WATERGATE: SYMPTOM OF WHAT SICKNESS?

...Nor is it as paradoxical as it apWATERGATE: SYMPTOM OF WHAT SICKNESS...

...Watergate ended all this...

...They hardly add up to a hand-picked, disciplined, dedicated corps of men capable of a fascist coup...

...But there is also the fact that he did not make the speech, nor is there any evidence that he or any of his advisers possessed the boldness, nerve, and imagination even to consider doing so...

...One recalled the rumor circulated a few years before by New Leftists that Nixon planned to cancel the 1972 elections...

...It is doubtful, even without Watergate, that the Nixon administration's incompetent management of the economy would not have frustrated these hopes of a conservative counterrevolution if indeed they had any substance in the first place...

...A mood of apres moi le deluge seemed to prevail...

...In the past year the SLA has provided the only other domestic news event to compete with Watergate...

...Early in the Ervin hearings it became a cliche to attribute Watergate to the itch for power rather than to the pecuniary greed at the root of most past American political scandals...

...I want to make one thing perfectly clear: the responsible leaders of the great world Communist powers, Brezhnev and Mao, whom I visited last year in Moscow and Peking, have in no way supported or encouraged these evil designs...

...but they do not seem to have been moves toward the implementation of any larger project...

...The ugly reality of Watergate is sufficient to rob such hyperbolic, selfindulgent claims of any authority...

...One can discern a pattern in the eventually rejected Huston plan, the creation of the "plumbers," the wiretapping not only of journalistic critics but of officials in the Administration itself and even on the White House staff, the efforts to appoint Nixon loyalists to strategic positions in other government agencies— especially those like the IRS with power to DENNIS H. WRONG punish opponents, and even the lengths to which the isolation of the reelection campaign organization from the Republican party was carried...

...When one turns to "subjective" rather than "structural" tendencies, a legitimizing counterideology to support these actions was readily available...

...Two contrasting explanations of the scandals might be called the "big money" theory and the "power" theory...

...These "structural" indications of a totalitarian potential in the Nixon administration—in conjunction with Nixon's remark in the transcripts that he had not yet used the full powers of the FBI and the...

...They were far more inclined to give primacy to "rooting out" Communist sympathizers at home...

...The fact that we cannot be sure that a speech like the one I have imagined would not have saved him and defused the scandal is a measure of the terrifying significance of Watergate...

...The overall picture is one of low cunning, nervous defen siveness, occasional flashes of a largely personalized venom, and a delusive ad-man's faith in "image projection...

...The Huston plan, the plumbers, the illegal wiretapping, as well as the use of the "national security blanket" for purposes of concealment appear to have been responses to immediate problems posed by leaks embarrassing to the Administration, vindictiveness toward particular enemies like Ellsberg or Jack Anderson, and impatience with the independence and bureaucratic caution of the heads of the FBI and the CIA...

...These activities bore little resemblance to past electoral frauds, which have usually involved ballot-tampering in oneparty dominated cities or counties far from Washington...

...One might add the "smartass shrewds" to the "crazy braves" and "phoney toughs" whom the late Stewart Alsop saw as uniting to bring about Watergate...

...God bless America and God bless each and every one of you...

...affluent Southern California lawyers with past business connections to the President...

...505 Only the last sentence was actually uttered by Richard Nixon in his speech of April 30, 1974...

...The effort to concentrate unprecedented power in the White House was not solely to gratify Nixon's personal appetites but also aimed at the implementation of far-reaching conservative policies...

...The casual, accidental way in which people were recruited to the White House cadres is also striking: old college chums and frat brothers from USC, UCLA, and Brown...

...But what Nixon aimed at, and might well have come close to achieving, amounted nevertheless to a major break in what I have called the rhythm of democratic politics (see DISSENT, Winter 1974...

...Nixon was about to become the first activist conservative president...

...participation, and limited wars as in Korea...

...The effort to create a shadow government, a secret "state within a state," is the most totalitarian feature of the Nixon administration's secret maneuvers...

...The crisis has illuminated so many areas of American government and politics that it is difficult to stand back and assess its largermeaning...

...In the few months between the election and the beginning of the Watergate revelations, it became quite evident that Nixon had chosen differently: there was the Christmas bombing of Hanoi, the demand for letters of resignation from all of his top officials, the dropping or demotion of the few mildly liberal officeholders he had appointed 506 and the failure of rumored appointments of others to materialize, the rapid dismantling of OEO, and most of all the open defiance of Congress by the impoundment of funds, vetoes and threats to veto, and the thinly concealed contempt shown toward congres sional committees by top members of the Nixon administration...

