PRESS: For the Gunder
Powers, Thomas
PRESS FOR THE GANDER THOMAS POWERS In certain circles eighteen months ago it was an article of faith (as well as an article of impeachment) that Richard Nixon did things as President no President...
...We know the CIA has been up to no good, and everyone involved swears they're going to be on the up-and-up from now on, yessir, but there is something specious in such assurances when they are based of necessity on a private agreement not to know exactly what it is we're not going to do any more...
...Like most other Nixon loyalists Safire eventually admitted the truth of the charges-what else could he do?-but he argued that a double standard of morality was at work...
...He would like to know why these revelations have been so slow in coming...
...It was never used...
...I am surprised...
...Church did not go down fighting...
...You are astonished, I am surprised...
...Satire naturally wonders what would have happened if Nixon had been surprised41 in similar circumstances...
...Frank Church...
...Four of the five were, in fact, murdered...
...The CIA designed a bolt for a car's engine block which would heat and release lethal fumes...
...In this instance, at least, there was one note of dissent Richard J. Walton, on the Op-Ed page of the Times, made a forceful argument that of course Kennedy knew about the attempts to kill Castro...
...People were upset by it, but they didn't dwell on it, and for the most part they didn't question it...
...The image of the Church committee which sticks with me-far more vividly than Ehrlichman's curled lip during the Watergate hearings, or Mitchell's phlegmatic denials, or Nixon's claim that "I am not a crook"-is Church, holding up an electrically-operated dart gun, a "nondis-cermible microbioculator," and accepting William Colby's bland assurance that because records are so spotty he just can't say for sure whether or not that gun was ever actually used, don't you know...
...Otis Pike and Sen...
...A double standard of sorts has been at work, Nixon war singled out, Re-publicans are arrested for speeding while Democrats get away with murder, and Watergate was less a national catharsis, than a vendetta...
...THOMAS POWERS AN APPEAL-A large social center in Madras is providing "means for the able-bodied to help themselves...
...so calmly accepted, once public...
...Reasons, alas, yet, of an old and familiar sort, but not good ones...
...They didn't like him...
...I'm not quite sure why this is so...
...The result has been an investigation which conceals as much as it reveals...
...No, my dear," said Johnson...
...I remember in particular an evening at the height of Watergate when Nixon gave one of his last televised speeches insisting he was innocent...
...So Safire, it seems to me, is right...
...It was never used...
...God knows what other malicious toys the ' CIA created...
...10802, or directly to Beatitudes Social Welfare Centre, 193-A Sundaramudaly St., Madras 600039, India (Airmail 310...
...Gracious no...
...It designed a fluorescent light which would do the same thing...
...But he didn't ask, just as he left open so many other questions-the FBI's 238 break-ins, the endless wiretapping, mail-opening, lying before Congress-for one simple and basic reason: He didn't want to know...
...The Church committee -and countless press reports echoing the committee- said there was no evidence the CIA had been involved...
...Partly this is the fault of a passive It is said that Samuel Johnson's wife once opened a pantry door and found her husband with a maid of the house...
...But none of them was ever used...
...it was cold and factual, just as it should have been...
...Investigating committees in a Congress dominated by Democrats overlooked the Watergate-style excesses of Kennedy and Johnson, and the Press pursued Nixon personally-for fiddling his taxes, for letting his wife keep jewels which were more properly gifts to the state, for accepting campaign contributions which were all but indistinguishable from bribes (but not, oddly, for personally ordering the secret bombing of Cambodia)-with a venom and energy entirely lacking where other political figures were concerned...
...Somebody else-I saw one report which said simply, "other enemies"-killed Lumumba...
...But in another sense, Safire is wrong...
...Watergate was one of those subjects which could strain families or sour dinner parties, in its early stages at any rate, when the facts could still be argued...
...the outraged editorialists and investigative reporters...
...He might have said, "Give us a list...
...At the end of the speech Roger Mudd asked Dan Rather for his reaction, and Rather ticked off the distortions and omissions: this ignored, that in blatant contradiction to the record, some other claim twisted out of shape...
