Watergate's Clearest Lesson

By LANCE MORROW

Ten years later, the point remains: Not even a President is above the law

A few weeks ago, a handful of survivors of the Titanic came together in a Philadelphia hotel to observe the 70th anniversary of the sinking. They fetched out their memories of that night and passed them around like photographs. They gazed at a few forlorn relics of the voyage: Mrs. John Jacob Astor's life jacket, a battered deck chair, other odds and ends from the unsinkable "Floating Palace" before it went down.

It will be ten years next week since a security guard named Frank Wills discovered a piece of tape on the latch of a door in the Watergate complex in Washington. He called the police, and thereby began the destruction of Richard Nixon's presidency. The survivors of Watergate will not be holding reunions. No one died at Watergate, of course, as the bumper stickers say--meaning, rather heavily, that Chappaquiddick was worse. But 25 people went to jail, and Nixon became the first President in Amen can history to leave the White House one step ahead of impeachment.

That kind of disgrace does not encourage nostalgia. In an interview last week with Diane Sawyer of CBS, Nixon said, "Remember Lot's wife. Never look back!" He suggested that those who obsessively revisit Watergate may suffer from "Narcissus complexes." Nixon and the others from his crew (most of whom he threw overboard at the last moment, the captain struggling to be the last to go) will never gather at some hotel in, say, San Clemente, to share memories and souvenirs--enemies lists, voice-activated taping systems, smoking guns, the moral compasses that they lost.

Watergate was an American morality play. The Constitution was the hero. That was Watergate's simplest and purest dimension. But it was fascinatingly more than that. It was one of the nation's most complicated psychological and cultural experiences. The multiple levels and facets of it (somewhat like the levels and intricacies of Nixon's character) give Watergate an almost inexhaustible interest.

"The fall of great personages from high places," the critic George Steiner has written, "gave to medieval politics their festive and brutal character. [Such cases] made explicit the universal drama of the fall of man." Watergate had both its grubbiness and its universality. It was a quagmire and a catharsis. It was a mystery story with splendidly bizarre obscurities of plot. It was a national psychodrama, a spectacle of immense power that the Senate committee hearings dramatized as a daytime soap. (Viewers actually called in to the television networks to suggest changes of script or pace, as though they were indeed watching a political serial.)

Watergate passed itself memorably into American myth. Books by almost everyone involved came tumbling off the presses. The movie All the President's Men and TV miniseries like those based on John Dean's Blind Ambition and John Ehrlichman's novel The Company turned the history into the sort of instant legend in which fact and fabrication become indistinguishable. Watergate created its own rich vocabulary--of "stonewalling" and "twisting slowly slowly in the wind," of the "limited hangout" and expletives deleted." Haldeman, Ehrlichman and "the Big Enchilada,' as they called Attorney General John Mitchell, spoke a language of breezily menacing bonhomie.

Watergate produced strange, wonderful double-entendre evasion. White House Lawyer J. Fred Buzhardt Jr. referred to the famous 18 1/2-min. gap on one tape as an "obliteration of the intelligence." Alexander Haig told Judge John Sirica that the gap might have been caused by "some sinister force."

The cast of characters was utterly right, a collection that Dickens would have imagined if he had been a late 20th century American Nixon himself was a masterpiece of internal disharmonies, with a face--the discomfited scowl, the sudden stabbingly inappropriate smile--like five cats and a bitter Calvinist thrown into a Hefty bag. There was G. Gordon Liddy, the wild hair Nietzsche who held his hand in candle flames. There was Martha Mitchell, the Aunt Pittypat embarrassment and midnight telephone dipso who turned into an oracle.

For 784 days, Watergate led Americans through a dark, tx wildering forest, through thickets of paranoia, past caves from which they heard voices--intimate, vengeful, disconcerting. The Oval Office transcripts lifted a rock. The tapes that Nixon accumulated and, inexplicably, never burned, seemed almost deliberately calculated to record the drama of his own unworthiness. It was as if the height of his life's success must produce some penance, some immense undoing, some terrible self-inflicted vengeance.

"I don't give a shit what happens," said the President of the United States. " want you all to stonewall it, let them plead the Fifth Amendment, cover-up or anything else, if it'll save it, save the plan." The statesman, the architect of detente and the opening to China, talks in these moments like a don organizing the rackets in Brooklyn: the leader of the free world as a paranoid thug. Watergate was a large and shadowy kingdom. At least some of its landscape came at last to seem a portrait of the darkling mind of Nixon himself. The House Judiciary Committee made a long, pained bipartisan examination of that countryside and adopted articles of impeachment that sounded with a resonant sadness: "In all of this, Richard M. Nixon has acted in a manner contrary to his trust as President and subversive of constitutional government, to the great prejudice of the cause of law and justice and to the manifest injury of the people of the United States."

