Watergate: The Bottom Line

...If the whole of the late Confederacy were to be engulfed by a tidal wave tomorrow, the effect upon the civilized minority of men in the world would be but little greater than that of a flood on the Yang-tse-kiang...

...The Nixon Administration shared the common political preoccupation with the wrong issue—to wit, are the media for or against us...

...And yet, for all its size and all its wealth and all the 'progress' it babbles of, it is almost as sterile, artistically, intellectually, culturally, as the Sahara Desert...

...But let us not create a new oligarchical authoritarian structure outside of parties to bring about reforms, regardless of whether such reforms may be desirable on their merits...

...He then added, "On the heels of the violent denunciations of the elder Southerners there soon came a favorable response from the more civilized youngsters, and there is reason to believe that my attack had something to do$00...

...Unless our elected officials can choose, control, and direct their subordinates down to some significant level, they will be helpless to introduce or manage the policy changes which they were elected to carry out...

...The media can have a field day with alleged presidential subversion of a federal agency...

...He brings into sharp focus Mencken's numerous comments, both private (in his correspondence with writers) and public (in his newspaper and magazine articles), on what he considered wrong with the South and what he advocated as measures necessary to the correction of those wrongs...

...Something to do with the revival indeed...

...He was too intent upon setting up a contrast between what was once a civilization and what was then a barbarism to bother with the niceties of judicious thought...

...their power over elected officials is not confined to national security issues...

...And those that are called for are not even being discussed, let alone advocated...

...Buckley's response to the Times pointed out that those who work for the Times have a much greater influence on public policy than most Congressmen...

...Of course, these critics have no monopoly over inconsistency, but their criticisms are unjustified all the same...

...When it comes to voting, we accept the notion that our ability to exercise legal rights effectively is important, but no such question seems to be raised concerning the media...

...The impact of Watergate has instead been to focus attention on the rights of the media and their objectivity...

...No doubt his aristocratic prejudicies contributed to his overestimation of antebellum society...

...How times do change...

...If one believes in the importance of a two-party system—as I do—shortcomings in either party should not be viewed as a reason to abandon party politics but as all the more reason to become active in a party to improve it...

...The same persons who now assert that Nixon was responsible for the malfeasance of his subordinates, regardless of his knowledge thereof, were also criticizing him before Watergate for allegedly keeping too strong a control over them...

...After all, if there ever were a place where we have a right to expect the media to function effectively, it ought to be Washington...

...And yet, after a massive institutional failure to inform us adequately, the media have added insult to injury by proclaiming that Watergate illustrates the vitality of the media...

...My thesis is that the bottom line will be negative: the overall impact of Watergate will be to weaken this country and its chances for achieving a more stable and democratic society...

...Though Mencken was certainly not the first writer to attack Southern lethargy and ignorance—one recalls, in particular, the demolition work of Mark Twain—no other writer, before or since, has had such pervasive influence on the region...

...The notion that there is such an obligation is more consistent with anarchy than with accountable representative government...

...The media play an enormous role in answers to this question, but media personnel lack insight into public policy issues or their information requirements and cannot distinguish between the important and the trivial...

...It would be an enormous step forward if media personnel were required to make full income disclosures both as a professional obligationand as a term or condition of employment...

...These are some of the reasons why I believe the bottom line on Watergate will be negative...

...One hears much of presidential secrecy, very little about the conditions that render it imperative...

...The latter does not extend, of course, to the right to know media sources, the authors ofnewspaper editorials, or the extent to which the pockets of media personnel have been lined by sources with a, vested interest in what is presented as news...

...For instance, what are we to make of the tendency to criticize the president for appointing "colorless technicians" instead of policy makers who resign in principle or fight the president openly, or politicians with a constituency of their own...

...Nor is there any question that full financial disclosure, down to and including the reporter level, would significantly reduce such abuses, which are every bit as dangerous to our society as conflicts of interest affecting politicians...

...In raising this question, the Administration was not particularly concerned about our information needs but about its image in the media...

...Similarly, it appears that efforts were made to use the CIA to support a coverup of the Ellsberg break-in and illegal campaign contributions...