...It refined enough shellfish toxin to kill 30,000 people, not...
...Rather had been paying attention to the facts- close attention, meticulous attention-and Nixon was trying to weave around, over, under and through them...
...He wants to wipe off smug Democratic' grins, watch the sweat break out on Democratic brows, see Democrats standing before the bench, holding up their trousers, as a black-robed judge hands out prison sentences...
...and I'm disappointed but not too surprised that Church is at least willing to live with it, but, like Safire, I can't see any good reason why the press should go along...
...No one paid that sort of attention to the Church committee, even though the crimes involved there-at the very least, conspiracy to commit murder-were of far greater substance than the corruption charged against Nixon...
...In much the same tone of voice the Church committee said it could not link any assassination conspiracy to any President The Presidents in question ought to have known, but they didn't, or at least we don't know that they did...
...There had been excesses, yes, these apologists conceded...
...Yes, Safire is right...
...But he is not, or at least does not seem to be, very much interested in...
...PRESS FOR THE GANDER THOMAS POWERS In certain circles eighteen months ago it was an article of faith (as well as an article of impeachment) that Richard Nixon did things as President no President had ever done before...
...perhaps it's the Cromwell in us...
...Safire says they're all home watching late-night movies on television because they don't have Nixon to kick around anymore...
...Did no one care...
...When Church ran up against a stonewall, he did not have a groundswell of public opinion to lift him up and over it...
...And yet Walton, so far, has been the only one to raise the obvious protest...
...Or at least he is sussing what seems to me to be the point...
...In writing about the CIA there is an all but irresistible tendency to dwell on its "crimes," as if the point in any investigation were only to find and punish the wrongdoers...
...to mention at least 19 other substances (including cobra venom) which could kill or incapacitate...
...Where are the special prosecutors...
...the truth...
...We are permitted to hope so, at any rate...
...we'll decide if such cases were murder or not...
...Why has so much been left unasked of so many...
...Watergate wasn't so long ago that I have forgotten the way people talked about it at the time: obsessively, almost without interruption for a year and a half, with passion and an appetite for the details...
...I'm not surprised Colby is content with this state of affairs...
...A President may be expected to ignore only what is peripheral or routine, and no one has suggested that assassination was so accepted, so automatic and frequent that a President would pay it no more attention than he would a press release from the New Orleans regional office of HEW...
...It was not mean or unfair...
...One of those defenders was William Safire, a Nixon speeehwriter who left the White House to write a column for the New York Times...
...His defenders, on the other hand, few to begin with and down to a midget's handful by the time of his resignation, insisted that Nixon was being singled out unfairly by disgruntled Democrats trying to undo the disaster of 1972, and by his old nemesis and tormentor, The Press...
...The real tragedy of the Church committee is not the fact that its chairman has been guilty of partisan preju-dice, attacking his enemies and sparing his friends, but that be has been so cool to the truth...
...Donations should be sent to Salesian Missions, Box 30, New Rochelle, N.Y...
...etc., but for a simpler reason...
...They were never used...
...I can hardly believe either is the case, and yet the press remained solemnly silent when Church said he had gone as far as he could go...
...The Church committee's official report mentioned Kennedy's "friend" without even identifying her sex...
...But none of them was ever used...
...Safire shows every sign of wanting to drag Kennedy and Johnson henchmen out of the woodpile and to put them up against the courtroom wall along with Haldeman, Ehrlichman and the rest...
...There is simply no other way to explain the extraordinary public feeling which was aroused by and in turn sustained the Watergate invests gations, and which has been feeble at best during the investigations of the Church committee...
...Nothing ever happened...
...It was all talk...
...Doctor Johnson...
...Just take one instance...
...This left Hoover in possession, not at all coincidentally, one suspects, of just about the most compromising and politically lethal bit of information he can ever have obtained during his long . career...
...But who questioned the Church committee...
...Church investigated assassination plots against Castro, Lumumba, Trujillo, Diem and the Chilean General Rene Schneider...
