WATERGATE & MUGWUMPS

...Nixon's reputation, could promote national security, sensibly construed...

...In addition to inexpensive expiation, the mugwump's moralistic approach betrays a desire to avoid issues —notably race and the economy—about which homilies are no longer convincing...

...obstruction of peace does not...

...For someone who accepted even a fraction of the argument, a break-in and some perjury were minor risks to rescue the Republic...

...Indeed, if the CRP had focused on the "extremist" McGovern instead of badgering Edmund Muskie, Henry Jackson, and O'Brien, they might have avoided a major investigation...

...And, without the Bay of Pigs as a prelude, we might have avoided the Cuban missile crisis which, more than any confrontation since World War II, threatened our security, that is, our existence...

...Does anyone imagine that a Senate panel would have expressed escalating indignation if Administration agents had been exposed stalking the offices of Rolling Stone, tapping phones at the Socialist Workers party, or auditing tax returns from the Christian Nationalist Crusade...

...authorities tell us that this was an unfortunate Cold War excess...

...No one seems to remember his race against Joseph Duffey in 1970, the year of Spiro Agnew's exhortations against radical liberals and the sinister forces behind them...

...Weicker would have been no closer to the hearings than his TV set in Greenwich...

...In addition to recognizing that our vital interests don't necessarily depend on the current president's unblemished image, we must correlate Watergate with other losses of liberty...

...Weicker's recent concern for free expression, like that of many public figures, is wellintentioned and, to some extent, heartening...

...By failing to associate recent buggings, phone taps, enemy lists, tax audits, and break-ins with that tradition, Weicker symbolizes the prevalent tunnel vision regarding Watergate...

...authorities tell us that this was an example of FDR's political sagacity...

...It would show that there is still room for harassers in the GOP rank-and-file, as in the NOTEBOOK 95 halcyon days of Jenner, Bricker, Joe McCarthy, the Old Agnew, and the Old Nixon...

...In 1961 the New York Times killed Tad Szulc's piece on the proposed landing in Cuba...

...There is a grotesque parallel in recent pronouncements by such men as Barry Goldwater...

...Having been chairman of the Americans for Democratic Action and a supporter of the notorious Eugene McCarthy, Duffey proved particularly vulnerable to innuendo...

...Nixon's speech of August 15th, as well as the testimony of John Ehrlichman and H. R. Haldeman, underscores how little specific meaning remains in the hallowed term "national security...

...Governor Reagan, long oblivious to social sources of crime in Oakland or Watts, explains why breaking and entering are different in D. C...

...IN THE MAGAZINES 123...

...But pride, like righteousness, must be kept under control...

...By viewing the Ervin investigation as the biggest morality play in town, not only do we applaud unlikely heroes, but we interpret Watergate too narrowly...

...For 25 years the fear of subversion has been manipulated for political advantage by both Republicans and Democrats...

...Some people are more guilty than others, and it's hardly surprising that "dirty tricks" reached a kind of critical mass under Richard Nixon...

...The careers of the "mugwumps" should have taught us that honesty is not enough...

...The conservative position has its own consistency, but liberal journalists should not be so quick to equate it with virtue...

...William Buckley was right to protest the strict sentences of the Watergate burglars...

...In this company, Mr...

...like the men he recently interrogated, he preferred to look the other way...

...To take seriously the ideological dimension of Senate testimony would erode the cagey distinction which Howard Baker, Weicker, and Goldwater, among others, have sold to the media...

...Yet Larry O'Brien is no more deserving of bugless conversations than the rest of us...

...The congealing conventional wisdom absolves Republican professionals and blames Watergate on White House amateurs (a category that may, somehow, include the President...

...IT is an established American habit to interpret political trickery simply in terms of personal immorality...

...But his apparent conviction that incursions on freedom have begun recently, or that they are infrequent actions by errant individuals, leads in the wrong direction...

...Having been willing to invade the sovereign nation of Cuba at the behest of one president, James McCord could not be expected to balk at invading a mere office building when the plan had White House sanction...

...As in 1970, he preferred to look the other way...

...Rather, the trend is toward an opposite, though equally venerable evasion...

...The prosecution and the courts will eventually sort out the lawbreakers from the co-conspirators and hangers-on...

...During this nationwide slur, Senator Weicker did not rise up in his now-familiar indignation to dispel] the fear of subversion that nurtured Watergate...

...After supporting the President while he lied about a war, they would consider impeaching him for lying about a break-in...

...Lawyers may complain that this is a slipperyslope argument...

...The words have scant connection with their literal meaning—the country's safety...

...and gentle people who despise our prison system crave John Mitchell's incarceration...

...The question of retribution is especially interesting...

...Instead of ritual praise for our political culture, the break-in, cover-up, and investigation should provoke awareness of its limitations...

...Yet without the votes of citizens favoring such harassment, Mr...

...The wider perspective would undermine Weicker's contention that his party, too, had been "aggrieved" by a small group of zealots...

...Many of his fellows seem more concerned about preserving the orderly, nonideological competition between the two major parties...

...There are obvious differences between a private citizen's open act of civil disobedience and an official's secret machinations, but Jeb Magruder's comparison between himself and William Sloane Coffin must not be dismissed...

...Sam Ervin and Herman Talmadge, too, did little to refute the notion that their party had been captured by weirdos...

...If the Times had printed the story, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., later suggested, the project might have been abandoned...

...Like many draft resisters (my analogy, not Buckley's) , they are susceptible to harsh punishments as symbols, not because their presence on the street endangers the rest of us...