...In part, it is not "natural security" but accountable representative government that is at stake in the conflict over the power of elected officials to control their subordinates...

...Perhaps the saddest aspect of the situation pertaining to Nixon's tax returns is the way it has been described and interpreted: the prevailing view is that disclosure, if required at all, should be required only of public officials or candidates for public office...

...As a matter of fact, one could hardly hope for a better example of the need to make all (or nearly all) tax returns public information...

...Unless both critics and supporters of the Administration do some hard thinking about the institutional implications of Watergate, its real costs are likely to far exceed the pessimistic conventional estimates offered thus far...

...Retiev Serpent in Eden: H.L...

...If he had, he would not have limited the request to those whose names appeared on the Times masthead...

...Moreover, the thing was a bomb, not a rational analysis—neither in its inordinate praise of the Old South, nor in its denigration of the present, circa 1920...

...If our political parties are unrepresentative and unresponsive, let us make them representative, responsive, and accountable...

...This power, much too weak before Watergate, is likely to be further weakened by media preoccupation with alleged abuses, of presidential power, and a continuation of its historic neglect of abuses of bureaucratic power...

...States guarantee a huge market for those textbooks which they adopt for their school systems, so getting on the state adoption list is extremely important to publishers...

...I believe strongly that there never would have been a Watergate (or American involvement in the war in Southeast Asia) if we had alert independent The Alternative: An American Spectator December 1974 19 media personnel, who do not live on the handout and on leaks and who do not allow themselves to be used to mislead the public...

...How do we learn about the ability of federal bureaucracies to frustrate presidents, not simply on illegal requests but on matters of public policy which are per-ceived as threatening to the bureaucracies...

...Unless the authority and control of elected officials permeates downward to a significant, though not unrestricted, degree, the right and capability of our people to run their government is lost...

...For example, what information do we need to make and monitor public policy and to evaluate political candidates and programs...

...For example, many persons think Watergate demonstrates the need to weaken presidential control over the federal bureaucracies...

...Day after day, we are exposed to an endless series of claims relating to media rights...

...Some have portrayed the bureaucracies as heroic defenders of truth and justice, bravely resisting an administration determined to use it for illegal purposes...

...The extent of presidential delegation of authority should be seen as a presidential, i.e., a managerial decision...

...I recognize this is debatable...

...in its efforts to avoid the political fallout from Watergate, it is inadvertantly weakening the concept of party responsibility generally...

...There is not the slightest question that reporters on the Times are sometimes influenced by personal financial considerations in deciding what to write, and how...

...However, from the standpoint of institutional change, the situation has been a complete washout thus far, even though Nixon's tax records have provided the greatest political opportunity in decades to generate support for tax reform...

...For example, the New York Times has asked for income tax information from all major candidates in the tri-state area...

...On the other hand, the president is our only elected executive officer, and regardless of party, the president cannot run the government unless he can appoint and control his subordinates...

...The selection of instructional materials is often the most important decision about a curriculum made by school officials, but those states which wanted to add, eliminate, or modify curricula found it difficult to do so when the agency which controlled the selection of instructional materials was independent of the agency responsible for curriculum policy...

...Obviously, 'opposition to institutionalizing divided responsibility does not mean that it was wrong to prosecute those who offered or accepted bribes for adopting textbooks...

...Let me emphasize that I am not questioning anyone's legal or moral right to advocate or participate in activities such as Common Cause...

...These and similar incidents have evoked a flood of comment on the "imperial presidency...

...Although some candidates complied, or stated their intention of doing so, Senator James Buckley did not...

...They have a right to be present at the bargaining table when public employees are involved, to publish or broadcast material that jeopardizes a fair trial, to question presidents on a timetable of media choosing, always and in every way equating their rights with the public's "right to know...

...Mencken and the South by Fred Hobson, Jr...

...In practice, there appears to be no movement in this direction...

...It's not the simple truth that sets men free or even causes them to think, but rather the Truth appareled in shocking garments and blown up to epic size...