...Whether the Nazis set the Reichstag fire in order to blame it on the Communists, or the Communists actually set it, or, as recent research indicates, it was the act of an individual madman that a court later judged it to be was of little consequence in view of the readiness of the Nazis to make ideological use of it as a pretext for suspending constitutional liberties...

...The loyalties and commitments of these lower-level operatives were no doubt cynically manipulated by the higher-ups at CRP and the White House...

...I have long been struck, incidentally, by the failure of the Right to exploit the fact that the assassins of both Kennedys were men of radical Left associations and commitments, one a former defector to the Soviet Union and a Castro supporter, the other a Palestinian nationalist...

...The "Radical Right" of the 'SOs even saw the fight against domestic Communists as an alternative to a sustained anti-Communist foreign policy requiring alliances, foreign aid, big defense budgets, U.N...

...Eighteen months of continuing exposure to an almost endless series of crimes and abuses has also revealed the hollowness of the more extravagant New Left sloganizing of recent years—the equation of America with Nazi Germany, seeing the hand of the CIA or the FBI in every unpleasant happening at home or abroad, imputing "repressive" aims to all our institutions...

...Under a parliamentary system— even the Canadian, which combines British institutions with looser, North Americanstyle political parties—Nixon would have soon been forced to resign, his caretaker successor would have called a general election within days after the evidence of illegal acts by Nixon's chief aides (let alone by himself) had become public...

...Now that we have the transcripts of Nixon's conversations with his aides, it is even harder than before to believe in a demoniacal fascist interpretation of Wategate...

...Other presidents, of course, have had their "kitchen cabinets" and White House "cronies," have created new government agencies under their personal control to bypass existing ones (FDR was a master at this), and have fiercely played the game of secret bureaucratic in-fighting...

...This was no Hitler or Mussolini, not even a Joe McCarthy or Huey Long, nor a de Gaulle confronted with the Paris "Days of May" of 1968...

...Consider the following "scenario," as John Dean or John Ehrlichman might have put it...

...No doubt ITT, Vesco, and others sought to buy favors from the Administration, but one gains the distinct impression that Nixon's campaign fund-raisers bullied many corporate officers into reluctantly making illegal contributions rather than the other way around...

...The radical conspiracy was, we now know definitely from secret intelligence sources, responsible nearly a decade ago for the assassination of a Democratic president and of his brother five years later...

...These activities are perfect projections of Nixon's mistrust of others, his almost paranoid hatred of the media and political opponents, and his noteDENNIS H. WRONG rious preference for being a "loner...

...I refer to the governments of Cuba, Albania, North Korea, and Chile, and to the so-called Palestinian Liberation movement...

...Or the Democrats, with the presidency within their grasp in 1976, are likely to be tempted to run a bland and vacuous campaign, no matter whom they nominate, expecting to be swept into office by revulsion against the Nixon administration...

...That the campuses and ghettos were quiet, the New Left virtually dead, and the peace movement deprived of its onetime momentum by changes in the draft and the "winding down" of the war in Vietnam actually enhanced the usefulness of radicalism as an issue...

...My imagined reference to the Symbionese Liberation Army is, of course, an anachronism, for no one in early 1973 knew about such an organization...

...Agnew's speeches linked the declining New Left to liberals and intellectuals in the media and the universities...

...I hold here in my hand a communication sent to the FBI by the Weatherman Underground from which I quote...

...If this pattern suggests a drift toward fascist authoritarianism, the drift was nonetheless largely unconscious, made up of ad hoc improvisations reflecting no grand design—rather like the absent-minded empire-building of Britain in the late 19th century...

...Contrast this failure with the wide hearing won by leftist theories of a right-wing plot behind President Kennedy's murder—even a commercial movie was produced, dramatizing one version...

...The New York Times has observed editorially that the case of ITT or of the milk producers alone is equal to the Teapot Dome scandal of the '20s—a period politically not unlike the present...

...the Cuban burglars were persuaded that the break-in served the cause of the anti-Castro opposition...

...A more relevant example is the exploitation by Senator Joseph McCarthy of the theme of far-reaching Communist conspiracy in the early '50s when American Communism was already finished as a political force of any magnitude...

...This brings us to the "power" theory—or theories...

...I also have here a manifesto from another terrorist group in California calling itself the Symbionese Liberation Army which reads as follows...

...Stalin's purges of "bourgeois" elements at home coincided with his turn toward the Popular Front policy abroad...

...WATERGATE: SYMPTOM OF WHAT SICKNESS...

