The Wars of Watergate (119 page)

Watergate bestowed a new vulnerability on the presidency. Americans alternately inflicted anger and derision on the office and the man. Ford’s pardon of Nixon added an element of cynicism. Slander and malice toward presidents, of course, was not new. Washington suffered his share, as did Jefferson, Lincoln, and Franklin D. Roosevelt. But the invective now appeared on a massive scale. Once peerless and invincible, presidential majesty seemed diminished, and Nixon and his immediate successors served as
easy prey for cruel, even contemptuous, humor. The media criticism of the presidency, and the preoccupation with presidential sins of omission or commission, had gathered such momentum in the Nixon years that it seemed impossible to turn off the spigot. Jimmy Carter fared no better; indeed, his self-avowed status as an outsider, his mannerisms, and his alternating shifts between doubt and assured faith provided tailor-made targets for equally biting humor and criticism. The Ford and Carter Administrations, especially, offered the spectacle of president as victim.

Clinton Rossiter notwithstanding, the President of the United States now appeared to be an immobilized Gulliver—or worse yet, a Lilliputian. “A feeble Executive implies a feeble execution of the government,” Hamilton wrote in
Federalist
70. “A feeble execution is but another phrase for a bad execution; and a government ill executed, whatever it may be in theory, must be, in practice, a bad government.” By the end of the 1970s, the nation seemed to view its government as “feeble,” and hence “bad.”

Although Watergate gave rise to the criticism of the “imperial presidency,” the
leitmotif
in the early Reagan years was that the nation could ill afford a crippled Chief Executive. Ford spoke of an “imperiled presidency.” Yet power and authority were not so much at issue during the Watergate years as were responsibility and accountability. Richard Nixon endlessly stressed the importance, the infallibility, and the uniqueness of the “presidency”—reiteration designed, it seemed, to insulate the President from accountability. Nothing in the historical traditions of executive power, nothing in the Constitution, nothing even in the modern celebrations of executive authority justified Nixon’s rationalizations. Indeed, had he acknowledged responsibility for Watergate, Nixon might have had a different fate. The President’s foes—and the nation—needed more than he offered. Nixon had underestimated the historical tradition of skepticism toward unrestrained power.
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In subsequent years, references to Nixon’s deeds and the Watergate controversy became a shorthand for amorality, abuse of power, and official criminality. “Watergate” provided a ready suffix to tag onto a range of public scandals. Some such titles stuck, such as “Koreagate,” involving illegal lobbying activities, and some did not, such as “Debategate,” the controversy over purloined Carter campaign materials in the 1980 election. The language became global when the Japanese used “Recruitgate” to describe a government scandal in the late 1980s. Watergate encouraged a routinized—some would argue a trivialized—response to official breaches of public law and confidence. A succession of congressional investigations, special prosecutors, and media pressures followed the various allegations, some well founded, some not.

Watergate established historical traces as standards for future political behavior.
For those who thought the scandal a “dim and distant curiosity,” the Iran-Contra affair in 1986–87 offered a rude reminder. The Reagan Administration’s secret shipment of weapons to Iran, clearly intended as ransom for American hostages held there, and the diversion of profits to the Contra rebels in Nicaragua vividly revived the memories, the lessons, and even the language of Watergate, sometimes inappropriately so. Almost instantaneously, the media raised the familiar Howard Baker question: “What did the President know, and when did he know it?”

