American Experiment (374 page)

This failure encompassed a number of tendencies: the revival of a presidency imperial in scope and power and heavily personal in image and operation; the refusal of Presidents, especially in crisis times, to include in the decision process America’s allies, congressional leaders, or even key
cabinet officials; presidential exploitation of popular protest over an issue or incident, raising public expectations that whip back on the White House; and the traditional gulfs between Congress and the President, and between the houses of Congress, that produce the stalemates and slowdowns that in turn trigger spasms of action.

Many of these tendencies were not new. For decades Presidents had bypassed the Senate treaty-ratification hurdle by making executive agreements on crucial matters with nations around the globe. At least since the Civil War, Presidents had been using their war powers to the hilt and extending their inherent or emergency powers to almost every conceivable domestic crisis as well. Indeed, the kind of congressional-presidential friction that tempted Presidents to go it alone had begun almost as soon as the two branches of government were established in lower Manhattan in the spring of 1789. As for secret presidential adventurism, the researches of Abraham Sofaer have supported his surmise that, in Arthur Schlesinger’s summary, “early presidents deliberately selected venturesome agents, deliberately kept their missions secret, deliberately gave them vague instructions, deliberately failed either to approve or to disapprove their constitutionally questionable plans and deliberately denied Congress and the public the information to determine whether aggressive acts were authorized.” White House agents operating secretly in Iran in the 1980s were nothing new.

What was novel and portentous was the convergence of these tendencies, immensely magnified by the media. Kennedy’s domination of press and electronic news during the missile crisis, Johnson’s obsessive monitoring of the media, Nixon’s access to television during both his foreign and his domestic struggles, demonstrated White House power to exploit television; but the media were willing accomplices. Presidents found it much easier to command the airwaves for direct appeal to the people than to consult congressional or even Administration leaders to shape a collective decision that might have future public support and staying power.

The power of the media to present foreign policy in quick, intense, staccato images put enormous emphasis on the appearance of national power as well as its reality. Once upon a time Winston Churchill had built his reputation partly on his ability to proclaim defeat. After Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt told the American people that the Japanese attack had “caused severe damage to American naval and military forces” and that it would not only be a long war but a hard war. Later, General Stilwell, despite PR hopes to cover up defeat in Burma, refreshingly said, “I claim we got a hell of a beating.” After the missile crisis, on the other hand, Kennedy said that while Soviet missiles in Cuba would not have significantly changed the
military balance of power, it would have appeared to change the political balance of power and “appearances contributed to reality.” Johnson had deep psychological fears of appearing “soft.” Nixon, commanding stupendous nuclear power, feared that the United States might appear “like a pitiful, helpless giant.” The perception of power, John Lewis Gaddis concluded, “had become as important as power itself.” The actuality of a nation’s military power had a certain continuity and measurability, while the appearance of power could change overnight, thus intensifying the uncertainty, unpredictability, and volatility of Washington’s role abroad.

In earlier days the United States had conducted successful experiments in foreign policy—or at least had occasionally persisted with a foreign policy strategy long enough to test whether it would be successful or not. Lend-Lease during World War II and its transmutation into the Marshall Plan after the war loomed as a strikingly effective, comprehensive, and long-run collective effort with other nations. More typically since 1932 Washington had tried short, staccato essays at economic isolation, political unilateralism, aid to allies, full partnership with allies including Russia, deterrence, containment, détente, triangular diplomacy with Russia and China, human rights.

Something important, however, was missing from this list. The transcending experiment Americans had not tried was a sustained, committed political-economic-ideological strategy of comprehensive détente as a road to world peace.

V
IETNAM HAD LEFT DEEP
and tormenting scars across the body politic. It was not like the century’s earlier wars that had ended with most Americans feeling victorious and the wars’ original opponents at least acquiescent. After World War II those who had rallied against Nazism knew they had helped put down a monstrous and dangerous tyranny. After Korea, those who had supported the final settlement were satisfied to have restored the regional balance of power first upset by North Koreans attacking south and then by Americans attacking too far north.

After Vietnam,
all
felt defeated—the hawks who had pressed for a “victory,” the doves who had wanted out, the veterans who returned to a sullen, ungrateful republic, the allies who had been enlisted in a hopeless cause, the Saigon leaders who felt deceived and betrayed, the anticommunist South Vietnamese who faced an anguished choice of fleeing to parts unknown or living under communist rule. Vietnam had displayed the ultimate strategic failure and moral bankruptcy of the “middle way,” of “bipartisan” foreign policy making, day-to-day, step-by-step escalation and de-escalation. An undeclared war for ill-defined goals had ended with Americans frustrated, embittered, and divided.

“It was the guerrilla war to end all guerrilla wars until it somehow became simply a war to be ended,” wrote Max Frankel in
The New York Times
a few days after Nixon announced the cease-fire of January 1973. “It was the proxy war to contain international Communism until it somehow became the central embarrassment to an era of Communist-capitalist détente. It was devised by a generation that wanted no more Munichs, meaning betrayals by appeasement, and it spawned a generation that wants no more salvations by intervention, no more Vietnams.” Few could have guessed that the war would come to an even more tragic end two and a half years later, or that already it had helped to trigger the chain of events that would bring about the collapse of the Nixon presidency long before hostilities ended.

On Sunday morning, September 8, 1974—thirty days after he took office—President Ford granted a “full, free, and absolute pardon unto Richard Nixon” for all federal offenses “he has committed or may have committed” or had helped commit as President. At once a fire storm of outraged telephone calls and telegrams broke upon the White House. Press and television editorialists thundered. But no one could do anything; the presidential power to pardon Presidents—or anyone else—was absolute and irreversible. Appearing on national television with the pardon in front of him, Ford stated that the former President would be excessively penalized in undergoing a protracted trial, “our people would again be polarized in their opinions,” and the “credibility of our free institutions of government would again be challenged at home and abroad.” He then signed the document in full view of the cameras.

