The American Scene

No quarter for the President

Al Capp

Serious men cannot discuss Watergate as truth versus untruth, honourable actions versus dishonourable actions, morality versus immorality, good guys and bad guys. It must all be discussed as a series of moves between a gang that was caught and one that wasn't. There is little this Administration bungled that the opposition, in the past, didn't get away with. But the press wasn't in a crusadfervour when not too many years ago the votes vanished, which would have defeated Jack Kennedy for the presidency, in Cook County, Illinios, nor when the waters of Chappaquiddick closed over the secret of the common humanity of the probable next presidential nominee of the Democratic Party. In those cases, the press seemed willing to let sleeping dogs lie. Any attempt later, to get at the truth, were, somehow, regarded as unsporting. But Mr Nixon, like Mr Arlen's lady in the green hat, has never been let off anything.

The Columbia Broadcasting System, the most persuasive of our three networks has been least charitable to the President's claim that he had no foreknowledge of Watergate. Nightly, CBS's commentators leave millions of Americans suspecting that it is inconceivable that the President didn't know what was going on, and that the demands for his resignation or impeachment are reasonable. Yet, a couple of weeks ago, CBS's giant record division was charged with having, for years, practised ' payola ', a form of TV bribery, which involved not only the gifts of immense sums of dubiously recorded cash to those who could do CBS's records the most good, but gifts of prostitutes and dope, as well. No sug gestion, however, has been made that CBS's President, William Paley, resign, or that the networks licence to broadcast be revoked or that they stop being so sanctimonious, with their own hands unclean. None of this makes the White House any cleaner, of course, but when there's mud for the media to throw, it's the White House that gets it, and not Hynannisport or CBS.

Mr Brezhnev's visit to Mr Nixon has been a distracting move, but not to be compared with the one the President made a couple of weeks ago, and, inexplicably, failed to follow up. After his ineffectual first Watergate explanation to the nation, he showed a flash of his old brilliance. He attributed everything that happened before, during, and after Watergate as necessary to ' national security '. It was a magic phrase. It brought howls of rage from his tormenters. It brought his shamed, silenced supporters back to the radio 'call-in ' shows, to the ' letters ' columns of the newspapers and newsmagazines. In the name of 'national security' it became no longer indefensible to defend him.

He had a good thing going if only he'd realised it. Yet his 'old instinct for the kill, which had served him so well, when all seemed lost before in his celebrated 'six crises ', deserted him. He failed to press on, to repeat it, to rally his forces, to win converts. Truth or untruth? Honourable claim or last refuge? Those are not serious questions. Watergate was in the words of our great philosopher, John Wayne, a pantryraid that became a battle to the death. There are no good guys or bad guys. Only killers who will try anything to win. The groggy, shattered President tried "national security." He could have won with that. He was too shattered to sense it. He abandoned it. And so the cries for his blood have grown bolder.

Not only for his blood, but for that of the one man close to him, who was totally uninvolved, the Vice-President. Although all that was done by the Committee to Re-Elect the President was done to re-elect the VicePresident, too, he was the last to know, and no sooner than you or I. This may have been due to the traditional disdain of American presidents for our vice-presidents. Harry Tru • man was astonished to learn that there was a nuclear bomb. It took Lyndon Johnson a year to realise that, although he was the President of everyone else, he was nothing but a clumsy usurper to everyone who counted. Or it may have been that Mr Agnew's character was too uncomplicated to be trusted to understand Watergate politics. Nonetheless, while the tantalising prospect of Mr Nixon's presidency

has brought joy unbounded to his enemies, the spectre of his place being taken by his legal successor, has been so upsetting to the champions of strict legality, it wasn't until the venerated Mr Clark Clifford came up with a solution, that they could face the future.

Mr Clifford proposed that, as his next-tolast act as President, Mr Nixon ask the Vice' President to resign. Congress then selects for the office next in line (when there is no vice' President), the Speaker of the House, a more satisfactory heir than the present incumbent. Then the President resigns. That proposal, to deny Mr Agnew the office to which he had been elected, was made in the New York Times, on the page facing their daily editorial on the sanctity of the democratic process. The truth about Watergate wasn't, or course, a matter of national security, nor was it an assault on all that's holy (the FBI, the CIA and the General Accounting Office). The assaults were as tentative and timid as they were feckless and nasty. The truth, it seems to me, is too incredible for the President to put into credible words, even if he understands it and he may not. There had grown, in the beleagured White House, the conviction (bordering on mad' ness) that a group, small in numbers, but somehow in charge of vital communications, who were unlike most Americans, who were hostile to the government most Americans wanted, were conspiring to confuse and sub' vert all that decent rest of America.

