The Watergate Triangle
wheeler, Richard
Richard Wheeler The Wate rga te Triangle Although the press has by now expended far more verbiage on Watergate than on the Kennedy assassination, the psychic shock to the Republic so far...
...The sight of Nixonian Bright Boys revealing their intimacies before a graven panel of flyblown solons fascinates them...
...Without its a priori hostility to Richard Nixon, Republicans, and all who are right of center, without its lust for machismo, its eagerness to commit regicide Watergate would not have been blown into such unusual proportions...
...Indeed most come off with a handsome profit...
...Most of Mr...
...These were not pocketliners, but patriots, refulgent with a zeal to advance the power and security of their sort of president...
...There was the instance of Clark Clifford scurrying around to the Washington press to quash stories about the troubled Johnson aide Walter Jenkins, and the amazing gathering of the whole Camelot hierarchy at Chappaquiddick to put a gloss on events there...
...Our speaker discussed what he had learned in New York about investigative reporting, which is often a euphemism for such deep digging tactics as espionage, bullying information out of people, buying information--and electronic spying...
...There are exceptions, of course...
...America had to have a Watergate...
...Richard Nixon's actual powers and discretionary authority surely excel even t h a t of the sun-king, Louis XIV...
...That sort of mindless joy in snooping can be easily discovered in most of the nation's newsrooms, where press ethics are honored in the breach...
...Nixon and his cohorts turned out to be masters of the game, it is because they had excellent teachers in previous administrations...
...Bugging...
...It is a phenomenon of an increasingly corrupt public life t h a t its participants assume public and private personalities...
...The Robert Kennedy Justice Department had been turned into a giant political force, but where were the watchdogs...
...Here was a president who welcomed the Rev...
...Kennedy and Johnson...
...Camelot, too, had its unsavory aspects which might have occasioned some hard digging by the press...
...And old hound dog Ervin's hayseed eloquence draws them ever closer to their boob tubes, deluding them into dreaming that they The Alternative October 1973 7...
...A couple of years ago, when I was a journalist in Montana, I attended a meeting under news management auspices in which our speaker was a Helena bureau chief freshly returned from a seminar at the American Press Institute on investigative reporting...
...men who in private discuss the racy aspects of power--sex, money, campaign contributions, b l a c k m a i l - - with an easy certitude about their impact on public affairs, but who in public never so much as hint of such things...
...One wishes that each reporter who had similarly used bugs illegally might spend an equal time behind bars...
...In America, liberals are reactionaries and reactionaries are liberals...
...Men who punctiliously commend their own parties and leaders publicly, while raging a t them in private...
...Among the participants at the API seminar, according to our speaker, were a couple of Life reporters who instructed the group on the rises of electronic spying, and discussed pridefully their successful use of bugs to supply the material for several expos~ type stories in the magazine...
...The watchdog barks only at certain trespassers, namely Republicans and conservatives...
...But the press is in a vengeful mood, and is inclined to ap6 The Alternative October 1973 prove the Watergate justice...
...In America, the distribution of news is a labor of tycoons and a spectacle combining the art of burlesque with the art of a down home revival...
...But Watergate was not meant for them anyway...
...who has reminded us of the decline of Rome and its lessons...
...There may well be a drastic change in our political structure once the dust settles, including the possibility of multiparty politics if the two main parties die or decline from a lack of funds and trust...
...While the response to Watergate has been serious, the public is taking it in stride, perhaps because politicians are expected to act nefariously...
...No doubt you will be relieved to hear that a thorough diagnosis of the origins of this complicated condition is beyond my expertise or interest...
...The vacuous speculations of John Chancellor thrill them...
...But there remains the problem of watching the watchdogs...
...This is political pageantry unsurpassed by mortal man since the dawn of democracy...
...The press had been excluded from the meeting...
...Except for the JohnsonBaker pocketlining, the Democrats no less than the Republicans were motivated purely by the instinct for power...
...Now of course, all this is hearsay, but I have no reason to doubt the truth of it, especially when thc speaker was waving an issue of Life containing, he said, a story acquired by illegal bugging...
...America was the first nation on earth to disfigure itself with franchised parodies of the good life...
...Harassment of newsmen...
...And he surely harassed Jimmy Hoffa and Roy Cohn, among others...
...t h a t some are unabashed Jack Anderson types...
...It is with relief that they flee to their country clubs or to their taverns...
...They breathe easier in their baseball parks or before idiot boxes tuned to roller derby, professional wrestling, or "The Johnny Carson Show...
...Thus in Washington one finds men who publicly speak the King's English, but profane the air in private (Lyndon Johnson was such a one...
...Is there any doubt t h a t the Democrats had used nefarious means to maintain their power...
...None of this exonorates the Republicans, of course: rather, the point is that Watergate is a conscious, selective effort to redress the American political balance leftward, after its rightist drift...