After its bleak, interminable passage, Watergate seemed to issue forth into the sunburst of a civics lesson. But what exactly was the content of the lesson? If Watergate was a morality play the question, then as now, was what moral to draw from it The drama transfixed Americans. Mostly, it bewildered foreigners. Moscow believed it was a trick to destroy detente. The rest of the world had difficulty grasping what all of the agony was about. Foreigners tended to watch the spectacle in the way that an agnostic beholds a believer who is suffering a bout of spiritual anguish; the ordeal seems impressive, perhaps, but unnecessary, odd and even self-indulgent. "The French never understood why the Americans got so upset over Watergate,' French Historian Franc,ois Furet said last week. "The French in particular and Europeans in general do not have a moral conception of politics." An English political columnist ruminating on Watergate sounds as if he were discussing an odd tribal custom: "That's true. The Americans take democracy very seriously " Many Europeans admired Richard Nixon as a statesman the last strong American President in the field of foreign policy. To them, Watergate was a profligate waste of superior leadership. It weakened America's force in the world.

How does Watergate seem to Americans now? How did it change them? History since Watergate has, in some ways, bent opinion toward the French view of the affair. Watergate has always been a sort of conundrum of the disproportionate. How could such a trivial event as a midnight break-in at the Democratic National Committee, an idiotic little piece of ineptitude by five stooges, end by destroying the leader of the most powerful nation in the world? The break-in itself was, said Presidential Press Secretary Ron Ziegler, "a third-rate burglary attempt." The cause (a moment of incompetent political espionage) did not seem commensurate with the effect (the resignation of the President), not in the usual Newtonian laws of action and reaction. Watergate was more like an event in quantum physics. A particle of history as minuscule as an atom produced a cataclysm.

That sense of disproportion has skewed judgments about Watergate ever since, has left an impression in many minds that Watergate was essentially an injustice to the Nixon Administration. That is certainly Nixon's own official opinion. In a 1978 appearance at the Oxford Union in England, Nixon put Watergate into the context of his successes in foreign policy. "It was these little things that I failed in," he said. Watergate, he has suggested all along, amounted to little more than an unfortunate series of low-level mistakes and stupidities that he was too busy to notice and correct.

Nixon knew enough about the rhythms of American opinion to predict, accurately, that his status would change. Indeed, his reputation has gained by a process of historical comparison and the sheer passage of time. Since he boarded his helicopter on the White House Lawn for the last time in August 1974, the impression of Watergate on the public mind has been blurred in several ways:

> In 1976, Jimmy Carter ran for President as the antithesis of everything that Nixon supposedly embodied in the American imagination. "Trust me," said Carter. "I will never lie to you." He ran as an anti-Nixon, the blue-eyed sweet guy in a cardigan. But when Carter's foreign policy foundered and the hostage crisis deepened and the gas lines grew longer, Nixon's stock rose a little. At least, many Americans said, Nixon commanded respect abroad.

> The Victor Lasky thesis acquired new impetus and evidence. In It Didn't Start with Watergate, Lasky detailed a variety of dirty tricks and unsavory habits practiced by previous Presidents. John and Robert Kennedy played unethically rough in the 1960 primary campaigns against Hubert Humphrey. As President, J.F.K. got involved with a Mafia chiefs girlfriend. In a new book, The Kennedy Imprisonment, Author Garry Wills presents the Kennedys as an energetic but morally empty collection, fatally and somehow pointlessly ambitious. Wills is as ruthlessly eloquent--and often unfair--with the Kennedys as he was with Nixon in his 1970 book, Nixon Agonistes.

> New biographies of Lyndon Johnson accuse him of both worldly corruption and spiritual hallucinations. Journalist Ronnie Bugger, for example, cites L.B.J.'s vivid conviction that he was talking regularly to the Holy Ghost--in person, like Joan of Arc.

Nixon's best stroke of comparative public relations has arisen from disclosures that, almost since the invention of recording tape, Presidents have surreptitiously recorded conversations in the Oval Office. Franklin Roosevelt did it. Dwight Eisenhower did it. John Kennedy did it. The new knowledge of such taping has helped Nixon's negotiation with history, or at least his case in the public perception. It should not. Taping conversations on the sly is not polite. It is often morally wrong. But the fact that he taped his conversations did not destroy Nixon's presidency. It was what he said in those conversations--his talk of hush money, his coaching of the cover-up and his tone of cunning and low spite.

> A psychological backlash against the press has also helped Nixon. From the moment that Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward began their pursuit of Watergate in the Washington Post, some Americans have subscribed to the theory that a liberal press was out to undo the results of the 1972 Nixon landslide. The implications of that belief are troubling: they carry the suggestion of a sort of cultural civil war, between Nixon's America and a suspect elite that trafficks mostly in information and services.

