The Old Defense: They All Did It

But they did not, despite the claims of a bestselling book

In the flurry of post-Watergate books, Victor Lasky's It Didn't Start With Watergate has a unique record. Released last April, it justifiably drew blistering reviews, yet climbed to the bestseller lists and stayed there. (Dial Press has 115,000 copies in print and plans to publish 10,000 more.) The reason seems to be that Lasky tells readers something that quite a few of them want to hear: that abuse of presidential power did not start with Richard Nixon. No responsible authority, of course, ever claimed that it did. But, not content to refute a charge that no one has made, Lasky goes much further. He claims in effect that F.D.R., J.F.K. and L.B.J. all were much bigger crooks than Nixon. They were not portrayed in the press as such, in Lasky's view, only because biased reporters admired the three Democrats but hated Nixon.

If Lasky's book has any value, it is in raising a number of serious and worthwhile questions: To what extent did past Presidents overreach their authority? Were their violations in any way comparable to the excesses of Nixon? Did much of the U.S. press judge Nixon by a tougher standard than it had applied to his predecessors?

Unfortunately, Lasky lacks the balanced perspective to shed much light on such complex topics. The author made a mint out of pasting together every available bit of anti-Kennedy rumor, gossip, innuendo and fact to produce his JFK: The Man and the Myth, which sold 220,000 copies in hardback. To turn out his new 438-page volume, he once again wielded scissors and pastepot with savage effect. As before, he has done almost no fresh reporting--one of his major sources, in fact, is his previous, unoriginal book.

The new book is getting attention, nonetheless, because Lasky is correct in some of his major contentions. However, it is deplored by many students of the presidency because it gives major emphasis to minor episodes of wrongdoing, repeats unproved charges without offering fresh evidence and, in the end, lets Nixon almost totally off the hook.

What Others Did As Lasky notes, Franklin Roosevelt did use the FBI to harass prominent people who publicly opposed U.S. involvement in World War II. Jack and Robert Kennedy did wiretap newsmen and Martin Luther King Jr. Lyndon Johnson did employ the FBI for partisan political purposes in gathering intelligence at the 1964 Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, N.J. The Kennedys did conduct a dirty campaign against Hubert Humphrey in the West Virginia primary of 1960.

More significantly, the internment of thousands of Japanese Americans under F.D.R. during the war was indeed a massive abuse of civil rights. Roosevelt also maneuvered secretly to engage the U.S. in the fight against Nazi Germany before the U.S. formally declared war. The way the U.S. became so deeply enmeshed in Viet Nam involved serious deception of the American people by their Government, most notably under Johnson. Ironically, much of the deception that Lasky deplores was detailed in the Pentagon papers; yet Lasky considers publication of the documents such a serious breach of security that, in his view, Nixon had every right to unleash his plumbers against Daniel Ellsberg. Typically, Lasky dwells at length on the well-publicized assassination attempts against Castro while Kennedy was President, but he notes only in a phrase that the CIA's deal with two Mafia figures to rub out Castro was struck under Dwight Eisenhower.

If Lasky is often correct on the well-known major sins of past Presidents, he indiscriminately elevates every questionable act, no matter how trivial, to an impeachable offense. Thus Lasky portrays Kennedy's impulsive decision to cancel White House subscriptions to the New York Herald Tribune, which has since ceased publication, as a serious presidential assault on the press. He rates in the same category L.B.J.'s use of Lawyer Clark Clifford, who pleaded with a few newspaper editors not to report Walter Jenkins' arrest for homosexual acts (Clifford asked that Jenkins be allowed quietly to quit his White House job).

Old, Unproved Charges In addition to magnifying the minuscule, Lasky reports as undisputable fact many old charges that have never been proved: that Johnson stole a Senate primary ejection in Texas in 1948; that J.F.K. defeated Nixon in 1960 only because votes were stolen with his approval in Illinois and Texas; that Harry Truman won a 1934 Senate primary election in Missouri on votes fraudulently delivered by the Prendergast machine.

Attacking the Press A major problem with Lasky's approach, of course, is that he is aware of past presidential excesses only because they were brought to light by the press--the same press that the author attacks for protecting its Democratic favorites. He claims, for example, that the press engaged in cover-ups in failing to get at the truth of Ted Kennedy's actions at Chappaquiddick and the means by which L.B.J. amassed a fortune while on the Government payroll.

In fact, both topics were probed exhaustively by various teams of reporters. Unfortunately, there were no tape recorders whirring in the Kennedy car when it went off Dike Bridge, resulting in the drowning death of Mary Jo Kopechne. The Johnson wealth, stemming mostly from a highly profitable Austin radio and TV station whose stock was held in Lady Bird's name, proved impossible to trace fully. The reporting on Teddy was far from protective; opinion polls show most Americans do not believe his story--and his chance of becoming President has been severely damaged. As for L.B.J., he was forced to forgo a run for re-election at least partly because of intense press criticism of his Viet Nam policies.

Lasky has a better case in charging that Jack Kennedy enjoyed a relatively uncritical press. Too many Washington reporters were charmed by him and wanted to bask in Camelot favors. Yet whether their failure to report his hyperactive sex life was a coverup, as Lasky charges, is doubtful. Rightly or wrongly, the sexual excesses of politicians had not been seen as newsworthy until the advent of post-Watergate morality. It was hardly a partisan matter; widely rumored dalliances by F.D.R. and Ike went unreported too at the time. The bedtime habits of a President, moreover, are scarcely on a par with the Watergate-related crimes of the Nixon White House.

In his claims of a biased press, as in much of his book, Lasky is inconsistent. While he condemns the press as Nixon's worst enemy, he also argues that it overplayed the violence outside the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago--thereby hurting Hubert Humphrey. "The convention coverage undoubtedly helped tilt the closely contested election to Nixon," concedes Lasky. And while the author repeatedly accuses the press of a bloodthirsty pursuit of Nixon during Watergate, he also approvingly quotes an observation in Commentary that "it was not the press which exposed Watergate; it was the agencies of Government itself."

Defending the Indefensible Lasky is shakiest in trying to rationalize Nixon's transgressions. He suggests that Nixon was hounded from office by a hostile press only because of the Watergate burglary --which Lasky still describes as a "third-rate" caper. He makes no mention at all of the White House payoffs to the convicted burglars to buy their silence. Lasky even finds the celebrated "smoking gun" tape (which caused Nixon's most devout Republican defenders on the House Judiciary Committee to recommend his impeachment) so garbled and murky as to be inconclusive. As Lasky sees it, if Nixon actually did get the CIA to impede the FBI's Watergate probe, his aim was not to keep investigators from linking the break-in to his re-election committee. Nixon tried to keep the burglars' cash from being traced, Lasky claims, solely because "it would have been embarrassing for major contributors who had been promised anonymity."

Yes, other Presidents wiretapped for personal purposes, misused the IRS, CIA and FBI, lied to the American people, employed dirty campaign tricks against their opponents--as has been fully reported in the press. Nixon, uniquely, did all of those things--and more. He also cheated massively on his income tax, used federal funds to furnish personal residences, told his aides in effect to lie to grand juries, altered (and probably destroyed) evidence in a criminal case, lied to the top Justice Department officials investigating those crimes, ordered the payment of hush money to convicted criminals, offered a prestigious job to a judge who was presiding over a case in which Nixon was intensely interested, fired a special prosecutor without legal cause, and directly challenged the very foundations of the U.S. system of justice. Had Lasky really found another American President who did all that, he would have had a book that was genuinely worthy of being a bestseller.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.