...High officials have abused our liberties for a long time, and the abuse has regularly been rationalized...

...Already pundits acclaim the Senate hearings as proof that the system works...

...As a former Connecticut resident who voted against Lowell Weicker, I was particularly fascinated by his conduct during the first phase of the Watergate hearings, and by the favorable impression he made among liberal commentators...

...There are congressmen who are eager to get the guilty today who would vote for preventive detention or bans on "obscenity" tomorrow...

...Yet even if the paragraph revealed an act as drastic as covert support of an invasion or coup d'etat, the exposure of such an adventure, while damaging to Mr...

...Weicker's mugwump outrage, though belated, is admirable...

...If, during their motorcade to Hartford, Weicker had asked Nixon about his early career, he would not have been surprised that presidential appointees considered unorthodoxy seditious...

...Above all, we must relate the White House "horrors" of 1972 to the zeal with which politicians have promoted, and we have accepted, various kinds of repression...

...If Weicker had paused to hear Joe Duffey's warnings, he would have learned before last spring that officials aren't always fastidious in their definitions of disloyalty...

...To save the nation from "extremism," like the Republicans eight years later, they probably would have exercised their capacity for silence and selective perception...

...The Roosevelt administration unleashed the Internal Revenue Service on insurgent Huey Long while loyal Frank Hague stuffed his wallet in Jersey City...

...From Hugh Scott on down, they conjured forth images of abortions in the Lincoln bedroom and acid trips instead of egg hunts on the White House lawn, as amnesty was proclaimed in the Oval Office and our defenses went to hell...

...Lowell Weicker is reminiscent of the 19th-century genteel reformers who considered public affairs a contest between honest men and corrupt bosses—swarthy immigrants who bought some votes and neglected to count others...

...While the Vice-President called Duffey a "revisionist Marxist"—a category even more ominous than radical liberal—Weicker worked hard to identify with the Administration...

...If the senators had put aside their obsession with individual culpability to listen, they would have usually heard plausible explanations...

...After the "guilty" individuals have been condemned, the nation will congratulate itself on how well the Republic functions when good men stand fast...

...To reunite "good" and "bad" Republicans (Weicker's terms), we need only recall the concerted efforts of mugwumps, stalwarts, and half-breeds to make George McGovern look like an extremist...

...Three decades of more or less bipartisan foreign policy have made us forget that "national security" is a broadly political concept about which there is disagreement and there should be debate...

...But, for three decades and more, the slope has been amply greased...

...To the best of my recollection, as the saying goes, Weicker never publicly 94 NOTEBOOK criticized Agnew's tactics...

...there's no reason to make him a martyr...

...The Truman administration revoked press credentials and passports from its critics...

...The Watergate second-story men, Ronald Reagan rightly observed, were not ordinary criminals...

...Indirectly, Lowell Weicker's freedom from harassment depends on Gus Hall's...

...Did it occur to none of these men that a believer in the updated innuendo of 1972 might willingly —and with a sense of honor—break the law to undermine McGovern's candidacy...

...The Ervin committee was incredulous that "dirty tricks" used against the likes of Huey Long and Henry Wallace had been imported into the mainstream to abuse respectable people ' like Lawrence O'Brien...

...An embarrassed John Kennedy would have condemned the press for publishing government secrets, but the publication could have made the nation more secure for the next decade...

...Excepting some obvious apocalyptic threats, our basic interests and the correct strategy to protect them are by no means self-evident to all persons of right reason and good heart...

...Similarly, out of office John Mitchell is no more dangerous to the commonweal than most corporate lawyers...

...In the meantime we should curb our mugwump righteousness and learn from the manifold ironies: erstwhile McCarthyites were crying "witchhunt" though the Ervin Committee was affable and avuncular compared to the harassers of old...

...Furthermore, Mr...

...Unencumbered by the greater embarrassment of the Bay of Pigs, Kennedy might have been less determined to look tough, and more skeptical, about dispatching advisers to Vietnam...

...Repeatedly, Weicker and his fellows asked in real or feigned amazement: "How could a man like you have done it...

...Perhaps Ervin and Talmadge sometimes wonder, as I do, how Democrats would have responded in 1964 if Lyndon Johnson's henchmen had been discovered ransacking Goldwater headquarters...

...Apparently obstruction of justice qualifies as a "high crime...

...as if interrogator and witness dwelled in separate moral realms...

...These men of rectitude despised President Grant's attorney general who was on the take, but admired Cleveland's, who only had strikers shot down...

...The collective mea cu/pa probably will not be the preferred way to avoid the menacing implications beneath the Watergate surface...

...Considering George McGovern the latest apostle of infidelity to the American way, burglars and perjurers alike acted out of conscience for ideological reasons...

...The Senator has said that Republicans don't think of their "fellow Americans as enemies to be harassed," for which he received sustained applause...

...DESPITE these moral ambiguities, our historical propensity for chicanery, and our well-fed fear of subversives, the proper response to Watergate is not to shriek, "We are all guilty," a popular American way of avoiding fixing responsibility...

...Thus, when Ehrlichman chanted this totemistic incantation instead (continued on page 123) 96 NOTEBOOK IN THE MAGAZINES (continued from page 96) of publicly discussing a deleted paragraph, the Ervin committee hardly quibbled...

...If Weicker was unaware that his advocates alluded to Duffey's "radicalism," then he knew as little about his campaign as Nixon supposedly knew about doings at the Committee to Re-elect the President...

...Mary McCarthy surmised that Americans have seized on Watergate to prove, after Vietnam, that we are still a moral people...