Democratic nomination until his
emotional meltdown in New Hampshire in early 1972 (itself triggered by two of
Nixon’s “dirty tricks” engineered by his sabotage operative, Donald Segretti,
to ensure that Muskie wasn’t the Democratic nominee and the more progressive
but also easier to defeat George McGovern was) who was making physical copies of Muskie’s schedule and all his analytical work and running them to Nixon’s
re-election campaign. Today, of course, they could just hire someone with
computer hacking skills and steal all those data electronically — and indeed
one of the key allegations Mueller and his team are making against the Russians
is that they did just that.
So the indictments Mueller has filed thus far are
filled with definitions of terms like “phishing” and mentions of crazy screen
names like “Guccifer 2.0” (the original Guccifer 1.0 was apparently the alias
of a single person, a legendary Romanian hacker, and the team behind “Guccifer
2.0” apparently adopted the name in tribute to him) that only make the scandal
more confusing — and confusion is a prosecutor’s nightmare because the more
explaining you have to do about why a
particular conduct you’re accusing the defendant of is illegal, the more room
you create for an acquittal based on “reasonable doubt.” The increasing
reliance on computers not only to do our work but to store our data has
powerful and profoundly negative consequences for data reliability and the
whole idea of “truth” — in George Orwell’s 1984 he mentions in passing that the largest department within
the Ministry of Truth was the one that gathered all the records of the past —
newspapers, magazines, books, recorded broadcasts, films — that no longer
agreed with what the Party was now saying “the past” had always been — and
destroyed them, replacing them with new ones. This was considerably more
difficult to imagine in Orwell’s time than it is today because it’s far easier
to erase and alter digital records than physical ones! Aside from that, the
other fascinating thing about Watergate, especially the way it’s presented here
— Ferguson uses snippets of the actual White House tape recordings to introduce
his re-creations with actors of the key conversations in the Watergate cover-up
— is it highlights one difference between Nixon and Trump. Nixon publicly
presented an image of rectitude, and a rather prissy rectitude at that — after
Nixon resigned, H. R. Haldeman complained on a CBS news interview that the use
of the phrase “expletive deleted” in the transcripts of the White House tapes
released by the Nixon administration made them sound dirtier than they were —
while in the private conversations recorded on the tapes he was considerably
more profane. Donald Trump is as profane in public as Nixon was in private; he not only rejects the norms by
which men in power usually present themselves, he wants the American people to
believe that that very rejection proves he’s more “authentic,” more honest and
more “one of them.”
A few weeks ago Lawrence O’Donnell went into a fascinating
little riff at the end of one of his MS-NBC shows and wondered out loud why
Trump had such a sense of status anxiety — unlike Nixon, he did not come from a poor family, he didn’t have to deal with the
trauma of losing two of his brothers in infancy and he wasn’t looked down on by
the cool kids from the rich families — except Trump was looked down on by the cool kids from the rich families
because his father had made his fortune in the outer boroughs of New York City,
and not only does New York believe (to paraphrase the famous song) that if you
haven’t made it there, you haven’t made it anywhere, you haven’t really made it
in New York until you’ve made it in Manhattan. Listening to O’Donnell’s
question — why does Donald Trump have such a sense of status anxiety? — I found
myself answering the question in one word: “Queens.” Queens is the borough in
which Donald Trump was born and grew up; it’s also where the TV show All in
the Family (an artifact of the Nixon
years!) was set, and it occurred to me that who Trump really is is Archie Bunker with money. Other than that, much of
Trump’s playbook was set in the Nixon years — it was Pat Buchanan who cooked up
the strategy of blaming the media and their lousy coverage of Nixon for
anything that went wrong with his presidency, and as with so much of Nixon’s persona, he called the press “enemies” in private while Trump
calls them “enemies of the people” in public. It’s precisely Trump’s
willingness to be as vicious and profane in public as Nixon was in private[1]
that made him seem like such a breath of fresh air to Right-wingers who had
been Nixon’s “silent majority,” who had watched All in the Family and taken Archie Bunker’s character to heart (much to the
horror of Norman Lear, who created the show based on a British model, and
Carroll O’Connor, who played Archie — both were liberals who had meant Archie
as a satire of racist, bigoted conservatism, not an heroic embodiment of it!)
and who in later generations had formed the audience for Right-wing talk radio
and Fox News, and when Trump emerged were enthused about being able to vote for
a Presidential candidate who sounded like a talk-show host.
Watergate, like the
censure of Senator Joe McCarthy in 1954 and the defeat of Barry Goldwater’s
Presidential candidacy in 1964, was little more than a temporary defeat in a
long-term war the American Right has basically won, redefining the style of
American politics as well as its ruling principles and moving us definitively
away from the social-welfare state Franklin Roosevelt and a Democratic Congress
(reacting to a lot of pressure from
people’s street movements and labor organizing below!) created in the 1930’s
and Lyndon Johnson and his Democratic
Congress tried to expand in the 1960’s — and whenever one of the “good guys”
win temporarily (as Carter did in 1976, Bill Clinton in 1992 and Barack Obama
in 2008), it seems right now like it’s only a brief respite and pause in the
march of America (and, increasingly, the rest of the world as well) ever
Rightward to nationalism, economic libertarianism and social conservatism. When
Richard Nixon took office, John Mitchell, his campaign manager and later his
attorney general (and still later convicted Watergate cover-up conspirator),
said, “We’re going to turn America so far Right you won’t recognize it” — and
that’s exactly what they have done. It’s only unfortunate that last night the
History Channel only showed the first half of this compelling documentary,
breaking off with John Dean’s “cancer on the Presidency” remarks at the White
House meeting on March 21, 1973 and leaving the rest of the story — the
appointment of two special prosecutors, the televised hearings of the Senate
Watergate committee, the “Saturday Night Massacre” in October 1973 in which
Nixon fired the attorney general, deputy attorney general and special
prosecutor (a show we’re almost certainly in for a rerun of in the next few
days, especially if the Republicans
keep both houses of Congress in the midterms and therefore Trump doesn’t have
to worry about any serious investigations from the legislative branch!), the
impeachment hearings before the House Judiciary Committee and Nixon’s final
resignation on August 8, 1974 — for later.
[1] — It’s indicative of how Nixon wanted to be viewed as
“above the fray” in public that instead of delivering the big anti-media speech
Pat Buchanan wrote in 1969, he delegated his vice-president, Spiro Agnew, to do
it for him.