Watergate veterans weighed in with experienced advice. Alexander Haig urged President Reagan to take responsibility for the scandal and immediately dismiss underlings suspected of violating the laws. The President, he continued, should refuse to appoint a special prosecutor, nor should he allow congressional hearings (as if it were in his power to bar them). Finally, Haig thought Reagan should tell the American people: “And if you don’t like it, impeach me!” He later lamented that Reagan did not follow his advice and instead “went along with a six-month orgy” of independent-counsel investigations and congressional hearings. Richard Nixon merely told Reagan that the affair would not be “another Watergate, as long as you stay ahead of the curve.” More familiar language: thirteen years earlier, he had told Henry Petersen that he wanted “to stay one step ahead of the curve.”
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Reagan and his advisers had learned a great deal from the Watergate experience. The President appointed the Tower Commission to investigate the Iran-Contra affair. He generally cooperated—and, more important—gave the appearance of cooperation (if not of truthfulness). He never asserted executive privilege; he instructed relevant agencies and individuals to cooperate with Congress and with the independent counsel he appointed (ignoring Haig), and even made available to the congressional committee material held by his designated biographer as well as extracts from his personal diaries. One Congressman, however, was unimpressed and thought that the Reagan Administration had learned a different lesson from Watergate: “they learned to destroy as much evidence as possible and to appear cooperative.” The next perpetrators of misdeeds, he thought, would do “even better” at covering their tracks.

The Iran-Contra affair perhaps represented a greater threat to the American constitutional order than had Watergate, yet its dénouement was not nearly as dramatic. Reagan undoubtedly suffered a loss of credibility, but unlike Nixon he retained a substantial measure of public trust. For some, nevertheless, there was a sinister aspect in what was perceived as the privatization of foreign policy by the White House and the adventurism of presidential subordinates; more than anything, perhaps, the affair revealed the shortcomings of Reagan’s careless management style. But the congressional inquiry demonstrated that the constitutional arrangements for shared
governance remained contested ground in the American system. And within those conflicts, as within that system, “trust,” as Secretary of State George Shultz admitted, “is the coin of the realm.”
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Watergate sounded its haunting tones throughout the episode.

Watergate became a permanent part of American political language after 1972, but its meaning could be easily forgotten. At a press conference in December 1978, a reporter asked President Jimmy Carter if he would consider reducing or withholding federal revenue-sharing funds from those cities or states that did not follow his wage guidelines. “I think this would be illegal under the present law,” the President said. The reporter, as if oblivious to Nixon’s extra-legal policies, persisted and repeated the question. “No,” Carter responded very firmly, “we could not do that under the present law.” Yet for others, Watergate was more instructive. In 1983, revelations indicated that the Solicitor General’s office had covered up important evidence that might have helped the cause of the Japanese-Americans when the Supreme Court heard arguments in 1944 regarding the constitutionality of their wartime internment. A Justice Department attorney, who later went on to a distinguished career as a civil libertarian, was asked some forty years later why he had not publicly exposed the alleged chicanery when he found himself tormented between conscience and loyalty to superiors in 1944. “Watergate,” he responded, “hadn’t happened yet.”
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Watergate, on the whole, has lingered in public memory. The public traditionally has been disposed to expect the worst of legislators “and at the same time believe in high virtues of the President and his entourage.”
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But for a while, at least, the situation has been reversed. When the expectation of executive virtue is disappointed, the weight of such disappointment almost inevitably produces a massive response which, however naively, attempts to ensure against any repetition of executive offenses. Some of the resulting measures succeed; some amount to little more than an exercise in futility or wrongheadedness. And so, the judgment of the effectiveness of post-Watergate reforms results in a mixed verdict.

Perhaps above all, however, Watergate revitalized and nourished the tradition of constitutional responsibility. It also elevated moral considerations in the judgment of public officers and in the conduct of public business. Whether involving limitations on campaign funds, ethical standards for elected and appointed officials, governmental intervention in the private sphere, or the conduct of foreign policy, a national consciousness of the need of checks on powerholders was sparked by Watergate. That concern has remained vital in the years since, prompting and rationalizing both legislation and criticism that reflected some standards for the proper conduct of political leaders and governmental officials. However excessive, faulty, or
even misguided the character of the responses to Watergate, they reflected an understanding that public officials must themselves adhere to the same rule of law they so piously demand that the governed obey. Richard Nixon’s most ardent and passionate defenders, those who most readily assail his persecutors, must either agree, or defend the alien proposition that a president is above the law.

“In the past few days,” Richard Nixon told the nation on the evening of August 8, 1974, he had realized that he no longer had “a strong enough political base in the Congress” to maintain himself in office. The President’s contention that he had to resign merely because he had lost his political base sounded the
leitmotif
for his last campaign—his struggle for the grace and favor of history. That political base was Nixon’s to lose, yet his remarks implied that he had been the victim of a political conspiracy. He mentioned the Watergate “matter” only once.

