President on trial (2)
For the defence
Al Capp
Watergate may not keep its glorious prornil It promised to demolish the President newly-respectable American conservati9", There are disturbing signs now that it 11 not. Like a fighter who was dealt a Mine, numbing blow, he took a long count, rosi, made a couple of efforts to defend hirnse'o feeble, almost laughable efforts, went doll, for the count again, and just as it was react ing the terminal ten, rose again, with reneW`:,1 strength and guile, no longer defending, I)" attacking, and drawing blood.
The plan of attack is simple. It is simply to Justify everything that happened at Watergate (and at the White House, before and after) as having been necessary in the name of national security. The President tried that line of attack before an audience of the nation's only heroes, the hundreds of POWs and their wives he entertained last week at the White House. When he defended secrecy as a weapon that Must be used, no matter how shocked the Pure in heart might be, for our internal as well as external defense, the POWs rose and Cheered him.
To the average American, that crowd knows more about the harsh facts of life than any seven sleek senators sitting on a committee, and the President is not one who Misses any nuance of the average American's thinking. He has found his way out, and if the Public accepts it, he can justify any past evasions, contradictions and explanations of inoperative' explanations. In the weeks to come, no matter what comes out of the Senate hearings, the words 'national security' Will be coming out of the White House. And any link the Democratic Party has had, no Matter how tenuous, with any far left group suspected of planned violence, or with a past history of violence, will lend sinister substance to those words. And no one doubts that such links will be found, as inevitably, as Possibly as meaninglessly, as were links between the Republican Party and the conglomerates.
Roger Mudd, an otherwise cautious commentator for the Columbia Broadcasting System, was so upset by the first faint, but ominous success of the President's attack, that he Publicly warned our POWs that by supPorting the President they might lose their honoured place in American life and become controversial. Now, becoming controversial is no less feared by commercial TV commentators than becoming lepers, for both are equally loathsome conditions to their cornfl, ake and deodorant sponsors. It is hardly, ,nowever, a word that scarces POWs. It was because they took part in a controversy, instead of taking off for Toronto, that they became POWs. Yet warning a group of Americans that it might be risky to support a public (Odal seems no different from the warning c'f public officials that it might be risky for commentators like Mudd to oppose them, an arrogance which Mr Mudd and his network are still spluttering about. The President may yet make his ' national security ' defence work, and there is no evidence that he, himself, may not believe it. If 'le can make enough of the nation believe it, We are better off with a strong Richard Nixon than with a muted or mutilated one. For his Policies are those which most Americans have long passionately longed for. Because of Mr Nixon's daring, the expensive and perilous cold war has ended; there is a genuine and crowing warmth between us and Russia and `-hina, unimaginable in the lifetimes of most 0f us. Under Mr Nixon, we see an end to the ruinous welfare policies that have made it Possible for millions of able-bodied Americans t° turn down jobs and live on their neighbours. Under Mr Nixon, the orgies of looting, /(vhich we were tearfully assured were not ooting at all, but rather signs of deep racial Unrest, despite that fact that a study in Detroit revealed that the average arrested looter Was an able-bodied male, twenty-six, and Making up to $150 a week, have been all but akbandoned, so unprofitable and dangerous 'Jaye they become. , One would think a nation educated by "sanies Bond movies and Mission Impssible TV jries. would be ready for the Watergate distLosures, but it turns out that we really tu, ought all that stuff about secret organisa'°ns within secret organisations, operating
on immense amounts of American money, transmitted through Costan Rican and Mexican banks back into American pockets, forged passports, disguises, voice-changers, rendezvous in phone-booths on isolated highways, were all inventions of our thriller writers. Maybe they were. Maybe the Watergate bunch picked it all up from them. Whichever came first, we now find that all of it has really happened, and that all the thriller writers added was a procession of pretty girls. There isn't a pretty girl in the Watergate conspiracy — just a procession of middle-aged government officials meeting other middleaged government officials in discreet places. You British do these things so much better. When your middle-aged government officials meet pretty girls in discreet places with anything but national security on their minds, that's conspiracy enough for you.
Being old enough to have lived through our two comparable scandals, the Teapot Dome affair and the McCarthy hearings, my bosom swells with pride at the improvement in quality of our conspirators. Their motivations for their low deeds are so much higher. In the Teapot Dome affair, we saw a gang of smalltime government money-grubbers selling out to a gang of big-time tycoons, with only crass profit as their object. In the McCarthy hearings, we saw an effort of one megalomaniacal senator to impose his will on the US army to save one young henchman from military service. Such squalid rewards as financial profit, or personal vanity, were not the motivations of the Watergate gang. The sums of money paid out were modest (in the case of the CubanAmericans, merely expenses), and there was no glory in it for anyone; the best they could hope for was not to be noticed. They were motivated (and on one who watched their earnest faces on TV, and heard their steady voices could doubt it) by patriotism; patriotism perverted, possibly, patriotism twisted to demolish the principles of the system they were convinced they were protecting, patriotism in many instances indistinguishable from subversion, but the real thing, albeit carried to lunacy.
And so a fighting President may survive as President, if he can survive as a human being. There are months of agony ahead for Mr Nixon through the various Senate investigations and the court trials, agony more grievous than any president has ever been forced to endure. To those who sense that his ' cool ' is more a triumph of self-control than natural thick-skinnedness, the question is not can he survive but, in the blackness of despair that is certain to engulf him from time to time in the hell ahead, will he want to? For the media which deplored his lack of 'compassion ' has shown him none. It has shown him, and the nation, only its power to uncover hidden facts about him, laudable certainly, but curiously absent when there exist hidden facts about Chappaquiddick which, in the light of the surviving member of that cast being the probable liberal nominee for president in 1976, is no longer a matter of personal misadventure, but one of profound national concern. The crusading Washington Post, Mr Nixon's nemesis, launched no crusade to learn the truth about that, or of the widelyconceded dumping into the drink, in the Nixon-Kennedy campaign in 1960, of enough Nixon votes, in Cook County, Illinois, to carry that state for Mr Kennedy and carry him, instead of Mr Nixon, into the White House.
Our media can be compassionate when it chooses to be. It has never chosen so with Mr Nixon. This, of course, doesn't make Watergate any the less shocking. But the nation might have been less shocked by it if the media had exposed the Kennedy scandals preceding it. That might even have shocked the Nixon people into not trying it.
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