An American tragedy
Nicholas von Hoffman
Washington e Nixonian head was back, filling up "le television screen, explaining, expostulating and putting on his best performance since the Checkers speech twenty five years ago. The build-up for the Frost-Nixon conversations had been sudden but cyclonic. The clowns at Time and Newsweek had their blathersome Cover stories, the television networks carried who-knows-how-many pseudodispatches which were, in reality, promos for the forthcoming event; the New York l'irnes and the Was Post, both before and after, published argumentative Pieces that read more like the nervous rationalisations of regicides than fresh thought or information. Short of saying I Committed a felony, I em°nimitted an impeachable offence, "ixon admitted about all there was to
fzlrnit. Other than confessing that he was
on the planning of the Watergate weak-in, it would be difficult to imagine VYtinng else concerning the episode that
e hadn't shown contrition for. For some ericans this wasn't enough. They want
,13ten in the dock, as in the Moscow trials in the days of Stalin. For them tearing ,u13 and gulping, which he did, wasn't sufrleient; they wanted him blubbering and eating the carpet as he implored a stern and avenging people to forgive his satanic rit Vide Mr Anthony Lewis of the New °I.k Times whose anger renders him as 111\11..tteh a master of written English as Mr own is of the spoken word: `... shameless, grasping, freakish. People talk about Whether David Frost or someone else can extract "the truth" from him, as if he had anY notion of truth. Our fascination actuallY lies in knowing that there is no limit, rod never has been, to what the man will • • other presidents have abused 1,'‘Aver, but none had his utter contempt teir the restraints that have kept this untry free — the restraints of reason, eeeney and, above all, law.' 1,For those Americans who could look at wlilhouse's swaying jowls and swooped, striatulum nose without seeing Beelzebub r e Man's performance gave material to ,Vect on. The mere fact that he was 71ve was worth pondering. No public fig`re, not even Joe Stalin, has received the piversal, unrestrained and unbroken btlet ailade of abuse and execration that has e en Nixon's. But here he was, the man t:TerY American school child is being :tight to regard as Benedict Arnold II, nd he was still fighting like a huge 0runded cat when Frost came after him er the first half of the programme. He ven found a little bravado down in the bottom of himself when he told Frost, who was operating with a large research staff of anti-Nixon zealots. 'I've participated on (sic) all of these broadcasts without a note in front of me. I've done it all from recollection' or, I'll take ya on one by one or in bunches. The S.O.B. is so tough ifs awesome.
Frost didn't begin to get the man's story out of him until he let up on Nixon and came to him, not as a pugnacious prosecutor, but as someone who did genuinely wish to hear his version. The Nixon version, while still mendacious perhaps, is plausible and reasonably convincing. In effect it is that he was a back-alley, cut-your-gut kind of politician brought up in the presently unpopular lie-cheat-and-steal school of politics. A man who in some areas possessed a near
perfect political judgment, he was completely obtuse in others. Lyndon Johnson, every bit as dishonest and unbridled in the pursuit of his public and private lusts, understood that when you move into the White House you must cool yourself down and keep the theft, skullduggery and thuggery a few steps removed from your sacred, presidential person. Nixon never could get it through his head that as President he had to leave off river ward ethics. He then compounds his problem by an excessive loyalty to his henchmen, particularly the badly compromised German shepherds, Haldeman and Ehrlichman.
In American politics where no one can state with assurance what the principles of his political party may be, personal loyalty is all. It is the piratical brotherhood of the members of the same marauding gang so that one doesn't dump one's buddies lightly. Even the minor marauders must be covered up and protected. That's what Nixon confessed to doing and it is very difficult for him to see that as a crime, whatever the technicalities on the law books.
In other words Richard Nixon doesn't regard Watergate as the primary cause of his downfall but as an accident, an occurrence his enemies could use to batter him with. In Nixon's thinking if his enemies hadn't chanced upon a sword of Watergate, they would have found something else to encompass his ruin.
This isn't a line of inquiry the indefatigable investigative reporters of the New York Times and the Washington Post have cared to follow. There is ample reason to suppose, however, that these and similar institutions in American society knew of, condoned and possibly connived in the abuses of civil liberties of politically unpopular persons that were as serious as the Watergate burglary and• bugging. For instance, the persecution of Martin Luther King by the FBI was common knowledge in the news business . by 1964 because the FBI itself came to a number of editors across the country with tapes and transcripts of King's sex life. Moreover, the attacks against King, his southern christian leadership conference, and socialist workers party and other groups weren't confined to one burglary and one bugging but to countless incidents involving scores of operatives over a span of years. Yet even with government agents volunteering information to news executives about politically motivated invasions of civil liberties, the information failed to stimulate the ,investigative fury until Nixon's second term.
The reappearance of America's most unloveable face on the TV screens serves only to remind thoughtful people how implausible is the Nixon/Devil theory of Watergate. The likelihood is that Richard Nixon was the loser in a struggle that split America's ruling circles over a series of questions which included disarmament, detente, China and the power of the President and the presidency over the running of the executive branch of government. Tax cheat, nouveau riche rider of electric golf carts, extortionist, the only President since the Civil War or before to allow a black man (Sammy Davis, Jr.) to kiss his fanny in public, the gloomy and grinding Milhouse was often a fascinating and resourceful President who tried to do too much when he attempted to swing American foreign and defense policies around and reorganise a dangerously incapacitated domestic government.
He failed and, as he failed, his protes. tations that he was doing it for world peace and the preservation of the office of President were derided as so much more self-service from the old trickster. Indeed he probably had cried false alarm too often to be taken seriously, but the present weaknesses and incapacities in Jimmy Carter's position are in no small degree traceable to Nixon's defeat and expulsion three years ago this August.
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