I was a Watergate junkie.
I didn’t realize it until I saw Gore Vidal on a television talk show, probably Dick Cavett’s, where he said he was a Watergate junkie and he needed his fix everyday.
Yep. That was me.
I had come a long way from supporting Nixon during his 1960 run for the presidency in 1960 when I was in sixth grade. My mother had always railed against him, and I think when he lost his 1962 attempt at the governorship of California and had his petulant outburst against the press, that had finally did it for me. I just wanted him to drop out of politics altogether, and for a while he did.
But then he came roaring back and seemingly the American people had forgotten all about what a miserable person he was.
I wasn’t yet able to vote in the 1968 election, but if I had been, I guess I would have held my nose and gone for Humphrey, who just couldn’t shake the stench of LBJ’s unpopular war off of him.
I wonder if the folks who voted for Nixon had known that he had secretly sabotaged the Vietnam peace talks and that he belonged in federal prison, long before his Watergate crimes, I wonder if they would have still voted for him.
Yes, Nixon really was a crook. A traitor, actually:
Haldeman, 42, was Nixon’s campaign chief of staff, a devoted political adjutant since the 1950s. In late October 1968, the two men connected on what came to be known as “the Chennault Affair.” Nixon gave Haldeman his orders: Find ways to sabotage Johnson’s plans to stage productive peace talks, so that a frustrated American electorate would turn to the Republicans as their only hope to end the war.
The gambit worked, and the Chennault Affair, named for Anna Chennault, the Republican doyenne and fundraiser who became Nixon’s back channel to the South Vietnamese government, lingered as a diplomatic and political whodunit for decades afterward.
Johnson and his aides suspected this treachery at the time, for the Americans were eavesdropping on their South Vietnamese allies—(“Hold on,” Anna was heard telling the South Vietnamese ambassador to Washington. “We are gonna win”)—but hesitated to expose it because they had no proof Nixon had personally directed, or countenanced, her actions. Historians scoured archives for evidence that Chennault was following the future president’s instructions, without much luck. Nixon steadfastly denied involvement up until his death, while his lawyers fended off efforts to obtain records from the 1968 campaign.
It wasn’t until after 2007, when the Nixon Presidential Library finally opened Haldeman’s notes to the public, that I stumbled upon a smoking gun in the course of conducting research for my biography of Nixon: four pages of notes his brush-cut aide had scrawled late on an October evening in 1968. “!Keep Anna Chennault working on SVN,” Haldeman wrote, as Nixon barked orders into the phone. They were out to “monkey wrench” Johnson’s election eve initiative, Nixon said. And it worked.
But I didn’t know that during the Watergate era, I just thought he was a common ordinary corrupt politician who used illegal methods to gain and maintain office. And unnecessarily at that, as he would have won the election handily without all his dirty tricks. He was a paranoid jerk who saw enemies everywhere, presumably a holdover from his red-baiting days.
Even into the 1980s when I got into an argument with some co-workers (Ed Fromberg, who didn’t surprise me and Bob McDaniel, who did), I still didn’t know the extent of Tricky Dick’s crimes.
A couple years ago I re-watched the movie All the President’s Men and I couldn’t help but think that Nixon’s crimes now look so benign compared to what we’ve recently endured. Well, except for his sabotaging the peace talks. How many people, both Americans and Vietnamese, died because of his treachery?
Then, of course, there was his Racist Strategy, whereby he announced to anyone who would listen that the Republican Party now gladly welcomed bigots. He called it his Southern Strategy and it was continued by his successors and it led to the realignment of the two major parties. Before that, although the Democrats were sort of the liberal party and the Republicans were sort of the conservative one, the Democratic Party had its southern Dixiecrats and the Republicans its Rockefeller Republicans. The legacy of that strategy is the polarization of the electorate and congressional dysfunction where compromise has seemingly become impossible. Moreover, Republicans have become a minority party and they have increasingly been forced to use illegal means to win elections and pack the courts with corrupt judges to allow them to get away with it.
So all in all a truly awful human being.
And yet…
Nixon was so focused on foreign policy that he didn’t much care about domestic policy, and with a Democratic congress, quite a lot of worthwhile initiatives were passed. Looking just at his domestic record, one might almost think there was a Democrat at the helm.
There was the formation of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the Clean Air Act of 1970, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), the National Environmental Policy Act, federalization of Medicaid for poor families with dependent minor children, and the National Sickle Cell Anemia Control Act.
In federal contracting he implemented the 8(a) set aside program for small business owners who are socially and economically disadvantaged.
And he did do that thing with China that supposedly only a red-baiting Republican could have done.
Sigh.
I think I’m going to make folks on both the left and the right angry with this but…