WATERGATE: THE Z CONNECTION

...I can't resist the polemical thrust of remarking on how strange it is that this "wave of collective delusion, suspicion and paranoia" should be the work of the very administration which Professor Kristol supported on the ground of prudence...

...Some of them, of course, could easily fit into a totalitarian milieu: robots like Bernard Barker who said his job had been not to think but to obey orders...

...The Watergate men saw themselves, one supposes, as agents of traditional values, 'old-line and trueblue Americans standing fast for Gary Cooper, J. Edgar Hoover, John Wayne and Richard Nixon, heroes all of individualism and the American way...

...No doubt, there were the ordinary motives of opportunism, the deceits of small ambition...

...You can't fight a war in the 20th century with bows and arrows, I heard another American sage, once a theoretician of the Left, declare a few years ago...

...He is not inclined to abandon himself to moral indignation before the recent scandals...

...Confirmation for this view comes from an unexpected source—Malcolm Moos, an influential conservative Republican who wrote speeches for Dwight Eisenhower and has since become president of the University of Minnesota...

...It is almost as if Peter Verhovensky and Shigalov and Liputin, unsavory creatures of Dostoevsky's Possessed, were transported to the advertising agencies and corporation boards of middle America, reincarnated with crew cut, grey suit, and a bag of "dirty tricks...

...but that the truth should have had to depend on the more-or-less accidental presence of a few indi viduals gives one no great reassurance as to the health of democracy...

...COMMENTS AND OPINIONS The one-sentence statement of these distinguished intellectuals declared Nixon the more "prudent" of the two candidates...

...Not in the age of electronics...

...III A FEW YEARS AGO I wrote a short piece in DISSENT called "Is This Country Cracking Up...

...I don't think the country is cracking up in any immediate sense...

...he scorns the "conventional bogies" of the liberals—I imagine he'd regard my invocation of Z as precisely such a bogy...

...They were ideological thugs...

...Now I am not saying that the Nixon men were totalitarians—though it would not be amiss to see Watergate as a pretotalitarian episode...

...One hopes so...

...For prudence is the very quality most distant from paranoia...

...For if he could understand and theorize about the far more terrible deeds of Hitler and Stalin, surely he should not be content with—indeed, he might even accuse himself of laziness in accepting— notions about "bewilderment" in regard to Watergate...

...for, if George Meany could not bring himself to support Senator McGovern, the American corporations, with their keener sense of class relations, seem to have felt that Nixon was their man...

...It is a matter that requires further, closer analysis...

...Watergate signified a process of sedition, the usurpation of crucial powers by a segment of the executive branch of government...

...What I am saying is that Kristol's bewilderment, which I am sure is unfeigned, should cause him to see Watergate in a far COMMENTS AND OPINIONS more lurid light than he does...

...In any case, one waits for public declarations from other signators of the "prudence" statement...

...Had they thought of the matter at all, they would probably have felt themselves superior to the thieves of Teapot Dome...

...Have they had any second thoughts on their electoral "neutrality...

...But it was to the condition of Z that their behavior tended—Z was the meaning of their actions...

...Even those of us who have always been in the opposition, convinced that the ethic of capitalism corrodes the experience of democracy, must still feel some shame at what has happened to our country...

...Efforts by two young reporters on the Washington Post who kept digging for the facts...

...The Watergate men were not crooks, they were thugs...

...Yet through a systematic use of gangs of hoodlums working in close collaboration with the police, the regime achieves a state of 276 quasi-terror, rendering the opposition physically and politically helpless and the nation morally inert...

...In recent months we have not been hearing much from the signers of this statement...

...They did not intend to establish a dictatorship of terror based on a militarized movement of inflamed plebeians...

...Is it hard to see such men working for Hitler or Stalin...

...Thus far only Irving Kristol, in the May 17 Wall Street Journal, has had the courage to venture into print with reflections on Watergate...

...Behind the Watergate plotters stood the wealth of American business, apparently passed around to the Nixon committees with lavish abandon...

...If the experience behind men like Mitchell and Stans and Haldeman was that of corporate and advertising chicanery, the experience behind the creatures they exploited was that of the CIA, FBI, and secret intelligence ventures...

...And for that matter, to come a little closer to home, what about George Meany and Albert Shanker and Bayard Rustin who, while not openly supporting Nixon, directed their major energies to deprecating his opponent as the candidate of the "kooks...

...Moos says that this involved a "coup d'6tat" by a portion of the government against the government...

...A mission to defend America from its defilers, its soft-minded devotees of permissiveness, its chanters of amnesty, its celebrants of drugs, its enemies of work...

...Ellsberg's psychiatric files: that was work, hard work...

...What did they have in mind when they so casually broke the law and transformed American politics, never very saCOMMENTS AND OPINIONS vory in the past, into a systematic exercise in hoodlumism...

...I think Christopher Lasch is probably right in saying that Nixon sees himself as an agent of morality...

...they did not need to, and indeed, to have been explicit would have meant to inhibit themselves with some weight of consciousness...

...It was, in a parodic way, an example of the military-industrial complex at work...

