The Bad Man's Club
Mayer, Milton
THE BAD MAN'S CLUB MILTON MAYER It is time that the late Senator Joe McCarthy had an epitaph. Maybe, Here Lies a Man Who Never Said He Wasn't a Crook. Or, if that should be too eclectic—He Didn't...
...No man I know of in American public life has had the homogeneous record of association that Nixon has had...
...seasoned, they might, like the front-office heavies, have become eligible for the Club...
...In the nature of the case Nixon is a bird of a feather with the men he chose and the men who chose him—all of them birds of prey, all of them guilty (whichever of them committed this offense or that) of flocking together for the purpose of private and public plunder...
...Gordon Strachan was equally and eloquently credible when he said that he would tell a young careerist to stay away from Washington...
...What difference does it make whether Nixon burned (or deep-sixed) the documents or hired men to do it—or hired men who knew enough to do it without being told...
...The company of crooks does not make a crook of me...
...The associates of Communists were not Communists by virtue of their association, but neither were they dupes...
...The man who chose Spiro Agnew in 1968, chose him to stand by to run the country, could have been a fool...
...They have undermined the Government...
...Do we get what we want...
...How would they know whether or not they are crooks, seeing life as they do, astonished as they genuinely are by what Spiro Agnew was astonished to call "post-Watergate morality...
...The offender is not impeachable under the statute...
...But it wasn't a hundred years ago that Harry Hopkins had billions of WPA dollars in his hands and spent $400 a month to support his ailing wife and three teenage sons...
...Where is there among them a man in whom (as it does in, say, Archibald Cox) ordinary decency declares itself unprotesting...
...One, Hugh Sloan by name, was credible when he testified that nobody ever told him anything and that he was told to go away when he asked about anything...
...Everybody's doing it," Al Capone once said...
...The suspicion that it did not fall, but leaped, is a depressing suspicion...
...Do we deserve what we've got...
...What McCarthy was right about was guilt by association...
...Why shouldn't we judge a man by the company he keeps, if it is clear, as it is in Nixon's case, that he keeps their company for purposes related to his...
...All of them cut from the same smooth shoddy—except Mitchell, cut from rough shoddy—they have set their country an immemorial example of rascality...
...Guilt by association is not a justiciable offense...
...The roster of Nixon's associates from first to last, those he chose and those who chose him, is persuasive evidence that this country has fallen among thieves...
...Do we want something altogether different from what we wanted a hundred years ago...
...They put their names and faces on the Communist line because, like the Communists, they wanted to change the world...
...Or, if that should be too eclectic—He Didn't Mean to Be Right, but He Was...
...It is common purpose that convicts me of guilty association...
...They were made fools of (some of them) in devastating detail—but not in rock-bottom principle...
...But these were rising young Nixonians both, both of them saved by the gavel...
...The man who chose Spiro Agnew in 1972, chose him to stand by to run the country, had to be a rogue...
...They have undermined the very probability of governance...
...Not one...
...If the Communists were guilty of something purposive, association with them for any purpose related to what they were guilty of was guilty association...
...And both of them were messenger boys...
...To that precise extent McCarthy was right...
...It will be time, some day, to write an epitaph for Nixon...
...I may be a conscientious criminologist...
...My friend Maude Hutchins once established an organization called the Bad Man's Club...
...Nowhere...
...Of all Nixon's men we have been privileged to see (and some that we haven't been), two, and only two, are not instantly eligible for election to the Bad Man's Club...
...Where among his associates in and out of government—those who have been paraded and those from the far past, like Murray Chotiner, who haven't been—is a nice guy...
...But this was the country that produced them, nourished them, and gave them the keys to the kingdom...
...It was an unusual organization: Its members did not know, or even suspect, that they belonged to it...
...None...
...Like the Communists, they wanted to change the world, and they were willing to sup short-spooned with McCarthy's Devil to do it...
...But it was twenty-five years and more falling, twenty-five years and more exposed to Dicky's tricks...
...All his life Nixon has chosen and been chosen by what the British call wide boys and what we used to call snake-oil salesmen...
...The stonecutter will cut the words, Here Lies a Man Who—and pause...
Vol. 38 • February 1974 • No. 2
