A Bit of History for The Donald

September 18, 2017

The Talk of the Town

August 27, 1973 Issue

Notes and Comment–A Bit of History for The Donald

By Richard Harris

http://www.newyorker.com

Nixon’s Farewell in 1974–The President opened China resigned in disgrace over Watergate. But he was pardoned by President Gerald Ford. On foreign policy, he and Henry Kissinger brought tragedy to Cambodia and Timor Leste.

In addressing the nation on Watergate last week, President Nixon said at the outset, “I shall not attempt to deal tonight with the various charges in detail. Rather, I shall attempt to put the events in perspective from the standpoint of the Presidency.” Then he proceeded to deal with some of the more serious charges in sufficient detail—though at some points incorrectly and at other points misleadingly—to make it appear that he had satisfactorily disposed of the question of his own involvement. But since that question is far less important than the question of what President Nixon’s Administration, his aides, and his campaign committee did that was immoral and illegal, it is appropriate to put his latest explanations aside for now and to examine the view of Watergate that Mr. Nixon eventually presented from his standpoint.

The first general subject he took up was the tape recordings. “It is absolutely necessary, if the President is to be able to do his job as the country expects, that he be able to talk openly and candidly with his advisers about issues and individuals,” he told his audience. “This kind of frank discussion is only possible when those who take part in it know that what they say is in strictest confidence.” The President did not acknowledge that he had betrayed this confidence by secretly recording, over a two-year period, conversations of those who spoke with him in what they thought was privacy. Instead, he moved on to support his doctrine of “confidentiality” by citing the legal privilege that “applies, for example, to conversations between a lawyer and a client, between a priest and a penitent, and between a husband and a wife,” and he concluded his discussion of this point by saying, “It is even more important that the confidentiality of conversations between a President and his advisers be protected.” Another well-known example of the privilege is the relationship between a doctor and a patient, but he made no reference to that, perhaps because it might have reminded the audience of the awkward fact that men presumably acting on the President’s authority had burglarized the office of Dr. Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist precisely in order to violate that confidential relationship. Mr. Nixon also failed to mention that the law extends no protection to the parties to any privileged relationship when they act illegally outside its limits; for instance, if a lawyer and his client hold up a bank, their professional relationship won’t do anything for them when they are arrested. Nor did the President mention that all the privileges he referred to are only privileges, and that the parties who are entitled to assert them can also waive them—as the President could now.

A little later, Mr. Nixon stated that “every President since World War II has believed that in internal security matters the President has the power to authorize wiretaps without first obtaining a search warrant.” That claim left out something, too: former Presidents are believed to have authorized such wiretaps only in cases involving agents of foreign powers, not in cases involving domestic dissidents and radicals, whose conversations the Nixon Administration tapped and bugged under a presumed power that never existed. Mr. Nixon also claimed in his speech that a law passed by Congress in 1968 “seemed to recognize such power.” But Senator Sam Ervin, who helped write that law, didn’t read it that way. As a matter of fact, neither did the Nixon Administration back in 1969, when it first tried to justify its wiretapping of domestic radicals, for Attorney General John Mitchell contended that neither the 1968 law nor the Constitution was binding on the President in national-security cases. (The Burger Court summarily rejected this contention.)