...Indeed, "it is the very incomprehensibility of Watergate that gives it such a nightmarish quality...

...Do you remember the wonderful advertisement that appeared last November, just before the election, in which a group of distinguished intellectuals, including Professors Sidney Hook, Robert Nisbet, Irving Kristol and Edward Shils, came out in support of Nixon—Richard Nixon...

...How, they asked, could one believe that Stalin was "paranoid" enough to send millions of innocent people to Siberia...

...the determination of Judge Sirica, a conservative who conducted his court by the precepts of elementary justice...

...These were our rulers, these the men who ran America—the Haldemans and Erlichmans, the Mitchells and Deans and Stanses...

...For if not rotten to the core our society has been shown to have a great deal of rot at the core...

...Thinking about this spectacle one finds oneself, a little surprisingly, assailed by sentiments of patriotic indignation...

...since a conservative says it, we need simply nod in assent...

...II LET US TURN to narrower concerns...

...Not, to be sure, that the Haldemans and Erlichmans and Mitchells thought their way through to such a goal...

...fulfilling their assignments with fanatic devotion, even at some personal sacrifice...

...but that there is a kind of Schumpeterian disintegration seems to me clear...

...Something got mislabeled...

...Even the cut-throats of chicanery need some claims for the value of their work...

...That is the fundamental ground for questioning whether the Nixon administration remains fit for office...

...The Watergate men were not fascists in any precise sense of the term...

...He sees Watergate as "a wave of collective delusion, suspicion and paranoia engulfing the White House...

...nevertheless—indeed, almost because of that feeling of theirs—they were morally far below the ordinary grafters who have always been present in American politics...

...What prevented the drift toward the Z condition...

...to rifle Dr...

...no doubt, the incitements of petty and not-sopetty graft...

...They had, God help us, a mission...

...and the likes of Haldeman and Erlichman and Magruder, all those stiff-faced apostles of squaredom, were not going to rely on bows and arrows...

...That such people were able to force Watergate upon the national conscience is a tribute to democracy, still the best political system devised by man...

...q...

...Breaking and entering, stealing, forging historical documents and letters in the name of political opponents, rifling psychiatric files, provoking turmoil and violence among dissidents, disposing of vast sums of money in squalid "operations," and God alone knows what else—these were the methods of the Nixon men, the cheap-jack bosses who made decisions and the moral zombies who carried them out...

...But they also knew themselves to be creatures of the 20th century, who had learned the lessons, as Joseph Bensman remarks on an adjacent page, of corporation and advertising battles, the necessity of screwing the other side, screwing everybody before you get screwed yourself, cheating, lying, maligning, slandering...

...Well, it wasn't the decline of the West I was talking about, it was a slow disintegration of those premises of value which hold a society, any society, together...

...Had a radical said this, it might seem excessive...

...To break into Watergate...

...Why, they asked, would Hitler want to murder helpless Jews whom he might have used to greater profit in his factories...

...Yet I am inclined to suppose that the Watergate crew was not driven primarily by motives of personal greed: these were not the kinds of people who wanted simply to line their pockets, though it would come as no surprise to learn that some did...

...It was an idea that came, not from Marx, but from Schumpeter who had suggested that capitalism might crack up less because of economic crisis than through a loss of confidence and belief in its formal values...

...it is said that some are suffering from embarrassment...

...Noting the plans of the Watergate gang to set up a secret and extra-legal espionage apparatus in the White House, Mr...

...What were they thinking of, all those scoundrels who have since been implicated in Watergate and its equivalents...

...To what depths of foulness has fallen the republic that once had been regarded as humanity's "last, best hope...

...Surely it doesn't speak well for the claims of the new conservatives to reasonableness, maturity, and civilized discourse that they offer us "prudence" and a few months later it turns out to be "paranoia...

...From the lies and killings of Vietnam to the filth of the Nixon era: the republic does not thrive...

...I think a more useful analogy is provided by Costa-Gavras's film Z. This film shows us a country where some of the externals of democracy survive: the opposition is still legal, it has the right to hold meetings and publish papers...

...Nice guys finish last, said an American sage named Leo Machiavelli, and in a cause so urgent as the defense of America, no methods could be too ugly...

...It was met with a certain derision among vicarious realpolitikers who charged that "you intellectuals" tend to see the decline of the West when all that is happening is an ordinary sunset...

...And they were ready to pay...

...Will the distinguished philosopher Sidney Hook, who gave his vote to Nixon as "a comrade in arms," no less, "of Norman Thomas," now favor us with some reflections on the role of intelligence in public affairs...

...More important: how is it that, in the course of rejecting the notion that Watergate symbolizes "a general drift toward `presidential despotism,'" Kristol does not stop to consider that the very bewilderment he expresses about the "nightmarish incomprehensibility" of Watergate is very similar to the kind of bewilderment that some people expressed about the "alleged" nightmares of the totalitarian states...

...But these can be assumed as a constant in all , politics...

...Will the distinguished sociologist Robert Nisbet, who wrote grave essays on the breakdown of authority caused by student uprisings, now favor us with some reflections on the breakdown of authority caused by the authorities...