Downstream from Watergate
Getlein, Frank
of the outside China-watcher. It may simply be that Daubier (and to a far lesser extent Esmein) allow politics to obscure their vision, and it is quite possible that men with a more detached...
...WILBUR MILLS AND LENNY BRUCE 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 MEDIA Should we be surprised that there have been so many jokes in the media about Wilbur Mills...
...to our consequent violent and often effective opposition to democratically elected regimes...
...If experience is the best teacher, it is also the most expensive teacher...
...If it can cause us to wake up from the anti-Communist dream which has long ago turned into a nightmare, Watergate will be worth its costs...
...Anti-Communism came into existence to stave off what was seen as a Soviet threat to engulf the world, starting with Europe, and to "roll back," in Nixon's words, the Red tide in Eastern Europe...
...The columnists have been warning of the dangers to privacy and good taste in all this, and admittedly a sweeping iconoclasm in the media can confuse issues, obscuring the distinction between private lives and public performances...
...This is the most important lesson of Watergate and it is one that neither the nation nor its leaders, not even the political party against which the attack was aimed, give any sign at all of grasping...
...and, Who profited from all this...
...to the inflation that is the unavoidable consequence of military spending on our scale...
...Second, the supercorp reps in the White House are stiU there...
...The caper was staged, according to this account, because national security was endangered by George McGovern's willing bondage to Fide1 Castro...
...Anti-Communism became policy in the wake of the savage and sinister Soviet takeover of Czechoslovakia early in 1948, a takeover preceded by essentially similar actions in Poland, Hungary and Rumania and by the forthright occupation in World War II of the former Czarist Baltic provinces...
...What he found, of course, was anti-Communism at its most paranoid and hence its most dangerous to the Republic, to individual citizens and indeed to the entire world...
...Howard Hunt at Howard Johnson's was the equivalent of the Turk at the gates of Vienna...
...That's a hell of a return on four hundred grand...
...DOWNSTREAM FnOM WATER(;ATE FRANK GETLEIN The uses of anti-Communism Gerald Ford, along with most Republican candidates, has been urging the nation to "put Watergate behind us," as, for that matter, Richard Nixon used to do...
...Actually the nature of the politicians attracted to anti-Communism should have given us fair warning: from Joe McCarthy and Tom Dodd of Connecticut and many others including the young Nixon, right to the old Nixon we have learned about at last, there was quite regularly an element of funny business with funds...
...But if this is true, and if the attacks against Liu Shaoch'i in the mid-sixties, or against Lin Piao today are to be taken at face value, if we really are to believe (as the Peking Review told us on February 8th) that Lin decorated his bedroom with maxims from Confucius, then we might as well stay home and get our news from the official journals...
...Now that the freaks have been ousted, the theory continues, we can all rest easy because now we know the system works...
...Wander about in a daze...
...It is easy to think of John Mitchell and Maurice Stans as a couple of comical confidence men, one of them dreaming up anti-trust suits and similar government botherations, the other running around with the black bag collecting the contributions that call off the harassments, but to think that is to miss the point...
...They are questions which I think have been dealt with more satisfactorily by China-watchers like Kamow...
...The system as system was all geared up to try Hunt and Liddy and the Fritos banditos for a burglary committed out of thin air and for no particular reason except a taste for burglary...
...Watergate as freak show misses everything that's important about it...
...Even if Haldeman and Ehrlichman go to prison, Watergate should not be put behind us...
...It is conceivable that the widespread defeat of Republicans in the elections accomplished just that...
...Meanwhile, the Soviets have demonstrated that they can't ~take Communist Yugoslavia, let alone the world...
...Besides all that, Watergate was also something else and here we will be suicidal if we neglect the lesson and laugh our fool heads off at the freak show...
...The reason, I think, is simple: Chinese propaganda at the time played up the rivalry between Mao Tse-tung and Liu Shao-ch'i, the personal aspect of the revolution...
...And yet when all is said and done it is precisely this aspect on which they too concentrate...
...Accepting the danger of jokes in public forums on these subjects, we compare notes over the phone, at parties or in supermarket lines, exchanging weird "scenarios" which might explain the Resignation, the Pardon and so on...
...The operating theory of the burglars was that Fidel was bankrolling the Democrats in exchange for the promise of recognition and economic aid once President McGovern took office...
...If it causes us to re-examine the anti-Communist base of our actions in the world and against ourselves, Watergate will have been a very cheap price for an absolutely essential educational leap...
