THOUGHTS ABOUT WATERGATE
Howe, Irving
About the "ultimate" meaning of Watergate we cannot be certain. Should we regard it as a transient stain on the Republic which time will blur, as it has blurred so many others? Or does it...
...What the hell...
...The Praetorian Guard set itself up in opposition to both the Congress and the governmental bureaucracy...
...Give them the decline of the West and they talk serenely about sunsets...
...Ehrlichman, I would go a step further, has the mind of a protofascist...
...Congressmen and bureaucrats seemed unable or unwilling to learn the methods of the "new" mass politics involving large-scale manipulation by advertising agencies and "dirty tricks...
...what do ordinary people think and feel about all this...
...And they got it...
...The president of the company probably didn't want to know, he was just making a payoff to those Washington characters (flunkies and pests at the same time) in the way a corner grocer makes his payoff to the cops...
...the Praetorian Guard saw itself as protector of the nation...
...It was deeply scornful of both these institutions, regarding them as slow, legalistic, sluggish, unresponsive...
...But it would be foolish to suppose that revelation, necessary as that is, and punishment will settle the matter...
...Yes, there were deplorable acts by previous administrations, some legal and others probably not...
...I THE WATERGATE REVELATIONS show that for several years now there has been at work within the federal government a process we might call Caesarism...
...After all, if George Meany and some of his social democratic admirers could speak of McGovern as a "kook," why should the Praetorian Guard be more refined in its perceptions...
...They are much too intelligent to suppose that McGovern was really going to bring socialism to America, but they feared, more realistically, that he might raise their taxes...
...I find myself wishing, parenthetically, that our old friend and critic C. Wright * They also should put to rest illusions, whether hopes or fears, about the transforming impact of American education...
...Whether Ehrlichman is or is not a fascist seems to me a trivial matter...
...both, probably, in previous administrations...
...If you heeded Ehrlichman's testimony, and Haldeman's to a lesser extent, you would have to conclude that the president of the United States is an absolute monarch elected every four years...
...No...
...Working for Colonel Haldeman and Major Ehrlichman, you had to shape up because you were a soldier in battle —and, like all soldiers, subject to call at 4 AM for a night attack...
...Finally, the meaning of Watergate will reveal itself, not merely through the facts that are disclosed but the responses they evoke...
...Or they say: "it's just the same old stuff, there have always been thieves down in Washington...
...About the "ultimate" meaning of Watergate we cannot be certain...
...Imperative, first of all, for the health and prosperity of the Praetorian Guard...
...More information is needed on this fascinating question, and perhaps it will come out in the second and third portions of the Senate committee's investigation...
...Services were rendered to the dairy industry, to airline corporations, to ITT...
...Intellectuals have an occupational fault: they overinterpret...
...The worship of authority, the habit of unconditional obedience, the contempt for dissidents, the readiness to justify all kinds of brutal and illegal methods in the name of "national security"—these, if not yet fascist, are certainly getting there...
...They probably even took notes...
...The Praetorian Guard saw the routine agencies of government as blind to the national "crisis," which required extraordinary and not-so-nice measures to defend the country and reelect Nixon: self-evidently, inseparable propositions...
...Robert Mitchum plays a down-at-the-heels thief in the Boston area, getting on in years, entangled with police informers, still intent on pulling off a few more jobs . . . and, good lord, the patience and planning needed for getting a fresh supply of guns, the secret meetings that have to be arranged, the precautions taken, for transmitting the stuff . . . Why, it was just like Herb Kalmbach coming all the way from California to pass some money on to that ex-cop from New York . . . With the exception that Mitchum was smarter than Chuck Colson and didn't write memoranda...
...III THAT THE PRAETORIAN GUARD made Muskie one of its major victims suggests it had worked itself up to the persuasion not merely that Nixon's victory was desirable or urgent, but that it was "imperative...
...But Watergate showed something which, if it had occurred previously, had not occurred on nearly so large and deliberate a scale...
...a heady thing to be elevated from corporation lawyer to secret emissary for the President...
...These young men were all college graduates, some of them from the "better" schools, where they listened, no doubt, to their liberal or even radical professors...
...The methods the Praetorian Guard used, from forging documents to breaking and entering, were the methods that every secret service and counterintelligence agency uses routinely...
...And so it applied to Muskie some of its most loathsome methods...