...For example, investigation and prosecution of suspected criminals should help to clean up government and to build up our faith in an effective system of justice...

...In must the same way, our institutional response (or nonresponse) to Watergate has been a disaster thus far...

...Nevertheless, although it is not the only contributing factor, Watergate is having this effect...

...This point extends far beyond private compensation by political figures...

...As editor of the Reviewer in Richmond, which she launched just as "The Sahara of the Bozart" made its appearance in 1920, Miss Clark was one of 20 The Alternative: An American Spectator December 1974...

...Such appointments are probably due to inability to get nominated and elected without deals...

...On the one hand, it is now impossible for us to believe, as Mencken believed at the time (he soon saw his error), that "Down to the middle of the last century, and even beyond, the main hatchery of ideas on this side of the water was across the Potomac bridges...

...And if that impact was more emotional than intellectual, that's only to be expected...

...One problem is that government cannot be conducted either for the convenience of the media or pursuant to the commandments of media columnists, commentators, and/or reporters...

...The available evidence indicates that efforts were made to use the IRS to harass opponents of the Administration and to provide favorable tax rulings for Administration supporters or donors to Administration-controlled campaign funds...

...The erosion of support for both major political parties does not necessarily follow from Watergate, but rather from some false assumptions about the significance of Watergate and of its implications for political parties...

...Fifty years ago Mencken's name was generally coupled with that of General Sherman or with the Antichrist...

...Recent public opinion polls show the lowest level of party identification in recent history...

...For example, the kind of truth—both undeniable and wildly outlandish—found in the opening paragraph: "Down there a poet is now almost as rare as an oboe-player, a dry-point etcher or a metaphysician...

...Our Media: The Real Problem Indeed, the most important negative in the entire Watergate situation is the way it has obscured, and made more difficult to resolve, the need for basic reform in the mass media...

...0 William H. Nolte A Irrigating the Sahara IN HIS SERPENT IN EDEN, Fred Hobson has written the first full account of Mencken's relations with and influence upon that small army of Southern writers who came of age during the 1920s—the period when the South, intellectually speaking, began to wake from its long postbellum slumber...

...The more one makes Woodward and Bernstein out to be heroes, the more one is forced to question the effectiveness and usefulness of the media generally...

...Why am I so pessimistic...

...many persons are not even aware that bureaucratic domination is a problem at all...

...The reasons for these views are clear enough...

...To see why this is so, we need to see the problem of presidential control in its proper perspective...

...Probably morethan any other of his essays, "The Sahara of the Bozart" proves that the best destructive criticism performs a constructive service...

...The Demise of Party Government My next point is that Watergate is weakening the role of political parties and of the two-party system in the United States...

...The incompetence of the media to understand our information needs, let alone to fulfill them, may well be the most important domestic problem we have, since it pervades and makes it all but impossible for us to solve the others on a rational basis...

...its editorial column paid tribute to the founder of the Bozart Press, begun in Atlanta in the late 1920s...

...and resort to, nonparty means of bringing about political action...

...But they are analyzed and discussed to the virtual exclusion of the competence of media personnel and of their effectiveness in identifying and fulfilling the information needs of the American people...

...Bureaucrats have frequently sabotaged domestic as well as foreign initiatives...

...What gave the essay its shock power was simply his delight in uncovering sham virtues and impaling pretentious and cocksure men on his rhetorical hook...

...Indeed, this is part of the problem...

...it often became so flagrant that in addition to prosecuting the bribe givers and takers, some state legislatures removed textbook adoptions'from the state education departments by creating independent state textbook commissions for the sole purpose of deciding which textbooks should be adopted...

...Theoretically, the electorate could believe strongly in the two-party system but nevertheless express its dissatisfaction with one at a given time by repudiating it thoroughly in various elections...

...Let me first illustrate the argument before stating it, using an example from the field of education...

...Of course, the Republican Party itself is partly responsible for this unfortunate development...

...there are probably single square miles in America...

...Both domination of elected officials by bureaucracies and attempts to subvert bureaucracies to illegal purposes are serious problems, but at present the former is more destructive: the federal bureaucracy exercises far too much control over elected officials and their policy-making and managerial appointees...

