WATERGATE WITHOUT THE PRESIDENT
Walzer, Michael
When Hamlet says, "Something is rotten in the state of Denmark," he means that the king is corrupt. He is not making any comment on the political life of ordinary Danish citizens, for there were...
...Or, if state officials are so dependent on corporate funds as to be infinitely open to bribery, where's the balance...
...By the time this issue of DISSENT appears, we will probably know whether or not there is to be an impeachment...
...The only way to combat the general cynicism, however, is for some group of men and women to offer an explanation of the present crisis and point the way to an alternative politics...
...our politics doesn't focus exclusively on a single person...
...And yet impeachment is only a ritual...
...ROBERT HEILBRONER, the distinguished economist, author of many books, who holds the Norman Thomas chair at the New School for Social Research...
...The logical place for that to happen is the Democratic party, but where is the Democratic party...
...Today, we all know that something is rotten in our own state, but it isn't enough to point to the White House or to Richard Nixon and his entourage...
...For the moment, there is little sign of any of these...
...Perhaps it needs to be said that that's not a satisfactory arrangement in a republic, when what is being transacted every time money changes hands is the public business...
...One of our regular correspondents was to send us a Letter from Israel, but decided to postpone it for similar reasons...
...In their hands, politics has become a spectator sport...
...We need to talk about Watergate without the President...
...But if the corporations are so dependent on the state as to be infinitely open to extortion, where's the balance...
...But the courts were active precisely because our elected representatives abdicated their moral and political responsibilities...
...Nor do they seem even remotely equipped to play the role set out for them in the American ideology...
...The brief career of Sam Ervin as a republican hero suggests the possibilities of congressional action and also the weakness of Congress as an institution...
...No doubt, they have enjoyed Nixon's fall, but they are also frightened by it and unable to respond in any coherent way...
...Next issue, we hope...
...1. Consider first the illegal transfer of vast sums of money from private corporations to the executive branch of the federal government in exchange for favors of one sort or another...
...That means, of presidential plainness, congressional energy, popular participation...
...The issue is being made up before the Israeli elections and the opening of negotiations between Egypt and Israel...
...The malaise seems more general...
...2. The corporate leaders who have done best in the current crisis are the newspaper owners and television managers—perhaps because they are the most public of our private men...
...If the market in power and influence were only let alone, we will soon be told, if nosy reporters and ambitious attorney generals stopped interfering, a delicate equilibrium would establish itself between the government and the corporations, that is, between extortion and bribery—a new kind of harmony, with both Middle East Crisis Though all of us at DISSENT feel strongly about the Middle East crisis, we cannot print anything on this matter in the current issue that would be of value to our readers...
...In the 1950s and early '60s, the burdens of social change were carried by the courts...
...DAVID BENSMAN, who has been conducting the "In the Magazines" department in DISSENT and who has been active in the socialist youth movement...
...The result of that reluctance is that only personal advantages are sought...
...No doubt, there is a great reluctance among its possible leaders to seem to be seeking partisan advantage in a time of troubles...
...And when they ceased to do that, the Committee ceased at the same time to command attention—almost as if it had gone underground...
...their work is subject to a daily audit...
...ROBERT LEKACHMAN, also a distinguished economist and author of many books, now teaching at the Lehman College of the City University of New York...
...Many of them were content to be courtiers, merely resentful when they were excluded from the court, with little sense of an alternative politics...
...So everyone connives in fostering the proposition that the wickedness of a few men, and nothing more, lies at the root of the crisis, and that the personal decency of a few men, and nothing more, will suffice to deal with it...
...DAVID BROMWICH, a young writer who has appeared frequently in our pages these past few years and who is at present a student at Yale...
...At its last meeting the DISSENT Editorial Board voted to bring to an end the list of Contributing Editors, over the years largely honorific, and to express its thanks to all the persons on that list...
...He is not making any comment on the political life of ordinary Danish citizens, for there were no citizens and no political life outside the court at Elsinore...