...Two concluding notes on this aspect: it is of the highest significance that one of the final public utterances of Nixon on any non-Watergate matter when he was still prowling about Dunsinane Castle on Pennsylvania Avenue was that the inflation, which had somehow been brought to his attention, would be cured by repeal or relaxation of the government controls which have been instituted, over the years, to protect us, however inadequately, from the greed of the supercorps...
...But when institutions and conventions become corrupt or oppressive, it can be therapeutic to peek rudely behind the curtain, to see precisely how ridiculous the Wizard really is, standing there in his undershorts...
...Or did life in Peking in those years tend to turn one towards the orthodox sources...
...A prime lesson of Watergate is that some responsible Congressional committee is going to have to find out everything that crowd of permanent adolescents has been up to and make them stop doing a lot of it both at home and abroad...
...Commonweal: 213...
...perhaps, anomalous though it may sound, they are questions which can be asked only by those who stand far enough away from Peking to see it clearly...
...Take pills...
...But there were some very real questions which transcended this rivalry, questions dealing ultimately with the Maoist vision for China, and with the immediate and long-range effects of the Revolution itself...
...Mills has taken the brunt of a frustration that has been teasing us for months: Having established that so many majestic figures in government are all too human, we now seem to want to know everything...
...We know the answers...
...As the supreme anti-Communist of this anti-Communist troupe, Nixon naturally took in more money than the rest of them put together, told bigger lies, caused more harm, betrayed more people and ended, in the tradition, by retiring to private life to avoid going to jail...
...The point is that Watergate, besides being the freak show we follow daily in Judge Sirica's court and in Richard Nixon's medical Dow-Jones averages, and besides being a kind of try-out for the CIA's big-time entry into domestic right-wing politics, was also a deadly serious effort by the supercorps at the take-over of the United States government...
...One area that needs further investigation is the role of the CIA...
...Another major lesson of Watergate that has been largely ignored while we have all been enjoying the freak show comes from the answers to two elemental questions of routine police investigation of crime: Where did the money come from...
...It may or may not be remembered that shortly after he was captured by the forces of law and order, Hunt leaked to a close friend, who is this country's best known if not best right-wing journalist, the inside story of Watergate...
...While they remain in office, keep your back to the wall and your hand on your wallet because they are out to kill the cops who protect you--inadequately--from their once and future associates and paymasters in superbiz...
...Could Hunt really have believed that...
...In some ways the agency's involvement in Watergate is more frightening than its murder of Salvador Allende, for it shows that the CIA, despite its charter, is perfectly prepared to do to Americans all the nasty Commonweal: 211 things Americans thought they were paying the spooks to do to foreigners...
...The belief presumably was that in the files of the Watergate headquarters of the Democratic National Committee would be found a copy of the contract, in Spanish and English...
...Hence the official accounts made it sound as if it really did matter whether Mao or Liu emerged triumphant from the Central Committee infighting, and made the power struggle seem very important indeed...
...It has also unleashed a peculiar kind of political charlatan upon us...
...The fraudulent nature of anti-Communism as policy may also be studied in its achievements, or lack thereof...
...Watergate was the grand climax, the supreme act of hubris and the ultimate bankruptcy of anti-Communism in America...
...He apparently sold the story to the Fritos banditos as well as to his right-wing journalist friend, but all of these people are by definition naive, anxious to believe the most melodramatic accoutrements to their private dreams of antiCommunist glory...
...The system as system has, in fact, allowed the head freak to retire to palatial exile and prepare for a comeback either in person or as an inspiring myth-figure who selflessly resigned for the good of the country when he failed to get a vote of confidence, presumably in the House of Commons because that's where they have those things...
...money somehow stuck to their fingers and had to be explained away...
...Treasury...
...Watergate was merely the last major gift of anti-Communism to the American people and was hardly the worst...
...Whether that is the case or not, however, putting Watergate behind us is the last thing in the world we ought to do with it...
...The tide has not been rolled back an inch nor has there ever been anything like a serious effort on anyone's part, including Nixon's, to roll it...
...similarly, although Howard Hunt has been in and out of jail, the cause for which he burgled at home and did God knows what abroad is still very much alive...
...the talk of the "struggle between two roads" was put in terms of divergences between individual members among the leadership...
...This time burglary on the home ground, next time murder, if indeed that next time hasn't already occurred...