...Then there was the bugging of State Department security expert Otto Otepka, and the perjured cover-up of t h a t event...
...that this press bugging was not employed to rout out malefactors or improve the public weal, but was used purely to satisfy a lascivious curiosity...
...She duly recorded the plans, which it turned out were not as damaging as the city editor had hoped, and their publication occasioned great glee in t h a t newsroom...
...It is in America that oily moralists roar for pornography, gentle humanists demand subsidized abortions, scientists revile science and businessmen denounce business--and no one suffers the consequences of his foolishness...
...It is uncertain what the future may bring...
...Coverup...
...They were the schizoid men of politics who did public things and private things, whited sepulchers...
...Wagner has combined with Berlioz to compose the score...
...Such struggles give rise to the underground politics of Watergate...
...If it is true t h a t Life reporters bugged sources illegally, would the gentlemen of the press agree t h a t such reporters should get the same twenty to thirty-five year sentences meted out to the Watergate conspirators...
...The American university is the product of the working man's taxes and the sanctuary for the anti-intellectual's indulgences...
...Cabell Phillips, in a book called The Truman Presidency, written in 1966, indicates that the press has been bugging its victims for a long time...
...It is not only Republicans and Democrats who have been twisted by power, but also the press, whose own hypocrisies outweigh all the others combined...
...There are few indeed whose public and private lives and utterances are mutually consistent...
...The press, now congratulating itself for playing the vigilant watchdog over the affairs of governors, conveniently forgets its own spying and electronic surveillance and dubious tactics...
...Our great Republic is crossed with a subtle schizophrenia, rendering us severe wowsers one moment and voluptuaries the next...
...Cover-up...
...Watergate is a beast with a lashing tail, a tail that may well strike Democrats and the press...
...Among those who have acquired a dual nature in the service of power is Richard Nixon...
...The history of both Democratic administrations is studded with circumstances which could have been blown into Watergate proportions if the press had been so inclined...
...The assassination was different: regicide committed by rifle savaged the American soul far more than regicide committed by news coverage, and thus the public concern about Watergate assumes a lower profile than the press coverage would indicate...
...In this sense, power has corrupted most politicians on the Potomac...
...Even Saint George MeGovern, we recollect, voiced differing public and private opinions about Senator Eagleton, and was thus among those who for the sake of power say one thing publicly, another thing in closets...
...Nixon's adult life had been spent in politics, to the point where the imperatives of power had remolded his character...
...It is a banquet prepared by Shaw and served by Fielding...
...Even before the caucus broke up, news wires across the country were crackling with speculations 'on the highest and most unimpeachable authority' that Adlai Stevenson's name would be put in nomination and he would not block it...
...Why did it not begin barking in 1964 when it was revealed that Senator Goldwater had been spied upon...
...The monstrous hypocrisy of it apparently never even occurred to those who were conducting it in behalf of the icons of virtue...
...Ask Pulitzer-prize winning Clark Mollenhoff about the stones turned over by the Johnson Adm i n i s t r a t i o n - w h i c h Mollenhoff had assailed--to prevent him from ascending to the presidency of the National Press Club...
...He was sincere...
...It is the denouement of America's lust for the lurid and the calamitous...
...Watergate is bread and circuses for an even lower species of Americano...
...It is powerful and prodigious medicine...
...There might at least have been an effort to trace the espionage to its source, even to the President if it had been authorized that high up...
...For it is obvious t h a t whatever crimes were committed were done before the altars of power rather than for personal gain...
...Phillips, writing in 1966 when the bugging issue had been well aired, chose to use tacit praise rather than condemnation of such tactics...
...Mere celebration of the ensuing whoopee is diversion enough for me...
...That surely ought to have sent the press into a spree of digging and moralizing, with scores of bloodhound reporters on the case...
...Extravaganzas and zaniness are everywhere...
...Only in America would such gaud sell...
...It is precisely because Mr...
...We are governed by kings, but we also elect our kings every four years rather than accept dynastic rule, and thus plunge ourselves into a ceaseless struggle for power, a struggle that has reached unconscionable dimensions...
...But has the press respectfully pleaded with Judge Sirica for a more temperate sentence...
...Note Phillips' use of the adjective"enterprising" in describing this sort of buggery...
...Eating at Camelot's table...
...Yahoo...
...Flatulent self-promoters lurk behind every bush...
...Indeed, it is the most colossal orgy ever thrown...
...The response among my colleagues was equally enthused...
...Obstruction of justice...
...There was not a one of his homilies t h a t he did not believe in the center of his soul...
...The sad thing is that such illegal activity by the press will eventually cause some grand juries to begin an investigation of invasions of privacy by the news media, and the result may well by a curtailment of our first amendment liberties...
...Only the American Republic contains the elements and the appetites for such gluttony, such profligacy, such statecraft...