...For the sake of convenience let's call this center of power the Praetorian Guard, after the elite corps of body guards, independent of the army, which protected Roman emperors...
...And mind: it was not just the McGovern wing of the Democratic party that was so regarded by the Praetorian Guard, it was the Democratic party as a whole...
...It is much easier to say, "I'll help you out...
...The Nixonites were ideologically devoted to corporate America, and some of them must have hoped, reasonably enough, to find comfortable berths in its bureaucracy once they had finished government service...
...To save it from what...
...At its top were men who were evidently working their way toward an authoritarian Weltanschauung...
...Not all the leaders of the Praetorian Guard grasped these premises explicitly, but Ehrlichman evidently did...
...There are mindless conservatives or brutal reactionaries who are not, by any stretch of definition, fascists...
...That party might have to be tolerated, but certainly no more...
...Within the Nixon administration, undertaken by a crucial portion of the Nixon administration, and with at least the tacit acquiescence of Nixon himself, there was gradually created an extralegal or quasi-illegal center of power (perhaps even a "dual power...
...To a Bernard Barker or a Howard Hunt, and, evidently, to a John Ehrlichman, how much difference did it finally make whether you were breaking into the office of a leftist politician in Latin America or of Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist in California...
...Whether or not inspired by the U.S., the coup is a savage blow against democracy in South America...
...The most crucial questions cannot yet be answered: what is the public response...
...Indeed, a major element of the Praetorian system is its inclination to undo and supersede the party system...
...What their outlook really comes to is a kind of "authoritarian democracy": the forms remain democratic, the content becomes increasingly authoritarian...
...And they supported the man who promised them protection, as well as all the little creeps who'd sneak in once in a while for a handout...
...The Watergate issue must be kept alive, until every possible fact is discovered...
...The Praetorian Guard served both as agent of big money and as parasite upon it...
...Give them a sunset and it becomes the decline of the West...
...And, as historians have by now made clear, the Crusades used some pretty dirty methods...
...Still, we ought to distinguish between the gradual accretion of power to the executive branch, a tendency present in all modern governments, and the usurpation of power by a presidential clique within the executive branch...
...It saw itself as defending— virtue...
...It acted for more than personal or group COMMENTS AND OPINIONS interest...
...Also, for its intellectual justification...
...Both of these occurred during the Nixon years...
...What is still more noteworthy than the "delegitimation" of • the McGovern candidacy is that the same approach was applied to large portions of the Democratic party (not least of all its chairman, Larry O'Brien, whose desk was imagined to house the most fascinating of secrets...
...It must have been exhilarating to move from a second-rank advertising agency to second-in-command at the White House...
...390 COMMENTS AND OPINIONS Mills were still alive: what rich material for studying the strata of the power elite...
...or if Roman analogies are displeasing, we can compare this process to de Gaulle's acquisition of power in France...
...It worked on the premise that the methods used in fighting external "enemies" were appropriate and necessary to fighting internal "enemies"—since (the assumption became stronger and stronger) there was a clear line of continuity between enemies abroad and enemies at home...
...It was composed of true-believing Nixonites, who yielded their primary loyalties not to the Republican or any other party but to the Emperor himself...
...Over the years we of DissENT have resisted the notion that anyone whom we greatly dislike in American politics should be called a fascist—to do that is imprecise, dangerous, self-defeating...
...it stood the New Left ideology on its head and made it into the ideology of a New Right...
...What now...
...The Praetorian Guard worked slyly toward enabling McGovern to get the Democratic nomination, for it feared that Muskie would be a stronger opponent...
...But with Ehrlichman, as he came through at the hearings, one begins to feet a little uncertain...
...In our next issue we shall comment in detail...
...Power tastes sweet, and a nibble has been known to arouse the appetite for more...
...It is a lovely illustration of the interdependence of capitalist class and political bureaucracy, the latter serving the interests of the former while battening off, and no doubt annoying, them...
...Yet Muskie was certainly not a man of the New Politics, certainly not the kind of ideological foe that McGovern was perceived to be...
...and these should be criticized, whether committed by Eisenhower, Kennedy or Johnson...
...that this increase occurred under both Republican and Democratic administrations...
...So far as we can tell, most of the Praetorian Guard consisted of standard, indeed standardized middle-class Americans: young lawyers, young advertising men, most of them moral zombies who did what they were told because they were (so they later said) "loyal...
