End of an Era
MAURER, MARVIN
Perspectives END OF AN ERA BY MARVIN MAURER Watergate marks the end of an era in American history that started with Franklin D. Roosevelt's 1932 election and extended through Richard Nixon's...
...system of checks and balances by enabling a Caesar-like President to by-pass Congress...
...In 1954, for example, Will Herberg argued in the pages of The New Leader that such devices as fireside chats subverted the U.S...
...In effect, Watergate is serving to de-charismate the Presidency...
...Others consider Watergate to be the logical extension of Richard Nixon's political career...
...Today, it is difficult to imagine a President going to Berlin and declaring his oneness with its beleaguered people, as did Kennedy over a decade ago...
...Herbert Marcuse contends that it is an inevitable result of the American political-economic system...
...Such deeds appear to have been discounted by the public because it was recognized that the nation required powerful leaders capable of acting in times of crisis...
...Recall how citizens rallied behind John F. Kennedy after the Bay of Pigs fiasco...
...Chief Executives, even when their foreign policies turned out badly, always received widespread public support...
...But in the course of meeting major problems, Presidents since FDR have succeeded in reducing difficult issues to predictable, manageable proportions...
...Watergate, the long Vietnam war and its horrors, the domestic turmoil of the '60s-all have accelerated this downgrading process...
...Now, however, opinion polls, Congressional efforts to weaken the President's war-making role, and defeat in the courts of Nixon's attempts to impound funds demonstrate a decline in White House power and prestige...
...But in fact, the great outcry against the buggings and break-ins is best understood as part of a larger process marking the decline of what Daniel Elazar called crisis-oriented centralism...
...Herberg did acknowledge that the White House had accumulated its powers because of post-1929 emergencies...
...Since the birth of the New Deal, the Chief Executive has been the nation's dominant policy maker as well as the primary source of the values that provided the rationale for those policies...
...and the USSR...
...Observers looking at the Watergate scandal have seen different things...
...The Ervin Committee subpoena may even prove the equivalent of Andrew Johnson's impeachment...
...Perspectives END OF AN ERA BY MARVIN MAURER Watergate marks the end of an era in American history that started with Franklin D. Roosevelt's 1932 election and extended through Richard Nixon's first term...
...No leader in the foreseeable future is likely to overawe us with his political mastery, as did Lyndon B. Johnson when he cajoled and compelled the 1965-66 Congress to pass a cascade of social and civil rights legislation...
...Thus, the need for strong leadership has receded, and official misdeeds are no longer ignored by the public...
...Indeed, current feelings about Executive power make Nixon's refusal to press for an investigation of election frauds in 1960 because it might have limited the functioning of the Presidency seem positively archaic...
...Given the process necessary for a politician to reach the White House, it is reasonable to assume that all of our modern Presidents engaged in some variation of the Watergate activities...
...In England, Robert Conquest suggests that Americans are overreacting to skullduggery that is par for politicians everywhere...
...Marvin Maurer is a Professor of Government at Monmouth College...
...But for most Americans the modern Presidency was inviolable-the one institution in recent decades to weather crisis after crisis...
...This was a situation many found ominous...
...The Russian press claims the exposures are a ploy cooked up by Rightists and reactionaries to destroy the possibility of detente between the U.S...
...Ironically, though, it was the accomplishments of strong Executive leadership, including Richard Nixon's own impressive first-term achievements, that actually paved the way for the present trend and made the Senate investigation possible...
...Following that imbroglio, the nation voted in weak Presidents like Grant, Hayes and Garfield for almost 40 years...
Vol. 56 • September 1973 • No. 18