...One thinks of the interstellar spaces, of the colossal reaches of the now mythical ether...

...The media's own immunity from criticism in the media, and the political hazards of reform—which now more than ever will be interpreted as an attack upon free speech and an attempt to intimidate the media —leave us worse off than we have ever been in this area...

...Consider the implications of the hornap,c accorded to Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, the reporters for the Washington Post who are credited with breaking open die Watergate story...

...And although my basic argument does not depend upon support for this particular reform, it is an example of the kind of institutional change which might have been generated by Watergate, but which is not even being discussed...

...For example, a copy of Sahara, a little magazine of Georgia verse, recently crossed my desk...

...In this case, election of a president would obviously not mean very much...

...A man with a weak heart would hardly boast about his great health merely because he barely survived a heart attack...

...Even if the Republican Party hadbeen actively involved in the illegal and unethical activities (which it was not) and even if the electorate were fully justified in repudiating all Republican candidates (which it is not) it would not follow logically or be in the public interest to weaken the two-party system...

...The media do not simply report disagreements between high officials, dramatic resignations, and high level conflict...

...if they are against, how can we convince people of their bias...

...For sheer impact upon the whole region, the essay has no rival in all of American literature—and not by miles...

...It is, indeed, amazing to contemplate so vast a vacuity...

...Granted, these are important problems...

...I would be delighted to be mistaken, but see little merit in the argument that it is too early to evaluate the outcome...

...At the same time, there has been increasing support of...

...Competition for readers and viewers has led to an emphasis upon the sensational, the bizarre, the exotic, or the smart-aleck, while simultaneously providing a handy excuse for the avoidance of news that has a bearing upon the daily lives of millions...

...Things can get worse as well as better...

...Suppose an elected president could appoint only his secretary, whereas all other government officials held office regardless of who was elected...

...My only contention here is that their effect is to further weaken the position of political parties in our society.and this effect, whether intended or not, is likely to outweigh whatever benefits they bring about...

...therefore, Buckley went on, all those whose names appear on the masthead of the Times should disclose their net worth and income...

...He exaggerated as much in his praise of the past as he did in his assault on the present—probably more so, in fact...

...today he is considered one of the New South's Founding Fathers...

...Does anyone suppose that President Nixon could have taken the military and state departments into his confidence concerning the opening to China, and not been sabotaged in a hundred different ways by those in these bureaucracies and the armed forces opposed to such a development...

...Surely the competence of the media is as important as its legal rights...

...The President and his Bureaucrats Now the abuses mentioned above are extremely serious ones which cannot be accepted or condoned...

...The upshot is that the media, always so quick to emphasize the public's right to know, continues to frustrate the public's access to information that would eliminate or reduce major conflicts of interest affecting media personnel...

...They encourage, magnify, and thrive upon these developments...

...The issue is not simply, or even primarily, the right of elected officials to control their subordinates...

...The establishment of these textbook commissions, however, turned out to be an inadequate institutional response, and some were subsequently abolished for this reason...

...North Carolina $8.95 with the revival of Southern letters which followed in the middle 1920s...

...Evidence of the weakening of the role of both political parties comes from many sources...

...Myron Lieberman Watergate: The Bottom Line AA...

...At the same time, where and how does our society learn about the pervasive dependence of elected officials upon the bureaucracies for information, for formulation of policy options, for implementation of policies...

...When it appeared in the New York Evening Mail in 1917, "The Sahara of the Bozart" caused only a slight stir, but when refurbished and published three years later in book form (in Prejudices: Second Series), it caused an uproar throughout the South, the reverberations of which can still be felt from time to time...

...This is no justification for giving or carrying out illegal directions, but media criticisms of the president's allegedly tight control over his subordinates are clearly not limited to illegal activities...

...Moreover, Mencken tended to confuse the Old South with the civilization of northern Virginia...

...The emergence of Common Cause, Nader's Raiders, and "public interest" law firms are illustrations...

