Conrad Black on Nixon: Unworthy actions … but not criminal ones
by Conrad Black https://www.conradmblack.com/739/conrad-black-on-nixon-unworthy-actions-but-not Watergate, which drove Richard Nixon out of the U.S. presidency in 1974, was surely the most celebrated of all 20th-century scandals. Nixon had achieved great fame by calling his Senate opponent in 1950, Helen Gahagan Douglas, "pink down to her underwear," and by exposing former State Department official Alger Hiss as a former Soviet spy, and ensnaring him in proceedings that led to his conviction for perjury. His successes earned him the early, fervent and lasting opprobrium of the liberal establishment. Nixon received little credit from his opponents for promoting the Marshall Plan, pulling the rug out from under the destructive red-baiting demagogue senator Joseph R. McCarthy, and for accepting the dubious results of the 1960 presidential election, in which he lost Illinois by 9,000 votes out of over five million cast (some ballot boxes are still officially listed as missing). When Nixon was narrowly elected president in 1968, there were over 500,000 draftees in an incompetently conducted war in Vietnam, with 200 to 400 Americans returning in body bags every week; the country was torn by race and anti-war riots, assassinations, dysfunctional Great Society domestic programs and an inert foreign policy. Nixon was re-elected by 49 states and 18 million votes in 1972 because he extracted the United States from Vietnam while retaining a non-communist government in Saigon, had ended school segregation, founded the Environmental Protection Agency, cut the crime rate, signed the greatest arms-control agreement in history (SALT 1), opened relations with China and was ending the draft, after 33 years. It had been one of the most successful presidential terms in history. After the Watergate affair came to light, Nixon's attorney-general appointed a special prosecutor, Archibald Cox, who had a mandate to investigate anything he thought might be an offence "arising out of the 1972 election." Nixon's public contention was that he had known nothing of the June, 1972 break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate office complex (in which nothing was stolen or damaged), which was true; had no knowledge of any attempt to cover it up (tenuous); knew nothing of any offers of clemency for the accused intruders (probably true), or of any offers to provide them with funds (not true); knew nothing of the break-in at the office of the psychotherapist of the man who stole and gave to the media the Pentagon Papers (which discredited the Kennedy and Johnson administrations), which was true; and had not authorized subordinates to engage in improper campaign tactics (tenuous). In all these matters, he had a national-security argument that was sometimes a stretch, but precedented and arguable. His opponents sought to incriminate him with, in effect, involuntarily obtained taped testimony of his; and with perjured evidence, which should not have been admissible, of his turncoat counsel, John Dean. The whole impeachment process got going when Nixon fired his attorney-general, Elliott Richardson, and deputy attorney-general William Ruckelshaus quit (the "Saturday Night Massacre"); neither would fire Cox, after Nixon and Richardson supposedly had agreed that the White House tapes would be audited by senator John Stennis of Mississippi. If Nixon was correct, as seems likely (it was unfortunate that on this one occasion, he didn't record the conversation), he was within his rights to dismiss Richardson, but it was a tactical error. The House Judiciary Committee voted three counts of impeachment. The first alleged that Nixon "had made it his policy" both "directly … and through close subordinates … to delay, impede, obstruct … cover up, protect and to conceal … unlawful and covert activities"; that he "endeavoured to obtain from the Internal Revenue Service, in violation of the constitutional rights of citizens, confidential information contained in income tax returns for purposes not authorized by law"; and that he had impeded the impeachment proceedings by non-compliance with eight committee subpoenas. Two even more absurd counts were voted down, and a raft of other fatuous allegations did not get to a vote. The so-called "smoking gun" at the end of the process consisted of revelations that a trio of Nixon's aides — Robert Haldeman, John Ehrlichmann and John Dean — suggested to Nixon that the director and deputy director of Central Intelligence, Richard Helms and General Vernon Walters respectively, be asked to invite the FBI to desist from investigating the Watergate affair on the grounds that the intruders were Cuban and the whole matter could back into national-security areas, including anti-Castro clandestine activities. Nixon agreed with the plan, and the request was made. But Helms and Walters said they would follow a direct presidential order but not otherwise, and Nixon declined to make any such request. This was a pathetically feeble case for obstruction of justice. (Both Helms and Walters told me that they did not think Nixon had committed a crime in the matter.) The only area of legal vulnerability Nixon had was on the matter of paying a million dollars to Howard Hunt, one of the Watergate break-in organizers. It is not clear in this case, and certainly not clear elsewhere, that Nixon approved payments in exchange for altered testimony. In a fair trial in a dispassionate atmosphere, Nixon would not have been convicted on the Hunt matter, and certainly not on any of the rest. But no such trial was available to him. He followed, in the circumstances, the best course, and resigned voluntarily. Nixon maintained to his grave (in 1994), and beyond, that he had "committed errors unworthy of a president" but no illegalities. It is this version that is slowly emerging as history's consensus. Nixon's enemies roused the puritanical conscience of America, which still survives beneath the tinselled cynicism of American life, to destroy his career. But Nixon has reenlisted that spirit and has left it gnawing at American sensibilities, haunting the nation with the fear that he was unjustly treated. He was. His opponents shut off all aid to South Vietnam and bear some responsibility for the massacre of hundreds of thousands in Vietnam, millions in the "killing fields" of Cambodia and tens of thousands of drowned boat people. His enemies in the media, heavy-laden with self-awarded Pulitzer Prizes, have lost their audience to the Rush Limbaughs and Fox News, and stagger on, decade after decade, under the Sisyphean fraud that they advanced and saved democratic government, from Washington to what now rejoices in the name of Ho Chi Minh City. Nixon appeared, at his own insistence and at great inconvenience to himself, to speak on behalf of Mark Felt, whom he correctly suspected to be Deep Throat, when the Carter administration charged him with criminal invasion of the privacy of the Weather Underground. And he successfully urged Ronald Reagan to pardon him, after Felt was convicted of a crime he had falsely accused Nixon of committing. Richard Nixon was sometimes neurotic and sometimes tawdry, but he was a very good president, vice president and member of the Congress, who was persecuted and whose qualities will vastly transcend the antics of his enemies. Therein is the Watergate scandal. National Post Conrad Black is the author of Richard M. Nixon: A Life in Full (2007). © 2024 Conrad Black |
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