The Unraveling
In the presidential election
of 1972, voters could choose from among three candidates. George Wallace was a
segregationist. George McGovern was so impolitic he favored school busing even
though 52 percent of blacks opposed it. Sixty percent of the electorate judged
Richard Nixon the least of three evils. But then, voters that November didn't
know that two weeks earlier the incumbent had detained a friend in the Oval
Office with the question, "How about the milk money?"--and he wasn't talking
about his school-lunch program. The reference was to $2 million in campaign
contributions solicited from the dairy lobby in exchange for federal price
supports for their industry.
Journalists, senators, and special prosecutors have made sure that even the
most ill-informed among us knows that Nixon, this complex man who invaded
Cambodia while opening up China and invented racial preferences while singing
the praises of the Silent Majority, was a crook. But in 1974, even the Supreme
Court couldn't have proved that Nixon knew about the milk money. Or that he
once ordered his chief of staff to "[b]low the safe" of one of the bulwarks of
official Washington, the Brookings Institution. Or that he sold ambassadorships
at $250,000 apiece. But we know now, thanks to Watergate historian Stanley
Kutler's remarkable book of tape transcripts, Abuse of Power . This is a
book that tells two stories: of Richard Nixon's fall and of the tapes that
brought him down.
Both begin in June, 1971. The New York Times had
just printed proof, leaked by a disgruntled Department of Defense analyst named
Daniel Ellsberg, that the government had systematically lied to the American
people about the Vietnam War. Nixon's statesmanlike response was to fund a
secret investigative team to bedevil Ellsberg and anyone else whom Nixon, in
his overweening paranoia and narcissism, deemed a risk to "national security."
The most infamous escapade of these "plumbers" was their last: a failed
break-in of Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate Hotel.
They were caught, and Nixon and his aides became suspects in a conspiracy.
Immediately the president and his Oval Office confidants began scheming to
protect what they portentously referred to as "the presidency" (meaning
themselves) from revelations that would surely issue from any serious
investigation of their administration: where they got their milk money, how
they used the IRS as their own Internal Retribution Service, why they put Ted
Kennedy on 24-hour surveillance, how they forged diplomatic cables to frame
Jack Kennedy in a political assassination. "Just keep it as small a little
cloud as you can," Chief of Staff H.R. Haldeman advised his fellows early
on--which meant payoffs, from money raised off-the-books, to the hirelings
directly responsible for these enormities. They were pressured into leaving the
country, testifying that they had done nothing, swearing they had never before
heard of anyone named "Richard Nixon." The bigger the sums, though, the more
intricate the cover-up.
Nixon's presidency limped to its denouement by
way of a grim paradox: His lieutenants were soon suspected of conducting
illicit operations of such high stakes and complexity that only a senior
official would have supervised them. But the more senior the official who was
suborned into taking responsibility, the farther he stood to fall; and the
better he knew the error of trusting this president to protect him. It was only
a matter of time before someone who had seen how things worked inside of the
Oval Office would, when called before the prosecution, choose self-preservation
over loyalty.
John Dean
was the first to break. For months Dean's claims that the president was (like
himself) guilty of obstruction of justice simply pitted his own word against
Nixon's. Then in mid-1974 a mid-level aide casually mentioned to the Senate
Judiciary Committee--assuming the senators already knew--that Nixon recorded
his Oval Office conversations. Sixty hours worth of reels, subpoenaed by the
Supreme Court and carried to the courtroom in a single lockbox, yielded a
"smoking gun": In June 1972, Nixon had ordered the (loyal) CIA to warn the (
not so loyal) FBI off its Watergate investigation. Not even offering up his
chief aides, Haldeman and John Ehrlichman, could protect Richard Nixon from the
incriminating testimony of Richard Nixon. With the Senate shading toward a
unanimous impeachment, in August 1974, the president resigned.
The story of the tapes, meanwhile, was only beginning.
Congress whisked them immediately to the National Archives for safekeeping. But
as Nixon's two-decadelong campaign for rehabilitation gathered steam,
protecting the 4,000 hours of unsubpoenaed tapes became his new obsession, even
at an estimated cost of $5 million in legal fees. Only last April did Stanley
Kutler, author of The Wars of Watergate , and the advocacy group Public
Citizen reach the settlement that now gives us access to 200 hours of
conversations classified by the National Archives as touching "abuse of power."
Only last November did Kutler get access to the actual recordings from which he
edited Abuse of Power .
Which brings us to the book.
It's been a flush autumn for political voyeurs, what with the publication of
tape transcripts from JFK's Cuban Missile Crisis and LBJ's momentous first year
as president. Kutler's book, alas, is the most sloppily edited of the bunch.
When the cast of The Kennedy Tapes speculates whether Khrushchev is
pulling a "Suez-Hungary," a quick glance at its introduction quickly reminds us
of that dimly remembered corner of the Cold War. When Johnson, in Taking
Charge, cusses a damning newspaper editorial (a favorite pastime), a
footnote tracks down the article and quotes from the offending passages. To
read these books is to plant oneself firmly in their worlds.
To read
this book, on the other hand, is to hold on for dear life while a tornado of
invisible winks, quadruple entendres, and mystifying personages blows you
by--unless you happen to know, for example, that the "Hughes" on Page 124 is
billionaire Howard Hughes, with whom Don Nixon (Sr., that is, the president's
brother--not to be confused with Don Nixon Jr., the president's nephew) was
entwined financially in a way embarrassing to all concerned.
If the Free Press hadn't been so eager to join
the Christmas rush, Kutler might have realized he had even more scoops on his
hands than he thought. Consider Ehrlichman's reference to a certain "left-wing
Harvard professor, [first name unknown] Pomerantz, or whatever his name is,"
whose generosity towards the George McGovern campaign raises Nixon's
suspicions. It would have required a minimum of effort, and would been useful
to readers, for Kutler to have pointed out that "[first name unknown]
Pomerantz" was probably Martin Peretz, now editor in chief of the New
Republic --and at the time a left-wing Harvard professor and generous
McGovern donor.
To pick
these nits is not to deny Kutler's heroic efforts to bring this material to the
public. Already, newspapers and magazines have been filled with careful
parsings of the evidence presented here to reevaluate, one more time, the Nixon
legacy. (Conventional wisdom watch: Richard Nixon's funeral wouldn't have
amounted to a polypresidential love-in had these tapes come out in early '94.)
This is vital work.
But it is not the most vital work. The statute of
limitations has run out on these crimes. It may be that the best way to read
this text in the years ahead will not be with a magnifying glass, but through
the looking glass--as a prism to discern what the political culture that
produced Nixon shares with our own. America, after all, elected Nixon--and not
despite the paranoia and dread that runs through this book but, in some
ways, because of it. What was his appeal to the "silent majority" but a
subtle invitation to think like Nixon: to believe that our neighbors might be
our enemies, and that our enemies might engulf us?
Bob Dole, who presided over
the Republican National Committee while it stood by its man until the last,
said it best at Nixon's funeral: "The second half of the 20 th
century will be known as the age of Nixon." May the next half-century speak
better of us.