And that any means used to stop thern. was, despite dishonest appearances, honestly patriotic, and that, I suggest, is whY Watergate happened. It was, of course, n° more forgivable than the breakdown of so many of our POWs in Indo-China under tor' ture.

Not that the investigating Senators don't remember, from the old Army-McCartnY hearings, how unpopular torture can be ne TV, arid how its chief inquisitor entered the' same hearing room, the most powerful ma° in the US, and left detested and disgraced.

There is no blue-jowled, snarling Jnie McCarthy here, but a courtly, white-haireo Bible-quoting Sam Ervin. At seventy-eight' after being nobody at all outside the Carol' nas, Senator Sam suddenly finds himself' bigger TV star than Perry Mason. SuddenlY he is in demand as a commencement speake at liberal Eastern colleges, who, up to n011.,n would no more have dreamt of inviting OP' than his fellow Southern Democrat, Georie Wallace. Suddenly he is conceded to be the greatest living authority on the Constitution. and he may be, because the hundred or Si) .other greatest living authorities on the Con' stitution all interpret it in violently conflict' ing ways. Suddenly, too, he has become cele. brated as a humorist, and you give me ' .comparatively obscure senator, who, pushill four-score, suddenly finds that he can v_t., grovelling laugh on national TV every tn„ he misquotes Bobby Burns, and I'll give Yu the beginning of a national nuisance. Most heady of all, Senator Sam has beconle,4 a folksy philosopher, of the school of S.011‘ Gamp. The other day, at the conclusion of!: agonised confession of perjury by a you,.1 White House aide, his career ruined, family facing poverty, and certain of yearPi jail, Senator Sam used about fifty thous el; dollars of national TV time, to tell him he leaving a good wife, which was as comfort'; as telling a man about to be hanged he wee,.0 good health. Such warmth and humall'i pours out from the star of the Waterless show to all members of the supporting Chi who know their lines. He was fatherly, nign, to a young ex-White House aide nartl„ . Porter, who admitted he had lied to the Grti Jury in the first Watergate go-around. crime, said Porter, was his loyalty to Nixon. The Senator made it plain that he Pi derstood why such a path could lead onLY0 ruin. He bordered on the affectionate with

McCord (one of the convicted Watergate burglers) because Mr McCord's nobler nature (and the prospect of wheedling a lighter sentence) had caused him, too, to repent, spill the beans, and name name after name, thereby wrecking career after career, without the Slightest proof, except that they were associates of Mr Nixon's and that was proof enough for Senator Sam.

Only one witness, up to this writing, hasn't supported the star, maintained his innocence. This was no cringing burglar, or callow Youth, piteously, tremblingly, eagerly following kindly old Senator Sam down any path he chose to beckon, but former Cabinet Secretary Maurice Stans who, although he may face years in jail, was tough, unshakeable.

For all his Bible-quotin*, the Senator Showed Stans little Christian mercy. He Sneered, he snarled, he snorted. Only God knows what Stans knows about Watergate, and a proper trial may bring it to light, but at that moment on TV, although the Senator Flearly didn't know whether or not Stans was 'Ying, he left millions of Americans convinced that he was, and between his teeth. For all the snowy white locks, the dulcet Southern accent, it was as cruel a baiting of an anguished, and possible doomed man, as any of the unforgettably repellent McCarthy scenes. So cruel as to evoke, for the first time in these hearings, public protests from his fellow senators, although it had evoked only apPreciative tittering and indulgently rebuked .13131ause from an audience of mainly the liberal young and liberal journalists.

A public protest by one American senator !gainst any action by another, must be understood in the light of the US Senate's being the world's most slavering of mutual admiration societies. Senatorial rogues refer to other l'ogues as honourable men, senators of nearcommittable dimness of intellect, and nearly 11,0n-existent attendance records, are referred lo, even in the heat of debate, as cultured and distinguished statesmen, by their colleagues, Without a hint of sarcasm.