...Safire was saying, in effect, that Congress and the Press went after Nixon not from principled alarm about Freedom, the Bill of Rights, the Democratic Process, etc...
...It also provides 3,500 meals a day...
...But nothing Nixon or his agents did was a substantial departure from previous practice...
...But the CIA didn't do it...
...The rest of the press has been busy with larger questions, like Howard ("Bo") Calloway's attack on Reagan, and which Boy Scout on a dark horse the Democrats will choose to run this year...
...It was simply willful innocence to suppose anything else...
...Is Safire right...
...Nixon, of course, eventually retired to San Clemente but Safire has continued to argue his case, focusing most recently on current House and Senate investigations of the intelligence community headed by Rep...
...The CIA admitted plotting to poison Patrice Lumumba...
...Giancana and Rosselli were also, perhaps not so coincidentally, the CIA's chosen agents in one of many schemes to murder Fidel Castro, and it was apparently J. Edgar Hoover's discovery of this odd triangle which brought it to an end...
...All Rather did was to chart his course...
...Fountain pens, canes and umbrellas were all manufactured to shoot poison darts...
...In fairness, we must admit that Church was weak in a way that Sam Ervin, Archibald Cox, John Sirica and Leon Jaworski were not...
...Did no one think it important...
...He refused to give evidence to the Justice Department, he declined to televise hearings, he avoided court fights for evidence, he interpreted his mandate in a narrow way...
...Lumumba was in fact murdered...
...It conducts a 750-pupil day school and several night schools for the poor, a 60-machine sewing project for Burmese refugees, a typewriting and secretarial course-and a wide range of workshops for the handicapped...
...Just remember for a moment the endless pages of tape transcripts during Watergate, the dozens of memos, the verbatim testimony of witnesses before the Ervin committee...
...Impeachment was a grossly excessive response to what amounted to Standard Operating Procedure in a Washington grown cynical with power and the ease of secrecy...
...Church might have asked if any agent or employee of the CIA had ever killed anyone, under any circumstances, for any reason...
...she said...
...I don't know about you,but that sounds pretty lame to me, and yet I have not seen one article about Lumumba's actual murder, not ear attempt to establish who did kill him...
...He simply did not fight at all...
...No one condoned the Watergate or Ellsberg break-ins, wiretaps on journalists, the Huston domestic intelligence plan, the illegal campaign contributions...
...press, which seemed to drop the issue just as Church picked it up, and which gave little space to the testimony and interim reports produced by the Church committee...
...They were sustained by the squall of public feeling which Safire found so partisan and so unfair...
...Church was left pretty much on his own, but we must also recognize that he never tried to force the issue, to summon up public feeling or to protest its absence...
...In short, Safire would like to even the score...
...The thing for which I fault Church is not that he goes easy on the villains, but that he cannot let them off without failing to uncover what they did...
...No one has talked about the Church committee or the assassination report that way...
...Four columns in the last month alone have cited fudged investigations into the 1961-62 wiretaps of Hanson Baldwin of the Times and Lloyd Norman of Newsweek authorized by Robert F. Kennedy, the wiretaps of Martin Luther King authorized by Kennedy and Nicholas Katzenbach, the bugging of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic party at the Democratic convention in Atlantic City in 1964, and, most recently, the Church committee's gingerly treatment of John F. Kennedy's "friendship" with a woman who was also the "friend" of two Chicago Mafia leaders, Sam Giancana and John Rosselli...
...In boxing this is called taking a fall...
...After nearly a year of work there are still loose ends enough to stuff a mattress...
...It is not that he has failed to collect and publish a lot of information-he has done that, at least-but that in the final analysis, faced with crimes which far exceed those of Watergate, Church has been one of those who don't want to know...
...Whatever the explanation, the tendency is misdirected...
...The dismaying thing about this faint performance is that so few people have protested, or even seemed to care...
...At every stage of Watergate the public was intensely -at times even loon-ily-suspicious of the motives, energy and integrity of every investigating body...
Vol. 103 • January 1976 • No. 2