Nixon’s apologia alarmed his old nemesis Wright Patman, Chairman of the House Banking Committee. The morning after the speech, he wrote to House Judiciary Committee Chairman Peter Rodino, urging that the committee complete its investigation into Nixon’s presidential conduct. Patman told Rodino it was imperative to preserve all the documents and tapes and to ensure that nothing was lost as a result of the presidential transition.

Patman understood the stakes. He suspected that “in the coming weeks and months, there will be some who will attempt to distort the record, [to] misconstrue events and to cloud the real issues.” Watergate had been a “wrenching experience,” he told Rodino, but nothing would be learned if the record were incomplete or distorted. He urged that the committee secure additional White House tapes and publish them. Patman had correctly complained on other occasions that the available tape transcripts revealed nothing of White House discussions between September 15, 1972, and February 28, 1973.

The thought of remaining in the limelight apparently was too much for Rodino. He had been a reluctant warrior from the outset. Now, with almost unseemly haste, he retreated to his familiar obscurity—and shut down the House impeachment inquiry. No one challenged him; Patman again found himself abandoned and isolated. Meanwhile, Rodino had given aid and comfort to Nixon’s embarrassed supporters, one of whom had begged Leon Jaworski to put an “immediate end” to this “mess,” and allow everyone to “quickly forget about it and go on about their business.”
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Nixon himself was more than ready to go about the business of refurbishing his historical reputation. What he said when he resigned, and what he did after that, signaled his campaign to capture the soul of history. Gerald Ford, never known for stern judgments of his contemporaries, remarked that Nixon’s resignation-eve statement on his loss of political support dodged the real issue. Nixon, he complained, had failed to offer any note of contrition, refusing to “take that final step.” Surely, Nixon had no desire for such finality. A contentious man, so self-consciously struggling to emulate Theodore Roosevelt’s “man in the arena,” Nixon simply could not couple the shame of resignation with the obscurity that public penance might bring. Wright Patman could but ponder the future implications of Rodino’s decision to bow out. What, indeed, would history say?

Before and after his resignation, Nixon and his supporters either minimized Watergate or ignored it altogether. In May 1974 Nixon told Rabbi Baruch Korff that Watergate was the “thinnest scandal” in American history. Although embattled by that scandal near the end of his tenure, Nixon suggested to Alexander Haig that a failure to respond to a North Korean attack on an American reconnaissance plane in 1969 “was the most serious misjudgment of my Presidency, including Watergate.” He assured his fallen aide, Charles Colson, that Colson’s “dedicated service” to the nation would be remembered after Watergate had “become only a footnote in history.” At an October 1973 press conference, Nixon anticipated his theme of victimization when he denounced his congressional and media opponents as spiteful enemies who sought to reverse “the mandate of 1972.” Just after the resignation, David Eisenhower, the former President’s son-in-law, said that in fifteen years, Watergate would “look pretty small.” The President, Eisenhower said, had “simply acquiesced in the non-prosecution of aides who covered up a little operation into the opposition’s political headquarters”—hardly something to be taken seriously. In an April 1988 television appearance, Nixon repeated the “footnote” thesis but added that his delay in bombing North Vietnam was the biggest mistake of his presidency.

If he could not reduce Watergate to banality, to something commonplace, Nixon’s fallback position always was to insist that no wrong had occurred.
“When the President does it, that means that it is not illegal,” he told television interviewer David Frost in May 1977, in the first of many self-orchestrated “comebacks.” He referred to the “political” (not criminal) activities that led to his resignation. Following the broadcast of the Frost interviews, a Gallup poll found that 44 percent of those who watched were more sympathetic toward Nixon than they had been, while 28 percent felt less so. Yet Nixon’s early venture into revisionism and vindication failed dismally. Nearly three-quarters of the viewing audience believed he had been guilty of an obstruction of justice, and nearly as many thought he had lied during the Frost interviews themselves.
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