...That CRP may have partially succeeded in discrediting Muskie, and the fact that its preferred "weak" candidate won the Democratic nomination and lost by a landslide in the election gave its hidden activities an even more ominous look...

...The most urgent immediate task of the democratic Left is to maintain the pressure for reforms of those practices that made Watergate possible: campaign-spending laws, the activities of government intelligence agencies, the accountability of the executive to Congress and the public...

...CIA agents have discovered, however, that lesser Communist states and revolutionary movements abroad have provided significant financial and political aid to their allies in the United States...

...young proteges of Cabinet officers...

...At this point the limitations of the "big money" theory become glaringly obvious...

...In their different ways and thoroughly unequal importance, both Watergate and the SLA are the detritus of the late '60s, the offal left behind as the frontlash and backlash of the tide of war and protest recede...

...The easy thing would have been to have limited our efforts to conventional, constitutionally acceptable methods...

...No broad and misty ideological goals, no impassioned determination to rid the nation of a proscribed enemy reveal themselves in these colloquies...

...504 Somehow, though, the "mix" doesn't seem to be quite the right one to support the view that Watergate was a step toward "fascism...

...pears that he should play on fears of domestic radicalism while making maximum use of his role as a peacemaker with the Communist powers abroad...

...Recently it was revealed that, in addition to the well-publicized "enemies list," Maurice Stans compiled a "shit list" (his term) of corporations who had refused to contribute, or had done so less than lavishly, to the Committee to Reelect the President...

...Hitler's pact with Stalin did not lead to any abatement of his suppression of the Left in Germany...

...But, as that great jurist the late Justice Jackson, a Democrat, once observed, "the Constitution is not a suicide pact...

...The first Nixon administration showed little concern with civil liberties in moving against radical activists and attempted (with ambiguous success) to exploit their unpopularity with the "silent majority" in the 1970 congressional elections...

...This conspiracy had enlisted large numbers of young people in its ranks during the late '60s as a result of the misguided permissiveness and even encouragement of their elders in the media, the universities, and some segments of the Democratic party who should have stood for morality, patriotism, and strict observance of the law—the qualities that have made America great...

...Obviously, Watergate is in the first instance a constitutional crisis...

...But Nixon was clearly prepared to alter the structure and direction of federal welfare policies that had not been seriously challenged, let alone by the White House, since the New Deal...

...Of the Watergate conspirators themselves, Hunt and McCord were old CIA men experienced in anti-Communist intelligence activities...

...unsuccessful politicians seeking government jobs...

...The transcripts do not remind one of Hitler's tabletalk...

...There is also a striking similarity in the way in which the supralegal fervor of the far Left provided the Right with a pretext for using the actual or alleged methods of its declared enemy to violate civil liberties and the law...

...However, the corporations undoubtedly remembered President Kennedy's instant mobilization of the powers of the government against steel companies that had broken price guidelines in 1962...

...We did them to save America from a far-reaching radical conspiracy...

...Does it point to an incipient totalitarianism in advanced capitalist societies that will reassert itself after the ritual cleansing gestures have been completed...

...Claims of vast conspiratorial goings-on could be made without having to confront the real and therefore limited dis turbances made by flesh-and-blood activists...

...In the late '60s some of us warned that the growing taste of "Movement" radicals for violent confrontations would encourage similar tactics on the part of the Right, but we were scarcely so prescient—or so fearful— as to imagine that this response would come from the White House itself...

...Early in the Ervin hearings, a columnist quoted the advice of one of those "wise and experienced" but unnamed Washington "observers" to "keep your eye on the trail of the long green" if you want to unravel the mysteries of Watergate...

...I have heard radicals, predictably attracted by the notion of endemic "capitalist corruption," argue that the Nixon administration, as the publicly visible "government," is being made the scapegoat for the sins of the corporations who were the real agents of corruption...

...Can we be certain that if Nixon had made such a speech he would not have gotten away with it...

...The election and reelection of Nixon, and of course the Watergate activities themselves, were part of the reaction against a decade of reform and protest from the Left...

...New York cops who happened to have guarded the President on ceremonial visits to that city...

...But the impulse both to duplicate offices and to "colonize" the government bureaucracy with men from the White House "cadres" was unprecedentedly strong in the Nixon administration...

...WATERGATE: SYMPTOM OF WHAT SICKNESS...

...There were too few "crazy braves" at the top (Liddy was Alsop's main example) and too many "phoney toughs" and "smartass shrewds" ready to collapse under pressure and plea-bargain...