...One central strand of the whole scandal had to do with the location of the Republican convention...
...to establishing something very close to an economic military dictatorship in our own country...
...Finally, both these authors deprecate, quite correctly, the common western view of the Revolution as power struggle pure and simple...
...It may simply be that Daubier (and to a far lesser extent Esmein) allow politics to obscure their vision, and it is quite possible that men with a more detached view, had they been permitted to live in Peking at the time, would have written more widely ranging books...
...Haldeman and Erlichman, from this point of view, were clowns, hardly distinguishable from Agnew the crook: the serious people were Simon, Butz and Ash and they still are...
...What was it like during Nixon's last White House days...
...This liberation of our wild imaginings is probably a job for satirists, however, rather than investigative reporters---the plain facts are really not suflicient-- and indeed recent events have unleashed the satirist in everyone...
...Wilbur Mills, a safer target, has finally given us some good dirt to get hold of, a foothold for dark fantasies...
...It has led directly to our sup29 November 1974:212 port of military dictatorships around the world, even to creating military dictatorships where none existed...
...Since we have paid amounts still not fully calculated for the Watergate expereicne, we would be foolish to put it behind us without learning all we can from it...
...We want to know about the real relationship between Nixon and Zeigler, Ted and Joan, Rockefeller and Ronan...
...Actually, of course, we know nothing of the sort...
...Prevented by Ford from getting at the real criminal, the voters took out their wrath and disgust on the only available surrogates--another Nixonian idea that lives on in the new age...
...Sometimes the explanations were not accepted and the anti-Communist crusader went to jail or retired to private life...
...What they got in return was government favors...
...Anti-Communism abroad has killed thousands of American youths in two absolutely pointless wars and is now conducting a permawar in Indochina...
...It has corrupted the noble concept of foreign aid, sending shells instead of soybeans and tragically delaying if not making impossible the self-sufficiency of many third world peoples...
...Almost since the end of World War II, anti-Communism has been an unrelieved disaster for this country, yet it remains the only readily discernible unifying theme of our foreign policy and from that fulcrum has worked irreparable harm upon the domestic economy and the American society...
...to causing to exist an ever increasing number of nuclear warheads which any child knows are simply dangerous to have around...
...ITT picked up the $400,000 tab it took to get it in San Diego--the Diegans rebelled or that's where it would have been--and, by astonishing coincidence, not only did the Justice Department decide to settle its pending anti-trust suit out of court on terms extremely favorable to the conglomerate, but, as we learned only recently, the CIA sent its thugs into Chile to turn back the dread threat of social justice, murder Allende and restore ITT to its former position of shared dominance in the Chilean economy...
...He quickly became a stock character in Johnny Carson's monologues, along with Ralph, the used-car salesman, and he has been depicted in newspaper cartoons careening through the Capitol corridors with a girl over his shoulder, bubbles wafting around his head...
...Anti-Communism at home has unleashed hundreds of agents to violate the constitutional rights of citizens, including military agents assigned to spy upon political dissenters...
...Did he drink...
...to devoting a steadily increasing part of our industry to military manufacture and the consequent administrative corruption of industry: military industrialists have lost the basic business ability to figure costs correctly and to make things that work as they are supposed to because the Pentagon requires neither of these...
...who in turn brought in even freakier subordinates until the chain included horrid little men like Howard Hunt and Gordon Liddy...
...In passing, it may be noted that having lost Vienna, the Turk is now established at the gates of the U.S...
...At the moment, there is little sign of such an awakening...
...The operating theory behind this treatment is that the head freak naturally surrounded himself with fellow-freaks FRANK GETLEIN, author o! Playing SoMier--A Diatribe, is criticat-large o/the Washington Star-News...
...The money came from supercorporations, conglomerates and international cartels of one kind or another, even the milk producers' "cooperative," which shelled out a good hunk of the hush money, being not without its international and supercorp aspects...
...Whether Hunt believed it or not, he found enough people in the White House who did believe it or something like it to set up a cash flow for burglary equipment and interstate travel for criminal purposes...
...We have been assured by at least two directors of that agency that it had nothing to do with Watergate, but we know that it had some part and we need to know completely what that part was...
...As if deliberately to make that educational process as difficult as possible, the press and the politicians have all but unanimously treated the whole affair as if it were some kind of psychological freak show...
Vol. 101 • November 1974 • No. 8