...So the Praetorian Guard brought the Cold War to America...
...The corporation president had the money in his drawer, ready in cash...
...That was the way the world was viewed...
...Let me put my supposition in extreme form: Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Mitchell, and the rest saw themselves as high officers in a crusade...
...but that he represents a drift toward authoritarian thought and sensibility, which was powerful in the White House, is anything but a trivial matter...
...It doesn't pay to be cheap— if you want protection, you have to pay for it...
...Fascists can be more suave than that...
...One of the most notable aspects of Ehrlichman's testimony was the way he took it for granted that the Nixon administration would/should secretly support certain like-minded Democrats in Southern elections, rather than Republicans...
...The Praetorian Guard has been shattered, and some of its stalwarts face indictment, perhaps imprisonment...
...Nixon's whole career, his "training" in campaigns against Helen Gahagan Douglas and in the McCarthyite era, shows a capacity for a skillful union of the opportunist and the ideologue...
...CHILE This issue of DISSENT goes to press shortly after the military coup against the Allende government in Chile...
...Ed...
...It was a union of form and content...
...On my first or second day at the White House, Dwight Chapin said to me, "One thing you should realize early on, we are practically an island here...
...It also drew—but here one's head starts to spin—on the experiences of underground political movements...
...And then the larger problems that it raises, from electoral process to governmental structure, must be debated...
...Or does it constitute a new kind of evidence for the view, expressed occasionally in these pages, that we are experiencing a social and moral unraveling, a coming-apart of social binders, a crisis of discipline and belief...
...I think so...
...Our Praetorian Guard was devoted both to politics and protection...
...Should we regard it as a transient stain on the Republic which time will blur, as it has blurred so many others...
...they can wear gray suits, they can be teetotalers, they can be corporation lawyers...
...That the MCGovern wing should be seen as an ideological foe that had to be destroyed (destroyed, not defeated) in the election is obvious...
...Some of the Watergate defendants were actually trained by the CIA—not very well, thank heaven...
...Nor is there the slightest reason to accede to the appeals for "national reconciliation" which come every Sunday from James Reston, the chaplain of the New York Times...
...In both cases there were felt COMMENTS AND OPINIONS to be urgent reasons of national security: and the less specific the reasons, the more urgently were they felt...
...Herbert Porter, one of the small fry who broke the law for the glory of Richard Nixon, is very revealing on this: There definitely did exist [at the White House] a "we-they" attitude, "we" being anyone inside the gate, "they" being all others, particularly the press, and of course the opposition party...
...Talk about American inventiveness— where else can you find precedents for that...
...The Praetorian Guard drew primarily upon a recent major American experience for its methods, material, and personnel...
...II LET US TRY to summon a picture, drawn from the Watergate testimony, of how this Praetorian Guard functioned...
...The Praetorian Guard accepted as reality the New Left fantasies of immediate revolution...
...In turn, for favors rendered— antitrust suits not pursued, special franchises secured, price rises approved—they expected financial support...
...Robert Porter, asked why he had not consulted his conscience, answered: If you question too much you find yourself out in left field, and that's true not just in government but in business...
...For the Praetorian Guard was "above" ordinary party politics, often scoffing at Republican congressmen both to its left and right...
...All other things being equal, sincerity is always more dangerous than hypocrisy in authoritarian types...
...But there are nonintellectuals who have an opposite fault, habitual if not occupational...
...Still, the corporation executives seem to have recognized that they were getting their money's worth...
...Here a distinction should be made that is of some importance...
...Watergate showed a planned and illegal aggrandizement of power within the government, by a portion of the government—that is, by those executive appointees I have called the Praetorian Guard...
...Not very rich at all but coming into increasingly frequent (and ultimately useful) contact with the rich...
...IF THE PRAETORIAN GUARD was characterized by the sleaziness of its methods, we would be making a serious error in supposing that it regarded itself as anything but serious in purpose...
...it agreed with the New Left as to the feebleness and rot of the "mushy liberals...
...Less exalted comparisons also suggest themselves...
...It's the kind of movie Hollywood does well: unpretentious, fairly realistic, without moral claims...
...Let us grant that there is a portion of truth in this view...
...When Herb Kalmbach picked up the phone to get to the president of a California aviation company, he quickly arranged for a gift of $50,000 without even having to say what the money was for...