„ Senator Sam's abuse of Mr Stans went so iar beyond the savagery permitted the chair 'nail of a senatorial hearing, that mild-man nered Senator Gurney stated, between

li.enched teeth, that he wished to dissociate inaself from the Chair's harassment of the Witness. Chairman Sam, intoxicated for

Weeks by his emergence as the nation's most loved Clean Old Man, couldn't believe he'd aright, growled that he didn't know ,nY ' fine ' way to go about questioning a wit he was just "a plain old country law

gr." That roused the Observer's Mary . cCarthy to hail a great "civil-libertarian." Miss McCarthy comes upon her new role as a Political analyst with such unarguable credits 1,s The Man in The Brooks Brothers Shirt and e Group, but she's a bit weak in the plain ' d country lawyer field. She hasn't seen rtlitiany in action, or she would have observed ,hat plain old country lawyers are generally ine neighbours of everyone in the courtroom tiltleiuding the opposition witnesses, and that t eY invariably treat everyone with plain old olintry decency.

, 'his is being written before the John Dean atTs .

r,timony. He may have a world-shattering .. to tell, the story Magruder was expected wv tell, but didn't, the story they hoped Stans hsnuld tell, but didn't, the story that Martha t'laY. at this moment, be nagging John Mitt;,'ell to tell, but which he hasn't. And that is y'e story of the President's personal invernent.

in-tit in the weeks that Dean has been leak; kd tantalising bits of that story, his credi ;lay 1,Y. and character have been so demolished do "is former buddies, from the President on to_vyn. that he'll have to come up with photo! Phs of Mr Nixon personally driving Mr "C)ceord and his Cubans to the offices of the erncicratic National Committee. For it has

all become such an uncontrollable pogrom that before Mr Dean has had a chance to testify in a proper court of law, with proper safeguards both for himself and those he accuses, he has been painted in the public eye as a possible liar, a possible pawn, a possible sellout, when all that he is, if anyone had noticed the one undebatably honest statement he has made, is a possible victim of the murderous homosexuals American jails breed. Early in the game he told a Washington reporter he was willing to do anything to stay out of jail because he was in mortal terror that his boyish appearance might make him their prey. That forgotten interview may be the one excuse for Senator Sam's show.

Senate hearings are not courts of law, they are not circuses, they are not springboards for fat lecture fees or Presidential nominations. They have one legitimate reason for being, and only one, and that is to recommend legislation. Long after Senator Sam bangs his gavel for the last time, and you can bet that will be as long a time after as the Senator can make it, there will, I predict, be no legislation recommended for election financing any different from the excellent but as yet untried laws, now on the books; there will be no legislation on wire-tapping that doesn't already exist; there will be no new penalties for burgling either a Pentagon file or a desk at the Democratic National Headquarters although one seems safer than the other.

The only legislation that could in any way justify the public burnings now being presided over by Senator Sam would be legislation to humanise that system in or iails that makes them torture chambers for fair young men like Mr Dean, and indeed, that might make them humanly bearable for the frustrated people whom the system turns into deviates. But if I know my civil libertarians, Senator Sam wouldn't touch anything like that with a ten-foot pole. That's nasty stuff, too nasty for our Clean Old Man.

One last thought. With some 80 per cent of our media anti-Nixon, over 60 per cent of the electorate feels that he is unfit to govern, which collates neatly with the conviction of over 60 per cent of us, last November, when 80 per cent of the media was for him, that he was the only man fit to govern.

These are near fatal figures and they will not grow any healthier.

Whether Mr Nixon agonises through his next three years, whether he removes himself, or whether he is removed, he is under a death sentence. It is not pretty to see a man die. And for all the daily newspaper jibes of our Buchwalds and Bakers, it isn't funny. The US has always been kind to its condemned, no matter what atrocities they've been found guilty of. This then should be 'a time, not of glee or satisfaction, but of sadness for all of us, for those who detested Mr Nixon, as well as those who respected him, for he is the President of all of us. As we mourned the last moments of Jack Kennedy so should we, it seems, mourn the more prolonged and painful passing of Mr Nixon, for he passes knowing there will be no monuments.

Al Capp, creator of the comic strip, Lil' Abner, is acquiring a new reputation as a political commentator. He writes regularly for The Spectator on the American scene