Watergate Warhorse

Elizabeth Drew, an antique of the Washington press corps and a foaming-at-the-mouth partisan Democrat, has dusted off and inflicted on America yet again, for the third time in 40 years, her diary of the Watergate affair. Her proffered excuse for scraping up and reloading and firing this soggy, poisonous projectile is her "hope that those who go through this for the first time and those who relive it will realize . . . how we almost lost our democratic system." As the narrative grinds, with malice aforethought, toward Richard Nixon's premature departure from the White House, Ms. Drew quotes approvingly an unnamed friend who declares that he "hates Richard Nixon, not only for what he has done to this country, but for what he has done to politics." And as the febrile chronicle ends in a crescendo of collective Washington-media self-praise, the author does her pedestrian, self-serving simulation of the end of Camus's The Plague (which predicts the return of the virus of treason and cowardice) and asks, "Do we have a screen adequate to prevent such a person from again gaining power? That is not clear." And, so, at last, it ends, except for a dedication "to the beloved Haynes Johnson" (beloved, that is, to left-wing Democrats).

I could not wade shoulder-deep through Drew's 438 pages of bile again, but looked through it diligently enough to confirm that she is still unable, ever, to concede Nixon anything, except the most grudging and almost imperceptible doffing of the cap to "some graceful things" about supporting his chosen successor, Gerald Ford, and the fact that he "doted on his grandchildren." It is, as I had remembered it, an abominable book. There is not a hint of the fact that Nixon, in his one full term, despite being the first president inaugurated without the support of either house of Congress since Zachary Taylor 120 years before, had one of the most successful terms in the country's history. The America Richard Nixon inherited from Lyndon Johnson in 1969 was riven by race and anti-war riots almost constantly and throughout the country. There were 550,000 draftees in Vietnam in an undeclared war and 200 to 400 were returning in body bags every week, and there was no exit strategy. Ho Chi Minh had rejected Johnson's offer in 1966 in Manila of joint withdrawal of all non-indigenous forces from South Vietnam. Ho could have taken the offer and, three months after the departure of the last American, invaded the country and taken it over without reprisal, but he wished to defeat the United States and turn the great Cold War tide, regardless of casualties. This was the horrible, apparently hopeless mess Nixon found. In addition to riots, there were assassinations, skyjackings, and no relations with China or the major Arab powers, and nothing under discussion with the USSR after that country's suppression of Czechoslovakia after the Prague Spring of 1968.

Four years later, Richard Nixon was reelected by 18 million votes, still the greatest plurality in history although the electorate has increased by 70 percent. The United States had departed Vietnam while preserving a non-Communist government in Saigon, and the South Vietnamese had defeated the Communists on the ground in April and May 1972 with no help on the ground from the United States (albeit with heavy air support). The draft had been abolished, segregation ended, the Environmental Protection Act passed, relations opened with China, a peace process begun in the Middle East, and the greatest arms-control agreement in history signed with the Soviet Union. There were no riots or skyjackings or assassinations and the crime rate had been appreciably reduced. Nixon proposed comprehensive health-care, welfare, tax, and campaign-finance reform, though the Democratic Congress approved none of it. The Nixon term was rivaled only by Lincoln's and by the first and third terms of Franklin D. Roosevelt as the most successful presidential term ever, which prompts the question of why Elizabeth Drew, who has been festering and reporting in Washington more than 50 years, now, in the midst of one of the most unsuccessful presidencies in the country's history, following one of its few rivals in that sweepstakes, would ask for assurance that America never again have such a president as Richard Nixon. Most Americans and most non-Americans who wish the country well would prayerfully wish his return now, and for the last four terms.

Drew cannot bring herself to admit any of Nixon's achievements, claims that his ostensible foreign-policy successes were the result of unconstitutional activities or ambitions, and, for good measure, calls Nixon a drunkard and abuser of prescription medicine (complete falsehoods), who twice ordered nuclear alerts "for no apparent reason" (false) and, it is implied, while not in control of his senses (also false). She also overlooks the fact that there is no conclusive evidence of any awareness of crimes by Nixon. The House Judiciary Committee's counts of impeachment are risibly vague, sanctimonious, and partisan when examined today. The only gray area is whether money advanced to Watergate and other defendants was advanced in exchange for a stonewall or altered testimony. There is not conclusive evidence of that, but the money should certainly have been advanced under more unambiguously stated conditions. She misrepresents the "smoking gun," which was really Nixon's agreeing that some of his aides could ask the director and deputy director of the CIA (Richard Helms and Vernon Walters) to ask the FBI to desist from its investigation of Watergate, but then, when they said they would do so only under an explicit order from the president, declining to take it further. It was a tawdry idea that should not have been entertained, but it did not obstruct justice. (The local police were leading the investigation anyway, not the FBI.) Drew is correct that the sacking of the office of dissident Daniel Ellsberg was a disgraceful episode but neglects to mention that Nixon knew nothing about it. She distorts Nixon's meaning in his statement to David Frost that "when the president does it, that means that it is not illegal." He was referring to the president's latitude in national-security matters, and was taking essentially the same position as President Truman and President Eisenhower in the McCarthy era. Nowhere does she hint that there may have been an impropriety in Congress and prosecutors giving John Dean a generous plea bargain and enabling him to testify against Nixon before the Ervin committee, though Nixon should normally have been immune to testimony from his counsel.

Elizabeth Drew is just as rabidly hostile to her subject now as she was 40 years ago when Nixon resigned. The intervening years have not conferred upon her any sense of proportion or even forgiveness. One of America's most talented and successful presidents was evil, deranged, contemptible, and inaccessible even to any human feeling. I doubt that this attitude is representative of Drew's general personality, though I am prepared to accept that she is probably no barrel of laughs or paragon of graciousness. I will take only the slightest liberty compared with the massive exercises in patronizing analyses that Nixon's critics have never ceased to proclaim about him since he was first a congressman 65 years ago, and write that she, like the rest of the Watergate mythmakers, is concerned that the whole monstrous fraud is crumbling. There was no adequate reason to threaten Nixon's ability to finish his term, but Nixon — having bungled the investigation and tolerated and even encouraged a rather sleazy and somewhat neurotic ambiance in the White House — had squandered his political capital and declined to put the country through an impeachment trial in the Senate, thinking of the national interest, as he had when he declined Eisenhower's encouragement judicially to challenge the 1960 election, which was probably stolen by the Kennedys.

In the absence of the cant and emotionalism of 40 years ago, the impossibility of finding any reason to have hounded Richard Nixon from office has driven the imperishable Watergate assassination squads, led still by Woodward and Bernstein, to cling like horse-leeches to the defamatory falsehood that Richard Nixon, though esteemed by Dwight D. Eisenhower, Charles de Gaulle, Konrad Adenauer, and Mao Tse-tung, was a wicked psychotic with satanic horns and cloven feet. He had his failings and was a terribly intense and embittered personality at times, but he was a very successful and capable president who rendered great service to the nation and the world, and his accusers, especially after they have had 40 years to reconsider — as less prominent ones at the time, such as Hillary Clinton, in fact have done — are now merely liars and hypocrites. The problem is not preventing the election of another Nixon; it is ensuring that no such dishonest and infected press gang as this ever exploits the unattractive weaknesses of an incumbent president and emasculates the government and topples an administration again. Woodward lied in his biography of John Belushi and invented a conversation with William Casey in his book on Iran-Contra. For a horrible year, he and Bernstein and Elizabeth Drew and the rest of their infected claque were virtually running the country. It must never happen again.