...It is noteworthy, also...
...Totally sincere, totally earnest...
...Now admittedly some Americans have found the pageantry of Watergate revolting and burdensome...
...One can say this without regard for his technical guilt or innocence in the Watergate affair...
...In one sense, Watergate is the creation of the press...
...The list of absurdities runs interminably, and what catalyzes the whole gorgeous spectacle is that in America there is little sense of prudence, moderation, dignity, or decorum...
...From the memoirs of Robert Winter-Berger we learn t h a t Lyndon Johnson felt himself fully impeachable as the result of the financial manipulations of his prot~g~ Bobby Baker...
...One suspects, after all, t h a t such sentences are draconian, and t h a t one does not normally spend a quarter or a third of a lifetime in prison for a first offense of breaking and entering...
...Politicians act like clerics and clerics act like politicians...
...Attorney General Robert Kennedy apparently authorized bugs, and had a spat or two with J. Edgar Hoover about their use, if memory serves me correctly...
...Billy Graham gladly, who set a tone of piety in the White House, who resorted to Quaker philosophy, who saw the positive result of his efforts to calm the nation...
...For the next months, we will be treated to the accusations of three hypocritical factions, each calling the other kettles black...
...For example, no such monarch in prerevolutionary Europe had the power to conscript his subjects for military purposes, or to tax a third of their income away...
...It has yet to be explained how Ted Kennedy emerged from an apparent negligent homicide with nothing more than a slap on the hand...
...No essays about public morality or excess presidential power then...
...But in part, also, the growth of the office is the aftermath of triumph in World War II, followed by decades of cold war and constant crisis, all of which thrust imperial power on a people and government not particularly eager to assume such roles...
...America was the first nation to make education a national right and then an impossibility...
...Thus if Mr...
...The result is t h a t today American presidents--to put it in an unvarnished way--have the powers of absolute monarchs...
...Our speaker named several such stories, and noted that at the API seminar there had been little malaise about such illegal activity, because it helped newsmen fulfill their watchdog function...
...Thus one can take the self-congratulations of the press these days with more than a grain of salt...
...It was President Nixon who warned us that a Republic requires a virtuous citizenry...
...indeed, I was nearly the only one there who felt that the end did not jnstify such nefarious means...
...One of the more fascinating things to come to light in the wake of Watergate is the revelation t h a t the Kennedy regime had harassed Richard Nixon with IRS audits--which is a standard tactic of underground politics...
...No nation has ever seen anything like it...
...The prestigious API, at Columbia University, stands in relation to American journalism approximately as Mount Sinai stood to the J e w s - - i t is the source of the Word, the Law, and the Prophets...
...One wonders whether he would also tacitly praise the Watergate conspirators...
...Admirably they have complained to the networks about the Watergate telecasts, demanding that they be replaced by more seemly programs like "Search for Tomorrow" and the "Who, What, or Where Game...
...In fact, he reported, some had felt t h a t bugs were a positive good, and a vital investigating tool...
...The wider the difference between their public and private selves, the more corrupt they are...
...Prior to Watergate it was they and their minions who had acquired the public reputation for underhanded and nefarious politics--and not the Republicans...
...America with its bored congeries, its moralistic tubthumpers, and its deep reservoirs of self-guilt and self-contempt is a setting divinely endowed for such a fabulous show...
...It was instinctive both for him to be virtuous, even sanctimonious in public, and to establish t h a t virtue in private not by the force of reason, but by turning the White House into a commando post from which issue political raids on his opponents...
...We have been treated over the past four or five years to some remarkable presidential moral insights t h a t ought to have set the tone for his whole administration...
...While no final commitments were made one way or the other, it was obvious that Stevenson's name would go before the convention regardless of his wishes...
...The guerrilla war against political enemies and the press was abominable...
...Otepka had occasioned the Kennedy Administration's wrath by blowing the whistle against several of its appointees...
...That is the highest encomium normally paid to newsmen: the want ads in the trade publication, Editor and Publisher, bristle with requests for enterprising reporters and editors...
...Who has begged for the restoration of simple virtues, for abandonment of greed, swift punishment for criminals, tl/e restoration of calm, a justice reasonably balanced between public order and the rights of defendants...
...To the extent t h a t politicians have dual personalities, one of those personalities is serving the goddess of power...
...But the presidency, since the days of Franklin Roosevelt, is no longer the simple executive office of a New World republic, but r a t h e r the pinnacle of global power...
...And yet, was such spying by the incumbents any less nefarious than the spying by GOP incumbents?The press also had a chance to howl for the head of Lyndon Johnson in the Baker affair--Life had even detailed the evidence of the unseemly growth of Johnson's wealth in office...
...Richard Wheeler The Wate rga te Triangle Although the press has by now expended far more verbiage on Watergate than on the Kennedy assassination, the psychic shock to the Republic so far has not been comparable...