...regardless, tolerating opposition from subordinates is hardly superior in principle to the view that the person constitutionally chosen to run the government has to exercise effective control over his subordinates to do so, aiad is therefore under no moral or public policy compul18 The Alternative: An American Spectator December 1974 sion to appoint or rely upon opponents, actual or potential, to run the government...

...Their leadership is not accountable in any realistic way even to their own membership, which can enjoy the satisfaction of being public-spirited and above politics while undermining what is left of party activity and influence...

...For all practical purposes, these organizations lack political responsibility...

...When the last criminal has been jailed or pardoned, the last column written, the last politician elected or defeated on the basis of a position on Watergate, what will be the "net effects" of the complex of events called Watergate...

...Tax Disclosure and the Media I am also afraid that the controversy over President Nixon's tax records will have unfortunate consequences...

...not just politically but by plugs masquerading as news...

...If they are responsible for flushing out the truth about Watergate, what can be said of the media, when a vast panorama of illegality at the highest levels of government would apparently have gone unnoticed otherwise...

...And unlimited presidential control over the bureaucracies, or even greater control over them than presidents now have, would present some dangers...

...In an effort to solve this problem, it undertook an anti-media cam-paign which reinforced the neglect of media competence as a public policy problem...

...Indeed, by the middle twenties Mencken had become, as Emily Clark put it, a state of mind, a school of thought...

...No, the real tragedy of Senator Buckley's response is that it was offered as a forensic rebuttal, not as a serious proposal to be advocated and legislated...

...One would hardly make physicians responsible for medical treatment while according others the legal right to prescribe the drugs to be used by physicians, but independent textbook commissions institutionalized such inconsistencies in the field of education...

...But I fear that deleterious consequences will outweigh such beneficial ones...

...The institutional changes being advocated, like the independent textbook commissions discussed above, are likely to do more harm than good in the long run...

...All four state-wide candidates endorsed by the New York State Democratic Party lost in the September primaries, in some cases by overwhelming margins...

...In my view, the tragedy is that Senator Buckley was not reallly advocating his own argument seriously...

...Unfortunately, we are witnessing something more basic and more threatening than the temporary decline of one party...

...In saying this, I recognize that Watergate will have desirable as well as undesirable consequences...

...Those elected leaders who want to delegate authority and/or to appoint political opponents, or to rely upon politicians with independent constituencies, should be free to do so...

...Heroism is not to be denigrated, but it is a risky foundation for meeting our information needs...

...There are single acres in Europe that house more first-rate men than all the states south of the Potomac...

...The opportunities for manipulation of "news" for private gain by media personnel are so pervasive, and so bereft of any realistic checks or constraints, that it would be necessary to assume their sainthood to avoid the conclusion that we are being ripped off every day...

...Nevertheless, the major problem now is insufficient rather than overwhelming presidential control over them...

...Furthermore, a disclosure requirement would help to end the status of media personnel as the moochers par excellence in our society...

...When he included the famous essay in his Chrestomathy (1949), Mencken noted that it "dates sadly, but I have let it stand as a sort of historical document...

...The absence of political attention to the problem is understandable...

...Not surprisingly, bribery to achieve this result became common practice in some states...

...Mencken was overly modest...

...I am not referring to the adverse political impact of Watergate on the Republican Party, which might be viewed as a logical response to that party's responsibility for Watergate...

...Since the law providing for deductions for papers of historical interest has been repealed, conservatives and liberals alike seem to believe that what remains to be done is to force back payment plus interest, and prosecute for tax evasion if the facts so warrant...

...Of course, if the proposal were taken seriously, it would be recognized immediately that it should apply to TV and radio personnel, and others who control the flow of information and opinion to their fellow citizens...

...I believe that Watergate is accelerating the decline of both parties as a means of making public policy...

...Nearly the whole of Europe could be lost in that stupendous region of worn-out farms, shoddy cities and paralyzed cerebrums: one could throw in France, Germany and Italy, and still have room for the British Isles...

...That Mencken exerted an enormous influence on the region, acting as a kind of midwife to the rebirth of belles-lettres, has long been apparent to literate Americans, but it waited for Hobson to provide us with chapter and verse of the tale...