It's 1973 all over again
BARONE, MICHAEL
It's 1973 All Over. Again by Michael Barone Election year 1996 is looking very much like election year 1972, when most voters decided to return an incumbent president to office despite doubts...
...And then there is the Paula Jones lawsuit...
...He can be weakened abroad—which is to say that the United States will be weakened as will those whose freedom depends on its strength...
...they may decide, as Republicans like Howard Baker and Lowell Weicker did in 1973, that it is their duty or in their interest to investigate Clinton independently and aggressively...
...it's preposterous for the chief executive in a republic to claim the sovereign immunity of a king or queen...
...in 1972 Watergate was followed in depth only by the Post...
...A state trooper has already testified that the trooper took Jones to Clinton's hotel room...
...Similarly, an 89 percent pro-Clinton press may develop a heartier appetite for Clinton scandals once the Clintons are safely installed for a second term...
...Voters reelected Richard Nixon in 1972 though he wasn't beautiful...
...And what about these six-figure contributions from Indonesian nationals...
...Could the same happen to Bill Clinton...
...in the more likely event the court rejects the president's argument, Clinton will have to go on trial on charges of sexual harassment...
...Starr has been looking into the White House travel office affair, in which the Clintons could be accused of abusing law enforcement personnel or committing perjury, Clinton advisers could be accused of perjury or, depending on how Rose Law Firm billing records reached the Clinton family quarters, obstruction of justice...
...The Supreme Court has unaccountably agreed to consider Bill Clinton's argument that as president he is not subject to civil suit...
...On Election Day 1972, most voters were aware of the burglary of the Democratic headquarters and the arrest of Nixon campaign staffers Gordon Liddy and Howard Hunt there, but the exact connection of the burglary to the Nixon campaign was a matter of conjecture...
...otherwise, in the words of Theodore White, "The rest of the American press came in nowhere...
...But when scandal struck in 1973 and 1974, they decided he wasn't serving his intended purpose, and they pitched him on the trash heap...
...one has the sense that voters—certainly clinton supporters—are putting the possibility of a crisis in the presidency at the back of their minds and hoping for the best...
...Again by Michael Barone Election year 1996 is looking very much like election year 1972, when most voters decided to return an incumbent president to office despite doubts about his honesty and trustworthiness...
...Though the press has shown little curiosity about discrepancies between Livingstone's account and that of his assistant Mari Anderson, they may perk up after the election just as prosecutors or congressional investigators start zeroing in...
...Will a Nixon-like victory for Bill clinton be followed by the aftermath of the November 1972 landslide—the two-year slide into Watergate disgrace...
...the New York Times offered some coverage...
...Clinton may hope to be sheltered from scandal by pardons or by the ouster of the independent counsel or the retirement of House Government Operations chairman Bill Clinger...
...It is enough that they serve their intended purpose...
...But quite possibly something like it—and that is something Americans may want to ponder before they vote...
...Nothing was yet known of other major scandals—the FBI burglary of Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist's office, the "dirty tricks" squad...
...During the Watergate years, Joseph Alsop liked to say, "Politicians are like toilet fixtures...
...Which is what most Nixon voters did in 1972...
...Michael Barone is co-editor of the Almanac of American Politics...
...They need not be beautiful...
...Not exactly the same, surely, and perhaps not anything of the same magnitude...
...That person—Craig Livingstone, or his superior William Kennedy iii, or whoever—could be prosecuted and put under great pressure to produce more evidence...
...This we do know from the Nixon example: A president who wins reelection despite a generally low opinion of his honesty and trustworthiness can plummet in weeks from 50-plus percent to 25 percent in the polls...
...If the Democrats win control of Congress, that will shut down at least some investigations of Clinton...
...if Clinton's argument is accepted, he won't even have to pay his MasterCard bill until after he leaves office...
...But the Clinton team's frantic efforts to postpone disclosures through November 5 may not avail them afterwards...
...Nixon, like Clinton, tried to keep the lid on until after the election, but Nixon had more success: Clinton has had to weather congressional investigations, while Nixon was able to get all House Banking Committee Republicans and several Democrats to quash chairman Wright Patman's move for an investigation in the fall of 1972...
...But with one difference: There was a lot less information available at that point in 1972 about Nixon scandals than there is today about the clinton scandals...
...But the Democrats who have been so unswervingly loyal to him in Term One may not be when the second term is in full swing...
...it was possible for a voter to imagine that a second Nixon term would be dominated by investigation of scandal, but it was also possible to imagine that the Watergate story would end with the trials of the burglars...
...So does the office of independent counsel Kenneth Starr, and if he has been holding back indictments pending the election, he is likely to seek them very soon thereafter...
...Then there are the FBI files someone caused to be sent over to the White House...
...Russ Feingold, the Wisconsin Democrat, has already said he might support an independent counsel on the Indonesian contributions...
...Sam Ervin's Watergate committee...
...on the skein of land deals and cover-ups referred to as Whitewater, the statute of limitations has mostly passed, but not on possible perjury in congressional hearings or grand jury sessions...
...Many questions remain open...
...and stake out the houses of Bob Haldeman and John Ehrlichman...
...But pardons are likely to produce the same lasting damage Gerald Ford suffered after pardoning Richard Nixon...
...there may be a lot of reporters out there who would like to be the next Bob Woodward...
...A whole generation of journalists made successful careers out of Watergate, but most of those careers were made in 1973 and 1974...
...He can lose his natural advantage in dealing with Congress...
...it is hard to think what legitimate business Clinton might have intended to do with her there...
...of course, history never precisely repeats itself, but the answer could be yes...
...Ford, like Clinton, avoided an explicit commitment not to pardon beforehand, but that availed him nothing...
...This fall, voters know more things about more Clinton scandals and still seem disposed to vote for the president...
...Washington Post metro reporters Bob Woodward and carl Bernstein may have been writing about Watergate every week in the summer and fall of 1972, but cBs news rookies Lesley stahl and connie chung waited until 1973 to get up at 5:00 a.m...
...And such might well have been the case had Judge John Sirica not given 35- and 40-year sentences to the burglars in March 1973 and urged them to cooperate with Sen...
...the CBS Evening News scheduled a three-part series, though after pressure from the Nixon White House, it ran only two segments...
Vol. 2 • October 1996 • No. 7
