Dickgate

Forty years ago today Richard Milhouse Nixon resigned in disgrace from the presidency. This unprecedented crashing-and-burning was the climax of “Watergate,” the scandal triggered by a group of Nixon men who were caught breaking into the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee in the Watergate Hotel. From this incident comes the “-gate” suffix which has been widely used as a marker for subsequent scandals, but which has also been adopted by sensationalizing journalists who hope that its use will make some routine mishap or mistake seem like a major scandal.

The Republicans caught red-handed in the Watergate were trying to bug the Democrats' headquarters - this is what motivated their break-in in the first place. They were part of the Nixon campaign organization, formally known as “the Committee to Re-elect the President” but generally referred to as CREEP.

The team planting the bugs included a couple of mugs who were already experienced at breaking and entering. Several months before Watergate, in the summer of 1971, Gordon Liddy, Howard Hunt and Egil Krogh, all of whom eventually served time for their Watergate crimes, planned a break-in at the offices of psychiatrist, Lewis Fielding of Beverly Hills, California. Daniel Ellsberg, the man who had leaked the Pentagon Papers was a patient of Dr. Fielding at the time, and the Nixon men were hoping to steal Ellsberg's private file, publicize it, and in so doing promote the idea that he was crazy. This was how they planned to blunt the effects of the Pentagon Papers.

The break-in at the psychiatrist’s office was a spectacular failure and even had a kind of Three Stooges quality to it. The men doing the caper, Bernard Barker and Eugenio Martinez, damaged the doctor’s file cabinet and left various files on the office floor, including that of Daniel Ellsberg. But they seem not to have noticed it and came out with nothing for their efforts. When the psychiatrist arrived in his office the next morning and saw the mess, he was baffled by it since he had no idea of just how morally debased the Nixon White House had become or how anxious Nixon was to destroy Ellsberg’s reputation.

It was a mere nine months later, on June 17, 1972, that Larry and Moe, I mean, Bernard Barker and Eugenio Martinez, along with three other screwballs, got nabbed in the Watergate. As the scandal unfolded, one Nixon man after another fell before the increasingly disgusted public and the prosecutorial members of Congress who headed the investigation. By the way, it was while working as a member of the Watergate impeachment inquiry staff of the House of Representatives that young Hillary Rodham (later to be Clinton) first cut her political teeth.

John W. Dean, who has just come out with another Watergate book, The Nixon Defense: What He Knew and When He Knew It, was a key player from the start. He had been White House Counsel, but, when he began to balk at the cover-up, Nixon fired him and he wound up serving as a witness for the prosecution. He was famous for warning Nixon early on that the Watergate scandal was “a cancer growing on the presidency.” He was also famous for his hot wife, Maureen, aka Mo, who sat beside him during his Congressional testimony.

Maureen and John Dean at the Watergate Hearings

Dean’s recent book shows that Nixon and his insiders spent at least a few moments speculating on the couple’s love life. The Watergate tapes reveal Nixon aide, H. R. Haldeman, musing about Dean’s level-headedness as the scandal was unfolding and saying to the president, “I think he takes out his frustration in just pure, raw, animal, unadulterated sex. I guess he just solves all of his hang-ups that way. And then he can nail all the rest of this with real finesse.”

So Nixon responded, “Is that right? Is he quite a…? (inaudible).

Another key White House figure of this era was Vice President Spiro Agnew. Agnew was not involved in the Watergate scandal, but he faced a bribery scandal of his own, dating back to his days as governor of Maryland. This forced him to resign from the vice presidency just as the Watergate affair was driving other Nixon people out of office and herding them into prison. So, not only was Richard Nixon the only president to be kicked out of office for criminal behavior, the man he chose to be his running mate became the only vice president in American history to be drummed out of his office for criminal behavior.

Before this resignation, Nixon had relied on Agnew to make news by pouring contempt on liberals, using such memorably insulting phrases as “nattering nabobs of negativism.” Agnew did not come up with these phrases himself, since he wasn’t talented that way. He relied on White House speech writers.

This classic Spiro T. Agnew Watch can only increase in value with time.

 

When Nixon resigned, following the departure of some forty members of his team, many of whom were ultimately convicted as felons, it was widely assumed that he would spend time behind bars himself. He did not, though, since his successor, Gerald Ford, granted him a complete pardon.

Because Watergate happened so long ago, those too young to have lived through it might not be aware of just how big a deal it was. Also, given the partisan hostility that dominates current politics, it’s worth remembering that the impending impeachment of Nixon was to have been a bipartisan affair. Some of the president’s harshest critics were Republicans, including, for example, Senator Howard Baker who came up with the indicting question, “What did the president know, and when did he know it?”

It’s also worth remembering that it was the tireless efforts of two Washington Post reporters, Republican Bob Woodward and Democrat Carl Bernstein, that brought the details of the scandal to light. Without these journalists, Nixon would almost certainly have gotten away with everything.

The story of the Watergate scandal is well told in the 1976 film All the President’s Men, starring Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman. The film focuses on the actions of Woodward and Bernstein as they pursue the story to its very roots. Helping them, both in the film and in real life, was “Deep Throat.” Deep Throat was a secretive figure until his identity was revealed in 2005. It turned out to have been FBI agent Mark Felt who would meet Woodward in a parking garage and feed him useful tips. Agent Felt died in 2008, just three years after he agreed to have his identity revealed.

 Where Handsomeness Lies:

            Bernstein and Woodward

           Hoffman and Redford

Another fun fact: Deep Throat was the title of a 1972 porn film starring Linda Lovelace, whose character was said to have extraordinary powers of an oral nature.