Again and again in his speech, President Nixon used the terms “abuses,” “mistakes,” and “overzealous” to characterize the vicious crimes committed by those who worked for him. He said, “As we look at Watergate in a longer perspective, we can see that its abuses resulted from the assumption by those involved that their cause placed them beyond the reach of those rules that apply to other persons and that hold a free society together. That attitude can never be tolerated in our country. However, it did not suddenly develop in the year 1972. It became fashionable in the nineteen-sixties, as individuals and groups increasingly asserted the right to take the law into their own hands, insisting that their purposes represented a higher morality. . . . That same attitude brought a rising spiral of violence and fear, of riots and arson and bombings, all in the name of peace and in the name of justice. . . . The notion that the end justifies the means proved contagious. Thus it is not surprising, even though it is deplorable, that some persons in 1972 adopted the morality that they themselves had rightly condemned, and committed acts that have no place in our political system. Those acts cannot be defended. Those who were guilty of abuses must be punished. But ultimately the answer does not lie merely in the jailing of a few overzealous persons who mistakenly thought their cause justified their violations of the law. . . . We must recognize that one excess begets another, and that the extremes of violence and discord in the nineteen-sixties contributed to the extremes of Watergate.” To suggest that members of the civil-rights movement who broke state and municipal laws in order to test their Constitutionality—doing so openly and in the full awareness that they would probably be arrested and jailed—led frustrated black mobs to burn down their own neighborhoods and finally brought high government officials to the point where they tried to destroy the two-party political system in this country is to say that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., created G. Gordon Liddy. And to suggest that antiwar demonstrators who asserted their Constitutional right “to petition the Government for a redress of grievances” in peaceful and legal ways led to the Weathermen’s viciousness and then to the White House attempts to blackmail enemies and bribe friends is to say that Dr. Benjamin Spock created Anthony Ulasewicz. Continuing, Mr. Nixon said, “If we learn the important lessons of Watergate, if we do what is necessary to prevent such abuses in the future—on both sides—we can emerge from this experience a better and a stronger nation.” If we take his advice and accept his view that there was merely some confusion about means and ends on the part of a few misguided but well-meaning people and that the two political parties have traditionally indulged in the same dirty practices, we will reject the rule of law that preserves our system and the sense of morality that would improve it.

Next, turning to “an issue that is important above all else, and that is critically affecting your life today and will affect your life and your children’s in the years to come,” the President warned, “We must not stay so mired in Watergate that we . . . let an obsession with the past destroy our hopes for the future. Legislation vital to your health and well-being sits unattended on the congressional calendar.” If Mr. Nixon’s actions in the past are a guide to how he can be expected to act in the future, he will do his best to weaken, defeat, or veto such legislation. Moreover, the implication that Congress is not attending to its business because of Watergate collapses in the face of the fact that Congress rarely attends to its business much more expeditiously than it has recently; and in a couple of important legislative matters action has been delayed because the Administration hasn’t got around to letting Congress know where it stands. Finally, observing that the Watergate case should be turned over to the courts, Mr. Nixon said, “The time has come for the rest of us to get on with the urgent business of our nation. . . . I ask for your help to insure that those who would exploit Watergate in order to keep us from doing what we were elected to do will not succeed.” The appeal was an unmistakable attempt to force Congress to abandon the Watergate hearings, and, as such, was a flagrant violation of the separation-of-powers doctrine that the President has claimed to hold sacrosanct.

 

In the end, the best reason that Mr. Nixon had to offer for putting Watergate aside was his claim that the public and private obsession with the Watergate issue was dangerously hampering the government in the conduct of its business. Although his attempt to pitch some of his Administration’s worst failures—most notably, its failure to control inflation—into the Watergate caldron was absurd, his claim that the nation had been harmed abroad by the scandals was probably true. The nation has been harmed there mainly because foreign leaders cannot have much confidence in President Nixon until his own people do. And he cannot regain the lost confidence merely by saying to the people, in effect, that they should ignore the foul corruption in his Administration and get behind him again, so he can resume his negotiations with other heads of state. As for the President’s contention that the government’s domestic operations have been drastically curtailed because of Watergate, that kind of cutback would unintentionally fulfill one of the public mandates he claimed in last week’s speech to have been given in the 1972 election—“to reduce the power and size of government.”

Yet the President’s complaint that the government has been crippled is extremely puzzling, because he has assured the nation all along that he is not going to be distracted by Watergate, and if he hasn’t been, there is no reason the executive branch, which he commands as fully as ever, should not go on functioning as usual—and there is even less reason the legislative and judicial branches, which have assigned a very small fraction of their total manpower to the Watergate case, should not carry on normally, too. In fact, there appears to be no convincing explanation for the government’s purported slowdown unless it is that the President himself is so obsessed by Watergate that he cannot perform his duties properly. If that is the situation, the people have more reason than ever to insist that the Watergate story be openly and fully told, for both the people and the President must understand what was done to undermine the foundations of our system before we can repair them and move forward again. ♦