...As chairman of the delegation, Governor Stevenson pleaded earnestly with his fellow delegates neither to place his name in nomination nor to support such an action by any other delegation . . . . The assurances he had pleaded for were not given...
...But no...
...I found an excuse not to do so, and a young lady was sent in my stead...
...But the room had been %ugged' by an enterprising radio correspondent, and a group of other reporters, clustered behind a plastic room divider behind the speaker's table, overheard the entire proceedings...
...The judge is a reasonable man, and would surely listen if a respectful request for a better justice were directed to him by the press...
...The Democrats, seeking to maximize the damage but avoid a constitutional crisis, have two options: censure, or initiating an impeachment debate in the House, and then arranging a close--but failing--vote...
...The attacking politicians, the media moralists, and the keepers of public virtue are reading scripts prepared by Rabelais...
...The press, which usually accompanies its coverage of a scandal with backgrounders and histories of previous corThe Alternative October 1973 5 ruption in other administrations, has been curiously silent about recent history...
...In 1964, for example, at the height of the Goldwater campaign, the senator's press secretary, Vic Gold, threw a female Democratic spy out of the Goldwater entourage, and the press treated it as an amusing feature story, never bothering to inquire who had planted her there, never moralizing about political spying, never lusting to nail the crime on higher-ups in the Johnson Administration...
...Nixon had also devolved upon Messrs...
...Shattered hulks of humanity stumble about in the company of grinning clowns and the audience wheezes and gasps for more...
...One senses the hypocrisy of it all, even if the press is quite blind to the disorders in its own house...
...Their quavering and indignant targets are more suggestive of Beckett...
...This duality of politicians lies a t the heart of Acton's formula...
...Like the Nixonians who spied for political virtue, the press spies to uphold the public virtue...
...Liberals were infatuated with a strong executive, able to run around Congress and appeal directly to the people...
...But Watergate neither begins nor ends with Republican hypocrisy...
...The same monarchical power t h a t devolved upon Mr...
...In the Watergate embroglio, Lord Acton's famous aphorism has become flesh and blood--especially its l a t t e r half: absolute power corrupts absolutely...
...But there is a third factor in Watergate...
...In part, it grew to such incomprehensible power because liberals wanted to build the office...
...It would have glided by, even as Democratic scandals of comparable venality glided by previously...
...The stage sags beneath mounds of grappling limbs and sweating torsos, tortured visages and faces blossoming in triumph...
...So we are entitled to ask whether the press' opposition to electronic spying is principled...
...On page 421 he recounts a little bugging at the 1952 Democratic convention: "On the Sunday preceding the Monday opening of the convention, the Illinois delegation caucused in a private dining room of the Morrison Hotel in Chicago...
...For the Democrats to discover now t h a t all evil emerges from the bowels of the opposition party is to indulge in unspeakable cynicism...
...Watergate is for card-carrying members of the enlightenment mob, those highly cultivated minds whose cultural tastes are bootlegged from Europe, whose politics are imported from Latin America, and whose manners are untouched relicts from the religious wars...
...At that paper I had already waged my struggle against spying...
...These hinds are drawn to the pageantry of Watergate by the same kind of ineffable and unyielding attraction that draws lawyers to automobile accidents and to family brawls...
...What we have before us is a nation fraught with idiotic contradictions and full of joy...
...t h a t what is done and said for public consumption varies sharply from the private man...
...But all that is conjectural...
...R. Emmett T v r r e l l . J r . Watergate: The Cartoon Revisited There is something of the gorgeous, something almost of the voluptuous about the Watergate hearings, the Watergate conspiracy, the Watergate cover-up--the pious shrieks, the moral declarations, the newspaper revelations, the newspaper retractions, the presidential denials, the presidential clarifications, the eerie silence from certain famous Democrats who not long ago were so very windy, the occult analyses from the mountebanks of the New Age, whom history has jerked from the acute embarrassment of an unanticipated obscurity and sent squalling toward the embattled White House, a White House now silent, mysterious, and pathetic...
...I was to slip into the hotel where they were meeting, and listen to their campaign plans while hiding behind an accordion-like plastic room divider...
...If impeachment proceedings are inaugurated against the President, t h a t may change...
...It tantalizes the cosmopolitan Americans' appetites for luridity and calamity...
...It is common knowledge among journalists t h a t some reporters love to spy...
...Nixon and his cohorts believed deeply in law and order and decency t h a t they resorted to underground war to preserve t h a t vision...
...Our essential boredom is a veritable invitation to foolishness, and the transcendental populism of our self-anointed intelligentsia is an invitation to worse...
...Earlier, as a reporter, I had been assigned by an intensely liberal city editor to spy on some P,*'publican politicians...
Vol. 7 • October 1973 • No. 1