Speaking of movies, let me recommend Dick, a 1999 spoof based on the Watergate scandal. The premise is that two teenagers, Betsy and Arlene, played by Kirsten Dunst and Michelle Williams, find out about the Watergate break-in and are brought into the Nixon White House as part of the president’s plan to keep them from revealing his dirty secrets. The girls are naïve to an extreme, but they manage to change history by feeding important information to Woodward and Bernstein, and by convincing John Dean to bail out of the president's cover-up scheme. One of them, Arlene, at first nurtures a huge crush on Nixon. However, after witnessing his mistreatment of his dog Checkers and other unseemly acts, the girls become disillusioned, concluding that Nixon is “prejudiced” and has “a potty mouth.”

Both of these, as Nixon’s White House tapes reveal, are astute observations.

Ronald Reagan: Where Greatness Lies

In his December 8, 1986 journal entry, author Leo Lerman had this to say about Ronald Reagan:  “This man was shallow, a second-rate actor, utterly dependent on superficial Irish charm - the kind the morning milkman or letter carrier or any man in the street has.  He was destined to be used by strong, self-seeking, unscrupulous men wanting power not for state, but for self.  The man may be honest, but he is stupid, which in his position of highest power is criminal.”

Lerman had more to say about Reagan’s “smiling, good-fellow self” which I will not repeat here. No, I will confine myself to Mr. Lerman’s more moderate criticisms, i.e., the ones in the passage above.  

I’ve been thinking about Reagan these days because I’ve been reading Doris Kearns Goodwin’s latest book, Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism.  Goodwin’s books have invariably been both enlightening and engaging to me and Bully Pulpit is no exception.  One of its main messages is the powerful effect that capable authors like Ida Tarbell and Lincoln Steffens had on public opinion in the early 1900s.  It’s hard to think who has such influence today.  I suppose Jon Stewart’s Daily Show comes close, but it’s kind of humiliating to realize that comedy shows today are where we have to go to find influential critical commentary about political and corporate shenanigans.  A hundred plus years ago, serious writers could generate a tidal wave of reform just by reporting what Standard Oil and its flunkeys in the Senate were up to.  How times have changed.  Sigh.

Equally fascinating is a second theme of Bully Pulpit: the way in which Theodore Roosevelt, working against the leadership of his own Republican Party, used government to make life better for Americans at the expense of the big corporations.  Before Roosevelt became president, corporate money thoroughly controlled the GOP and the GOP served those moneyed interests.  Roosevelt changed much of that by establishing regulations aimed at protecting citizens against their depredations.

Ronald Reagan, of course, did the opposite.  He initiated an era in which the government – long the protector of the people – came to be viewed as a hostile alien entity.  And by encouraging a belief in this bizarre notion, he enabled the corporations to once again exploit and abuse ordinary citizens in a way they had not done for decades.  That’s why middle class incomes have become stagnant while the one percent has basked in unprecedented wealth - since about 1980.

But I don’t believe that Reagan screwed middle class Americans on purpose.  I agree with Lerman that he was simply not very smart - and certainly not smart enough to be president.  He thought he was doing the right thing because he listened to the wrong people.

Reagan had been a Democrat in his youth, and for good reason.  His hometown was hit hard by the Depression, and his family, like many others, faced the prospect of poverty and homelessness.  Only government intervention - Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal - saved the Reagan family and many of its neighbors from this fate.

But later in life, once he was married to Nancy, Ronald Reagan bought into the right-wing Republican philosophy of his wealthy father-in-law.  Even though his well-being as a youth had depended on government intervention, he decided, once he was wealthy, that “the government is the problem.”  His very shallowness served him well here, allowing him to ignore the bizarre contradiction of his about-face.  His biographer, Lou Cannon, said that Reagan was always uncomfortable around intellectuals.  No wonder.  By the same token, I imagine snake oil salesmen must be uncomfortable around real doctors.

One of the least appealing qualities of Reagan was his bigotry.  Granted, he was a sort of good-natured dude, and he didn’t come across as a snarling bigot in the style of, say, Jesse Helms.  But bigot he was.  Two of his most outrageous and disgusting gestures along these lines were his touting of “states’ rights” in his 1980 Philadelphia, Mississippi, speech and his portrayal of an irresponsible “welfare queen” living high on honest taxpayers’ money as though she were a fair depiction of poor black families during his campaign.  Yuk.

Despite his stupidity, Reagan was not without talent, and herein we find the sources of his political success.  He was competent enough in backslapping bonhomie, but his real skill lay in public relations.  The “superficial Irish charm” of which Lerman wrote came to the fore when he was on television and through that medium he reached millions of Americans, many of whom were no more knowledgeable about the world than he was.  When he said “Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem,” millions of people, many of whom depended heavily on government protection or support, believed him and they watched with approval as he dismantled many of the reforms that his predecessors had put in place.  

Of course Reagan didn’t bring about anti-government hostility single-handedly and he isn’t solely responsible for the rapacious way in which corporations have once again come to exploit ordinary citizens.  But more than any single individual, he, with his shallow but clueless charm, made greed-is-good corporate ruthlessness possible.

His anti-government policies were not born in the thin soil of his own consciousness; they came from those “strong, self-seeking, unscrupulous men” in the background about whom Lerman wrote.  Reagan was merely their public face.  He was, in fact, not so much a president as a press secretary, a spokesman for those who stood to benefit from a pro-corporate, small government philosophy.  And that’s why I think it’s reasonable to consider him “great” in some sense.  He was, in my opinion, the greatest presidential press secretary of modern times.

Let me wrap up by recommending Goodwin’s Bully Pulpit.  The book is a veritable inspiration.  It shows how an awakened citizenry can actually make government an active force that protects the weak – that is, almost all of us - against the strong - those we have come to know as “the one percent.”  In short, it points the way out of the dreadful era into which Ronald Reagan’s ingratiating charm has led us.