...The major corporations surely preferred Nixon's reelection to a Muskie or a Kennedy victory, but it is hard to believe that the prospect of the latter frightened them to the point of donating large amounts of money in violation of the law...

...A series of personable young men paraded before the Committee and confessed to perjury, destroying documents, and planning "dirty tricks" in the interest of Nixon's reelection...

...Justice Department in his first four years but that "things are going to change now"— give plausibility to the claim that the exposure of Watergate "seriously derailed .. . the fascist timetable," in the words of Irving Louis Horowitz...

...if they failed 502 to remember, they were certainly not so subtly reminded by Nixon's men...

...A policy of concentrating power in the executive in order to deconcentrate it for future presidents suggests that we were saved by Watergate from something less than a fascist coup designed to establish an authoritarian statist regime...

...We have all been provided with a refresher course in the Constitution and the structure of American government, which both reflects and encourages the American predilection for reducing political conflicts to questions of legal and constitutional procedure...

...Occurring in a period of mild reaction and loss of initiative by the Left, Watergate has now aroused fear and revulsion against the excesses of the Right and has at last discredited the incantatory use of national security and executive privilege as shields for presidential authority free from congressional and public scrutiny...

...Does it reveal anything about American politics and society that we didn't know in the large before...

...As an electoral base he sought to cultivate Kevin Phillips's projected new Republican majority uniting the South, the Western "Sun Belt" states, and those white, ethnic bluecollar workers who were responsive to George Wallace's appeals...

...Emboldened by the landslide victory handed him as a result of McGovern's candidacy, Nixon was ready to move even further than his predecessors toward a Gaullist, plebiscitarian definition of the presidency, which would permit him to use its powers for conservative rather than liberal domestic goals...

...Yet there is also the opposite tendency on the Left to treat forms of government as mere superstructures, often manifest in efforts to define Watergate as evidence of a "crisis of legitimation," allegedly plaguing "late capitalist" societies...

...Is it as momentous as its domination of our consciousness for 18 months makes it seem...

...As the Watergate "cover-up" begins to unravel in the spring of 1973, Nixon addresses the nation: Yes, we did most of those things we are now accused of doing by ignorant and smallminded men, and I take full responsibility for them...

...Actually, Hubert Humphrey had a lot more to do than CRP with defeating Muskie and ensuring McGovern's nomination, for his candidacy split the "traditional" democratic vote in several important primaries that would otherwise have gone to Muskie...

...They never rise above the level of sleazy scheming, petty machinations to fiddle with and evade the law, and preoccupation with the traits of individual personalities...

...Yet these effects may not fully manifest themselves at once: we are still in a conservative period...

...The initially shocking feature of Watergate was the attempted subversion of the electoral process by an incumbent administration that used "black" intelligence methods to try to influence candidate selection in the opposition party...

...A notable trait of McCarthy and his followers and imitators was their lack of interest in and even antagonism toward, often reflecting isolationist roots, American foreign policy efforts to "contain" the Soviet Union...

...Moreover, there was a special obsession with the official foreign and domestic intelligence services, themselves often accused by liberals of operating as "invisible governments," which have elsewhere served as the major instruments of dictatorial rule or as objects of special mistrust, inducing the dictator to create his own conspiratorial substitutes for them...

...Rather, the overwhelming mandate my Administration received a few months ago from the American people, and the peace with honor it has since achieved in Vietnam, have forced the Movement to go underground and to adopt even more destructive tactics than those it employed openly a few years ago...

...But what might have happened if Watergate had not been exposed (and we assume—plausibly, as I have argued—that American democracy would have survived Nixon's term in office...

...Watergate stands in the same relationship to the New Left excesses of the late '60s as the McCarthyism of the early '50s stood in relation to the exposures of past Communist infiltration and espionage a few years before...

...As the 1972 election approached, efforts were made to discover ties between the opposition party and the radical Left, and, if neces sary, to create the appearance of such ties, using rumor, forgery, and provocation to this end...

...It is worth emphasizing therefore that it is the basic design of the American government plus the de jure and de facto accretions creating what Arthur Schlesinger calls "The Imperial Presidency" that.have compelled us to "wallow in Watergate" these many months...

...The broader challenge, with the prospect of a more active Congress becoming a major legacy of Watergate, is to advance concrete proposals addressed to the injustices of American society and to avoid the attitudinizing and inflated rhetoric that so often in the past decade served as a substitute for such proposals...

...Today, with detente the order of the day, he is able to pose as the peacemaker abroad and as the scourge of a domestic radicalism, conveniently no longer tied to Soviet interests at home...

...Little of the full Watergate story had come to light in early 1973, and his approval rating in public-opinion polls still stood at over 60 percent...