...They cannot hope for more than marginal success—one consequence of Watergate as a public spectacle is a spreading cynicism about all politicians—but marginal success will probably be enough to win the next election...
...We expect the public business to be done in public, with reasons and arguments exchanged, not cash, and with the rest of us watching...
...No doubt, it will emerge one day with legislative proposals of some sort, useful proposals, presumably, but also moderate and minor...
...So socialists have a new opportunity to argue their case: might not the independence of corporate leaders be enhanced if they were public officials, put on their oath, subject to periodic NEW EDITORS We are pleased to announce the addition of six new members to the DISSENT Editorial Board: ROSE LAUB COSER, a veteran socialist who teaches at the State University of New York at Stony Brook and has specialized in the sociology of hospitals...
...Perhaps they are also not resigned...
...Republics don't rot so readily as monarchies, nor is the rot cut out so easily...
...How valuable the formality and solemnity of the law would be at this moment, after years of presidential lawlessness...
...But what alternatives do they have...
...After all, this is a republic...
...But however grateful we are to them and to the reporters and commentators they employ, the political role of the media ought to worry us...
...Yet I can see here the makings of a new laissez faire...
...Political virtue is passively represented by those ordinary citizens who—it takes no courage— tell George Gallup week after week that they don't approve...
...It would require a kind of cohesiveness and collective resolution which neither Congress as a whole nor the Democratic party in Congress has yet demonstrated...
...Conventional doctrine holds that corporate power balances governmental power...
...We thought their achievements less secure than they would have been had Congress joined wholeheartedly in the work—and we were right...
...it is instead an inducement to criminal intrigue, to the highest form of white-collar crime...
...Today, the burdens of political reform are being carried by the papers and the networks...
...DEBORAH MEIER, an active figure in the recently formed Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee and a past contributor to DISSENT on educational subjects...
...They would appear to possess very little of either...
...But what is to become of the public business...
...And there is something especially impressive about the machinery provided by the Constitution for throwing out the President himself...
...review, responsible to a determinate constituency...
...The media can only amaze us, stir us up, prepare us for action, but 6 COMMENTS AND OPINIONS they can't speak for us, and they can't act in our name...
...What can one say about the financial integrity or civic courage of the American corporate elite...
...anything we might say right now is bound to be dated by January...
...COMMENTS AND OPINIONS 7...
...But how splendid it would be to see those rusty constitutional gears grinding into motion...
...The Editors sides deterred from asking more than the market would bear...
...It is not easy to guarantee that, however, and clearly the private power of the corporations is not even the beginning of a guarantee...
...Never has American politics seemed so anarchic as it does right now when individual candidates and would-be candidates scurry about trying to distance themselves from the scandals and establish their personal cleanliness...
...Face-to-face with Claudius, we are waiting for the Prince...
...That is why we have no way of responding to Watergate and no organized pattern of political work in which we can involve ourselves...
...Who can find it...
...one wants most what it would symbolize—the reappearance of a republican politics...
...There seems no reason to expect decisive action from the Congress...
...For too many years, congressmen gave the President too much room, asked too few questions, took too few initiatives of their own...
...That is a good thing to do, not only because of the pleasure it would involve...
...The role of the media today derives from and reveals a similar abdication...
...Even the effectiveness of the Ervin Committee derived in large part from its adoption by the media: the senators and their witnesses put on a good show...
...Watergate is merely a scandal, and we are fascinated and delighted by every new detail in its exposure...
...And yet, within our constitutional system, there is no other place from which decisive action can come...
...I DON'T want to deny the value of throwing the rascals out...
...It made us uneasy then to see such large effects worked by men who had never been elected, who had no representative function...
...Perhaps everyone knew that this kind of thing went on in Washington, but it is astonishing that it went on so ordinarily, with special offices set up to handle "government relations" and elaborately devious channels worked out to conceal the actual sources of the cash...
...3. Perhaps the greatest problem is this: there is no opposition party in the United States today...
...Right now, the odds seem heavily against it...
Vol. 21 • January 1974 • No. 1
