Perceptions of Soviet machinations during the Yom Kippur War significantly enhanced Jackson’s appeal. Jackson raised public and private doubts as to Kissinger’s real motives toward Israel. His attacks cut several ways. For some, his concerns provoked a haunting specter of a U.S.–Soviet condominium that would impose a settlement on the Middle East contrary to the interests of the immediate parties. More important, Jackson accused the Soviets of undermining détente, as he characterized Brezhnev’s suggestion to dispatch a Soviet-American combat team to the Suez Canal as “brutal” and “threatening.” For Jackson and other foreign-policy conservatives, Soviet diplomacy in the Middle East amounted to an attempt to expand their influence among the Arab nations. Competition, the critics contended, not détente, remained at the center of Soviet intentions. The Administration’s rather dubious staging of a military alert at the time of the Yom Kippur War offered its own contribution to the heightening of suspicions toward the Soviets—an action that had its own tenuous links to the Watergate situation.39
After 1973 the Center/Right in the Democratic Party converged with the Republican conservative Right in open alliance against the President’s policies. Emboldened by Nixon’s deteriorating strength, Defense Secretary James Schlesinger and the Joint Chiefs of Staff worked closely with Jackson, his aides, and the sympathetic staff on the Senate Armed Services Committee. Nixon’s pursuit of détente increasingly aroused the ire of precisely those elements most likely to support his struggle to preserve his presidency; he could not afford to alienate them. At the same time, if he appeased the Right by backing away from détente, he ran the risk of alienating J. William Fulbright and liberals on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, who generally supported the Nixon-Kissinger global designs once the Vietnam war was ended. Watergate certainly complicated Nixon’s task.40
Kissinger acidly assailed Jackson in later years, accusing him of implementing legislative obstacles that “gradually paralyzed” policy toward the Soviet Union. According to Kissinger, Jackson’s staff was one of the “ablest—and most ruthless” he had encountered, ascribing invidious interpretations to Administration motives and masterfully leaking information. Jackson and the opposition to détente, Kissinger concluded, elevated “confrontation into a principle of policy,” and they did so during the nation’s “worst domestic crisis” in a century and against the “most hobbled Chief Executive” since World War II. In Kissinger’s ultimate estimation, Jackson “sought to destroy our policy, not to ameliorate it.”
The President himself thought that Jackson was “in the pocket of Jews.” He considered going public against Jackson, charging that he and “professional Jews” would “torpedo” chances for disarmament agreements with the Soviets. Nixon believed that “a storm” would hit American Jews once he exposed what he saw as their position.41
By 1974 Nixon’s position had deteriorated rapidly, and détente was embroiled in the maelstrom of ideological politics. The President seemed to have little interest in the SALT negotiations; Kissinger meanwhile was overwhelmed by the technical complexities of arms-control problems and by the determined opponents of agreements with the Soviets. For Nixon, the June 1974 summit in Moscow was little more than ceremonial. Jackson and the congressional opposition charged that secret deals had been made in SALT I negotiations and that the Soviets had cheated. He also made clear his determination to thwart the Administration’s attempts to expand East–West trade. The President and his entourage were so wary of the attacks from the Right that his spokesmen insisted Nixon had not visited Yalta, a place that conjured so much negative symbolism, but rather Oreanda, a nearby area. During the summit meeting, Admiral Elmo Zumwalt, Chief of Naval Operations, resigned and denounced the Administration’s policies. Despite explicit orders from Haig, Schlesinger attended Zumwalt’s retirement ceremonies and presented him with a medal.42 Richard Nixon had lost control of his Administration.
In subsequent years, Soviet commentators noted the Watergate affair, acknowledging belatedly that the President fell victim to his own abuses of power—after long insisting (when they were not ignoring it) that Watergate was a right-wing plot. Interestingly, they blamed the collapse of détente on the counteroffensive of the military-industrial complex, rightist forces, and Zionist groups. Another Soviet diplomat lamented that Watergate had so preoccupied liberals that the urgent problems of foreign policy and arms control eluded them.
At the end of his presidency, Nixon proudly noted his association with détente: “This, more than anything,” he said on the night preceding his resignation, “is what I hope will be my legacy to you, to our country, as I leave the presidency.” But in a diary entry approximately one month earlier, he cynically noted that the Moscow Summit had come out “about right.” To have gone further would have alienated “good conservative supporters, and we did just about what the traffic would bear.” He would not do anything to antagonize “some of our best friends prior to the impeachment vote.” (Thirteen years later, Nixon in his elder-statesman role still appeased those friends, as he and Kissinger attacked the Reagan Administration for its proposed nuclear-weapons treaty with the Soviet Union.)
Did Watergate abort the full flowering of that legacy of détente that Nixon so proudly hailed as he took his leave? In his memoirs, a more reflective Richard Nixon thought not: “domestic political fluctuations,” preceding and apart from Watergate, had impaired his ability to deliver fully on détente. The opposition of Henry Jackson on trade and Soviet emigration, Nixon believed, had undermined Brezhnev’s credibility with Jackson’s conservatives. Finally, “the military establishments of both countries” bridled at the prospect of real arms control. “These problems,” Nixon concluded, “would have existed regardless of Watergate.” Even without Watergate, Gerald Ford later ordered his aides to delete “détente” from the White House political vocabulary, as he sought to neutralize the Right in 1976. In truth, the opposition had swung the pendulum away from détente, almost wholly without help from Watergate.43
In an immediate sense, Watergate altered public perception of the presidency and the relationship between the executive and other institutions. How much of those changes has endured, however, is questionable. Watergate transformed and reshaped American attitudes toward government, and especially the presidency, more than any single event since the Great Depression of the 1930s, when Americans looked to the President as a Moses to lead them out of the economic wilderness. World War II and the Cold War, with all their attendant dangers to the physical and ideological security of the nation, only exalted that faith. Professor Woodrow Wilson, who often expressed his low opinion of Congress, wrote in 1908 that the presidency “must always, henceforth, be one of the great powers of the world.… We have but begun to see the presidential office in this light; but it is the light which will more and more beat upon it.”
Intellectuals, liberal and conservative alike, celebrated Wilson’s prophecy. “The President is not a Gulliver immobilized by ten thousand tiny cords, nor even a Prometheus chained to a rock of frustration,” political scientist Clinton Rossiter wrote in the late 1950s. “He is rather a kind of magnificent lion, who can roam widely and do great deeds, so long as he does not try to break loose from his broad reservation.… He will feel few checks upon his power if he uses that power as he should.” John F. Kennedy’s election in 1960 made that a canonical doctrine of the liberal faith. But by the end of the decade, such glorifications of the presidency seemed embarrassing (when they were not forgotten), and Rossiter’s restraints, largely written in as an afterthought, became the new gospel.44
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 d
iminished, 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.45
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.”46
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.”47 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.”48
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.”49 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 o
f 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.
XXIII
RICHARD NIXON, WATERGATE, AND HISTORY
We cannot escape history.
ABRAHAM LINCOLN
Second Annual Address
“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.
The Wars of Watergate Page 90