Some Americans believed that nothing would prove the credibility of free institutions more dramatically, or set a better example for dictatorships abroad, than the willingness to put a President on trial. Many simply suspected a Ford-Nixon deal. It was rumored that aides in the Ford White House knew of a call from Nixon to the new President: if Ford refused to grant him a full pardon, Nixon would announce publicly that Ford had promised the pardon in exchange for the presidency. Ford boldly appeared before the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Criminal Justice to declare, “There was no deal, period”; but the investigative reporting of Seymour M. Hersh suggested that Ford did have an outright arrangement with the man who had made him Vice President and then President. Another possibility was that such carefully protected multi-channel negotiations were conducted between the two through intermediaries that the parleys aroused hopes that melded into expectations that led to understandings that emerged as clear promises of a pardon, all conducted with the winks and nods, whispers and silences, gestures and mumbles that constitute the language of brokering politicians. Or perhaps Ford acted, as he claimed, in behalf of what he considered “the greatest good of all the people of the United States whose servant I am.”

In a very different fashion, nevertheless, Nixon went on trial anyway. Ford’s demonstration of presidential power and the debate over its cause and justice, the trials of high Watergate figures in the following months, the voluminous memoirs of Watergate heroes and villains in the following years, and Nixon’s disbarment from practicing law in New York State had the more important effect of putting not merely Nixon but his whole Administration on trial, and even more, of exposing the most extraordinary and pervasive abuse of power in high places. There emerged a frightening portrait of an Administration conducting a political war of attempted
extermination against its political enemies at home even while it was waging a military struggle in Southeast Asia. Viewing street demonstrators and student protesters not as legitimate political opponents but as threats to national security and subverters of the national interest, the White House developed a siege mentality.

This was not the first time an Administration had hunkered down into a psychology of besiegement; the previous Administration had exhibited similar signs and strains. But ultimately there was a difference between Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon. Until the end LBJ’s instinct had been to move out to people, to consult Republicans like Dirksen, to include critics like George Ball. It was better, he liked to tell intimates, to have such people “inside the tent pissing out than outside the tent pissing in.” And in the end Johnson was willing to quit voluntarily. Nixon’s instinct was for exclusion—to suspect anybody and everybody, ignore them, fire them, exile them. And in the end he in effect was forced out of office.

But before that end the Nixon White House had abused power with awesome ingenuity. They had set up an extensive “enemies list” that ranged from political opponents like Jane Fonda, Shirley Chisholm, and Edmund Muskie to the heads of eastern universities and foundations, along with media figures, actors, even athletes, and included a mistake or two—non-enemy Professor Hans Morgenthau made the list because he was confused with enemy Robert Morgenthau, U.S. Attorney in New York City. They conducted a private investigation of Senator Edward Kennedy’s 1969 automobile accident at Chappaquiddick in which a woman drowned. They tapped their foes and one another with wild abandon. They tried to subvert the IRS, the CIA, the FBI for political purposes. Though the so-called Huston Plan, which outlined a sinister program of surveillance of American citizens and proposed the use of “surreptitious entry”— burglary—for intelligence-gathering, was blocked by a nervous J. Edgar Hoover, it revealed the illegal lengths to which the Administration was willing to go in its war against political enemies. Parts of the plan were later implemented, and it was the inspiration of the “Plumbers” unit that burglarized the office of Daniel Ellsberg’s California psychiatrist and of the team that broke into the Democratic National Committee offices in Washington’s Watergate complex.

Not only the political war plans but the planners told much about the Nixon White House. Some of the inmates were of the order of Charles Colson, who liked to call himself a “flag-waving, kick-’em-in-the-nuts, anti-press, anti-liberal Nixon fanatic” and “the chief ass-kicker around the White House.” Others were younger men like White House counsel John Dean, attractive, clean-cut, affable, flexible—ever so flexible. And
willing—ever so willing. When Nixon asserted to Dean on September 15, 1972, that the White House had not used the FBI or the Justice Department against its enemies, but that “things are going to change now. And they are either going to do it right or go,” Dean exclaimed, “What an exciting prospect!”

The more that Watergate unfolded in the trials and memoirs of participants, in the brilliant reporting of Washington
Post
correspondents and of Hersh and J. Anthony Lukas and others, the more it appeared to be a morality tale, complete with villains and saints, winners and sinners, and a Greek chorus of Washington boosters and critics.

The Polo Lounge, the Beverly Hills Hotel, Los Angeles, June 17, 1972.
Jeb Stuart Magruder, deputy director of the Committee to Reelect the President— called CRP by its friends, CREEP by its foes—was breakfasting with aides when the phone call came from Washington. It was G. Gordon Liddy, insisting that Magruder drive ten miles to a “secure phone.” “I haven’t got time,” Magruder replied impatiently. “What’s so important?” Liddy said, “Our security chief was arrested in the Democratic headquarters in the Watergate last night.” Magruder:
“What?”

Magruder knew what. If the men who had tried to plant listening devices in the Democratic National Committee could, through CRP security chief James McCord, be linked to Liddy, counsel to CRP, they could be linked to himself, to his boss, CRP director John Mitchell, and therefore to
his
boss, the President of the United States. Magruder and his assistants hurried to Mitchell’s suite in the hotel. They had only one thought at this point, Magruder remembered later: How could they get McCord out of jail? Some way must be found. “After all,
we
were the government; until very recently John Mitchell had been Attorney General of the United States.” The break-in was not just hard-nosed politics; it was a crime that could destroy them all. With White House power behind them, it seemed inconceivable that they could not fix the problem. The decision for a cover-up was immediate and automatic; no one suggested anything else.