The conduct of the press after Woodward and Bernstein could only help Nixon's side of the argument. Watergate beatified the press; it gave reporters a model and an ambition. It made them zealous, fierce to expose, hungry to bring back trophies. A certain bloodlust went through the profession. Public officials, even the most obscure, knew that young reporters would go over their lives like flesh-eating birds. That knowledge has served to deplete the ranks of men and women willing to serve in government. Watergate helped to destroy the boundary between public and private life. Says University of Chicago Political Scientist Norman Nie: "Fear of exposure in their personal, financial, social and emotional lives is going to discourage competent people from going into government."

Watergate has performed its elaborate series of cultural cancellations, like the wakes of four or five different ships mingling and neutralizing one another. The suspicion lingers in many minds that the whole affair will eventually fade, enduring only as a kind of 1970s cultural period piece, with no more moral significance than, say, a vicuna coat or a deep freezer. Even now, says Washington Political Analyst Richard Scammon, "Watergate does not have much impact on anyone any more. Fact and fiction are so interwoven that people don't know which is which. They don't remember the Saturday Night Massacre. They do remember the Texas Chainsaw Massacre that they saw on the late TV movie."

But certain effects have found their way into law as a result of Watergate. Congress established the Freedom of Information Act, for example. Watergate brought both the FBI and the CIA under tighter control, although lately the Reagan Administration has moved to give back more secretive autonomy to both agencies. It has provided for public financing of political campaigns. Both the Senate and House established ethics committees as a result of Watergate.

Watergate undoubtedly functioned as a kind of massive cautionary tale. It is impossible to know, of course, how much corruption may have been prevented by the Watergate prosecutions. They surely had at least an inhibiting effect upon the powerful and tempted. In any event, the affair may have been even more important as a reassertion of official American morals after all the moral contaminations associated with the war in Viet Nam. Wisconsin Governor Lee Dreyfus was president of the University of Wisconsin's Stevens Point campus at the height of Watergate. "In the early seventies," he remembers, "we had a group on cam pus weaned on the milk of dissent, convinced that the system had been subverted. Watergate was what turned them around. It proved to us all how incredibly strong our system is."

What has Watergate done to the institution of the presidency? The authority of the office has more to do with the man who occupies it than with the ideas that compete for its attention. Still, Watergate has weakened the presidency somewhat. And that may be part of a longer process. None of the past five Presidents have completed two full terms. That is disquieting. Assassinations and forced retirements inject an odd sense of foreboding into presidential politics. There is the ghost of a thought that Americans are growing so impatient and unleadable that they insist on ritually disposing of the President every four years or less. The pat tern need not be inevitable, but in moments of depression, Americans may imagine that the procession of somehow foreshortened presidential terms makes the U.S. like the late Roman Empire: an ungovernable mess with a short attention span, restlessly chucking its leaders.

So a certain cynicism, a lack of expectation, lingers. It is encouraged by the spectacle of the rewards bestowed after the fall. Some of the miscreants of Watergate have profited handsomely. But of John they have had all of those legal fees to cover. John Dean commands $2,000 to $3,500 on the lecture platform. He sometimes shares the stage with Bob Woodward. But if the soci ety bestows fame and wealth upon people forced out of government in disgrace, what virtues are being proclaimed? How do we then say that the system worked? The phenomenon is comparable to noting that, in an economic sense, Japan and Germany emerged as the winners of World War II.

Watergate is such an elaborate masterpiece of irony (by taping himself, Nixon provided virtually all the evidence that destroyed his presidency) that too many people forget its clearest lesson. The deepest significance of Watergate, the only important meaning to be extracted from all of that wreckage and squalor, penetrates to the innermost American idea. To say, as many Americans did after Watergate, that the "system works" is only partly true: the constitutional system, in this case, with a lot of luck, did work. The important lesson that Watergate established is that no President is above the law. It is a banality, a cliche, but it is a point on which many Americans, possibly including Richard Nixon himself, seem confused.

It is perhaps a natural mistake, but the entire meaning of democracy depends upon correcting it whenever the powerful slip into that delusion. Napoleon once wrote: "They charge me with the commission of great crimes. Men of my stamp do not commit crimes." Richard Nixon evidently had some such Napoleonic conception of his exemptions. In his interview with David Frost in 1977, Nixon stated his basic mistake: "Well, when the President does it, that means it is not illegal." If it had no other purpose or consequence, the agony of Watergate would have accomplished something if it succeeded in teaching Richard Nixon a fundamental American civics lesson. On the evidence so far, that wisdom may be lost on him. The rest of the nation seems to have absorbed it reasonably well.

Compared with Watergate, a scandal like Teapot Dome was onedimensional, a routine political corruption played out at high levels. Watergate was crucially different. It was not a grab for mon ey, but for power; that distinction, in a democracy, is everything. Moneygrubbing is unsavory. Power grabbing, the plot to steal an election (which, weirdly enough, was already safely assured), was infinitely more serious. It was an attack on the American idea. That is important because if America loses its idea, it becomes merely sordid and fallen and dangerous.

--By Lance Morrow

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