...New York Times, August 5, 1973] Still, if you were in or near the Praetorian Guard—and you couldn't exactly tell whether you were near or in, it depended on being tested with special missions—you had to conform to a semimilitary discipline, so much more bracing than the moral sloppiness that was spreading across the country...
...q...
...They were "team players" —and, in a mild sort of way, they do seem to illustrate Hannah Arendt's notion about "the banality of evil...
...and that it is myopic or narrowly partisan simply to denounce the growth of executive power under Nixon without also denouncing its earlier manifestations since at least Franklin Roosevelt...
...The opposition party was no longer to be regarded as legitimate within the American political system, with rights, privileges, and courtesies owed to it...
...These men—Mitchell, Haldeman, Ehrlichman, others—are hardsouled, barely troubled by humane considerations, and with only the slightest visible attachment to the democratic ethos...
...Well, you know .. . from decay, corruption, sloth, hippies, addicts, eggheads, student demonstrators, kooks...
...A powerful segment of the American government had taken to the methods of underground work in order to combat established positions and procedures of that very same government...
...and by an atmosphere of tension, secrecy, urgency: a mixture of conspiratorial excitement and fraternity Kameradschaft...
...not very powerful but sidling up to men who really had power, the younger cadres of the Praetorian Guard were swept along by emotions and sensations not so different, one supposes, from those of candidates for the Central Committee of the Communist party, U.S.S.R., or similar functionaries in fascist parties in Europe and elsewhere...
...are they worried, frightened, upset, or do they dismiss it as "just politics...
...You put through phone calls only in public booths, you meet strangers in hotel lobbies and hand them sealed envelopes, you hold a rendezvous in a public park where you're not likely to be recognized...
...Between the Praetorian vision of things and the New Left vision there was a curious rela tionship...
...But what of Nixon, who has so often been described as a canny unprincipled politician —can he also be seen as a committed ideologue...
...And the same was true, cash or not, for the president of American Airlines and God knows who else...
...But when they got into "the real world"—the world in which Maury Stans and Herb Kalmbach knew how to raise money— whatever they had learned, if anything, in college soon faded away, and they lived, as under the circumstances they had to, by the ethic of the Praetorian Guard...
...Mitchell, Ehrlichman, Haldeman and all they represented were not exactly inclined to make "fine distinctions" between the New Politics that was behind McGovern and the New Left that was not...
...Certain commentators, either seeking analytic depth or intent upon deflecting popular anger from the Nixon administration, have noted that for several decades now there has been a steady increase in the power of the executive...
...A few preliminary impressions suggest themselves...
...Very well...
...Don't for a moment suppose that when Ehrlichman made his little speech about family morality and drunkenness, he was engaged in a mere cynical pitch...
...If it is a mistake to bandy the word fascist, it is equally a mistake to assume that the only legitimate image of the fascist is a bully with boots and swastika, wielding a whip and cowing inmates of a concentration camp...
...it found in the rantings of the Haydens, the Cleavers, the Newtons a rein forcement of its worst and most cherished fears...
...Then there were the young assistants (the Magruders, the Odles, and other crew-cut noodles), drawn to the Praetorian Guard by visions of a rapid ascent to power, by the pos 388 COMMENTS AND OPINIONS sible pleasure of mingling with the "great" (who wouldn't perjure for the privilege of riding in the same plane with John Mitchell and H. R. Haldeman...
...One night during the Watergate hearings I went to see a movie called The Friends of Eddie Coyle...
...Neither Haldeman nor Ehrlichman would make a good Tammany ward boss or an effective aide of Richard Daley: they are too stiffnecked, too righteous, too deficient in humor...
...But there was more than the urge to power, the instinct for self-aggrandizement...
...If he had been, it would not have been as alarming as it was...
...It took over the shoddier tactics of the Cold War and applied them to domestic politics...
...To apply the methods of the Cold War to domestic politics signified some remarkable premises...
...There was a mission: Nixon had to be reelected in order to save the country...
...is there a sense abroad that some of the better traditions of the Republic have been deeply violated...
...And about those it is still too soon to speak...
...What was the relationship of the Praetorian Guard to Big Business, to the corporation executives and the upper bourgeoisie...
...Let's try for a point of balance...
...But they are not the same, and to insist that they are is to blur the monstrousness of what Watergate reveals...
Vol. 20 • September 1973 • No. 4