...In late 1972 and early 1973 some of Nixon's supporters responded to criticism from conservatives and Republican members of Congress of his flouting of Congress and his aggrandizement of the presidency with the argument that he was doing all this precisely in order to reduce once and for all the powers of the entrenched federal bureaucracy in Washington...

...Nixon's first Administration had both capitalized on the reaction and succeeded in partially appeasing the protest by ending large-scale American involvement in Southeast Asia, changing the draft laws, promoting detente with Russia and China, and even proposing a few domestic liberal initiatives (which ultimately came to nothing), such as the Family Assistance Plan...

...retired CIA men...

...Fortified by the size of his electoral mandate and the awareness that he would not be running for office again, instead of the expected mellowing there seemed to be a falling away of previous restraints...

...Nixon's deep-rooted conservative and anti-welfare state beliefs came to the fore after the 1972 election, beliefs that even some liberals who had long loathed him for his opportunism and synthetic public personality had come to doubt he genuinely held...

...Gerald Ford may well become the Eisenhower of the late '70s, presiding over a pacified country weary of politics...

...My solemn responsibility to ensure the survival of this nation in peace and freedom as the hope of all the world left me with no alternative but to resort to drastic methods in fighting this radical conspiracy and exposing its dupes in high places...

...Their scale and accumulation, and the extent of involvement at the very peak of government, are what make Watergate unprecedented...

...Nixon's role in the Republican party and the Eisenhower administration was, in part, to build a bridge between the domestic Red hunters and the more respectable, conservative internationalists committed to the Cold War abroad...

...There would have been no equivalent of the long Ervin Committee hearings, no appointment of a Special Prosecutor, no discovery of the White House taping system, no reexamination of presidential tax returns, no revelatory transcripts—in short, no interminable scrutiny of the government's dirtiest secrets casting a garish light on American institutions...

...Indeed, the massive purchase of favors by ITT and the milk producers, the sale of ambassadorships, the raising of millions of dollars by illegal means from corporations for Nixon's reelection campaign, the apparent "skimming" of these funds for gifts to Nixon's relatives and personal friends, Nixon's own chiseling on his tax returns and use of public funds for private purposes, Agnew's disgrace and fall for petty financial derelictions unrelated to Watergate—all of these are forms of "capitalist corruption," of what C. Wright Mills called "the higher immorality," examples of which are scarcely unknown in the record of previous administrations...

...After Nixon's reelection it was widely believed that, unable to run for office again and with his eyes on posterity, he would lead the country in a moderate and statesmanlike manner, burying old enmities and playing peacemaker at home, as he had done with apparent success with the Communist powers abroad...

...Such a blend of PR manipulativeness, posturing rhetoric, and genuine fanaticism has often been a feature of fascist-type movements...

...Do not think the recent calm that has reigned on our campuses, in our inner cities, and our prisons means that radicalism has been defeated...

...Will it produce any lasting changes in our political system...

...We have unmistakable proof that similar actions and even more deadly ventures were, and still are, under consideration...

...Or does it show that the political system in the end "works," suggesting a possible renascence of democracy...

...I recall hearing Robert Lekachman argue, just as the Watergate scandal was beginning to break, that Nixon's revenue-sharing with cities and states, his dismantling of sections of the federal welfare state bureaucracy, and other pending economic policies would, if DENNIS H. WRONG carried out over the next four years, make it very difficult for a future liberal Democratic president to undo their consequences and recover the lost powers of the federal government to shape nationwide social policies...

...Liddy was an eccentric right-wing ideologue...

...Happily for all of us, Nixon's responses were the low scheming, the trivial PR engineering of appearances, and the general ineptitude and unrealism that have marked his defense against Watergate from the beginning and by now have clearly doomed him...

...There is an obvious congruence between the use of the alleged radical threat and Nixon's political beginnings as an anti-Communist crusader in the early years of the Cold War...

...Some of the money was used to increase the likelihood of McGovern's nomination—which might well have frightened them—by undermining the other candidates after it had been given or extorted...

...Watergate and Vietnam may prove to be the end of an era in American politics that began with Pearl Harbor: the end of the imperial presidency, of the invocation of the external enemy to silence debate, of the shameless and costly merchandising of political candidates, of the taste for exaggerated ideological rhetoric on the part of both Left and Right...

...The secret and illegal harassment of political opponents compels us to consider Watergate in light of the "deadly parallel" with fascism and totalitarianism...

...L ,s I wrote above, there was a discernible "pattern" in the various secret activities of the White House apparat...