Few of us by now can muster the will to wallow any further in Watergate. However we feel about Richard Nixon and the series of events that brought him down, we want above all to be done with both of them. Watergate has so overwhelmed contemporary political consciousness that we feel at once saturated with the lessons of the scandal and yet unsure precisely what they might mean for us. Our conceptual faculties benumbed under the continuing avalanche of Watergate literature—memoirs, recountings, analyses, and sermonizings—we feel it difficult to sort out what the event’s significance finally consists in. In any case, we prefer to hear no more about it all just now.
Yet there are reasons for resisting the mood of stupefied exhaustion. There is still learning to be done from Watergate, and it may be, in fact, that we are only now getting far enough removed from the details of the scandal to begin to take proper measure of its meaning. Only as we begin to distance ourselves from the event can we get past the stage of conditioned response and automatic judgment in our reaction to accounts of it. Two recent memoirs by participants in the crisis—John J. Sirica1 and Maurice H. Stans2—help us ponder aspects and nuances of Watergate that might previously have registered only partially or perhaps even not at all.
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II
Before new lessons concerning Watergate can be absorbed, however, a number of old ones will first have to be unlearned. It is probably inevitable that any major event will occasion a good deal of earnest nonsense. Watergate certainly has.
There is, in the first instance, the matter of significance. Historians and political analysts have a natural inclination to assume that significant events must have significant meanings. Watergate suggests that this is not necessarily so. There was not more there than met the eye. The scandal had momentous political effects, but its circumstances were essentially banal, and it left little in the way of usable lessons or enduring implications. Watergate may by now be the most overinterpreted event of modern times; it simply will not bear the weight of the portentous meanings that have been attached to it. We have learned from it again the venerable lessons that politics should not be conducted as warfare and that we need to elect to high office those who understand that there are certain things that decent men simply do not do. Those are useful reminders, but they require us neither to reconstruct our political system nor to reorder our moral values.
It is perhaps most useful to view Watergate as constituting, in symbolic terms, the last act of the 60’s. The scheme issued from an administration enveloped in a state-of-siege mentality, and that mentality grew out of the fevered and polarized political climate of the decade following the assassination of John F. Kennedy. By the end of Nixon’s first term, the. President and his advisers had become the victims of their ideological preconceptions. Convinced that the message of their accomplishments was being distorted or ignored by hostile media and agitated by left-wing approval of and even participation in leaks of national-security information—some important, some not—they conjured up from within their White House fortress a nightmare vision of a nation deceived and endangered by a radical minority. And they proceeded to act on the basis of that vision.
When politics is war, it is necessary, as in all combat situations, to gather intelligence on the enemy’s strategy and tactics. There has never been any good evidence that Nixon knew in advance about the Watergate break-in, and there is probably no reason to doubt his continuing denials. But neither is there any reason to suppose that he would have objected if he had known, except possibly on grounds of prudence.
The cover-up—in which of course Nixon was involved, and virtually from the beginning—followed naturally from the failure of the break-in. There was no plot as such, simply the instinctive behavior of men caught in an incredible blunder, trying to extricate themselves in any way they could. The immediate and automatic decision to deny any higher authorization for the burglary led inexorably, one step after another, to the making of a quagmire. Nixon’s own summary observation is self-serving but not inaccurate: “We . . . all simply wandered into a situation unthinkingly, trying to protect ourselves from what we saw as a political problem.”3 The cover-up was sordid and inexcusable, but it was not—as it has been variously depicted—an inevitable product of the imperial Presidency, a function of some peculiarly American preoccupation with ambition, success, and power, or a grand conspiracy against constitutional government.
Much of the initial interpretative gas over Watergate is already dissipating. President Carter’s inability to get much of anything at all that he wants from Congress, for example, makes it painfully obvious that we are in no present danger of a runaway Presidency. Carter’s particular problems aside, it has been clear to most observers for a very long time that our constitutional arrangements are such that national leadership must come from the President. The Congress is simply not constructed to provide coherent direction to the nation in either foreign or domestic affairs. (A fascinating and relevant statistic: there are now, by recent count, 152 subcommittee chairmen among the members of the House of Representatives.) The Nixon White House undoubtedly misused its powers, but the primary lesson of Watergate remains that we need a vigilant public and honorable leaders, not a reshuffling of the constitutional division of powers.
If the imperial Presidency has lost currency as a Watergate theme, the idea of the scandal as a commentary on the decline of American morality seems still to have lingering attractions. From the very beginning, our public moralists seized on Watergate as a symbol of the nation’s predilection for whoring after false gods. The first of the Watergate conspirators to break into print, Jeb Magruder, deputy director to John Mitchell on the Committee to Reelect the President (CRP), informed us in the title of his memoir that his had been An American Life,4 and he went on to wonder whether the Watergate crimes did not “somehow reflect larger failures in the values” of American society: “I think that I and many members of my generation placed far too much emphasis on our personal ambitions, on achieving success, as measured in materialistic terms, and far too little emphasis on moral and humanistic values.” The Reverend William Sloane Coffin, Jr., summarized Magruder’s involvement with Watergate as “an all-American experience.” There was, we were meant to see, significance here.
Perhaps. Recognition of human frailty is always salutary in a society still resistant to notions of original sin. More particularly, it is difficult not to be appalled by the narcissistic preoccupation of a John Dean with vulgar success, particularly in his measuring of it: fast sports cars, lots of women, impressive office furnishings.5 (Dean, of course, like all the other born-again ex-Watergaters, assures us that “everything is different now.”)
Nonetheless, we might well hesitate to blame Watergate on the traditional demons of personal ambition and desire for success. The old bitch goddess gets blamed for so much in general that one begins to wonder if she is responsible for anything in particular. We can safely assume that most major political figures in America—or anywhere else—are overachievers greatly attracted to power and success. Few such men, however, are normally implicated, at least to our knowledge, in criminal conspiracies. The men at the heart of the Watergate crimes—Nixon, Mitchell, H. R. Haldeman, John Ehrlichman—obviously wore ethical blinders, but the fundamental problem lay with their public political values, not their private moral ones. They had already achieved success and power, and neither materialism nor personal ambition had anything significant to do with their deliberations over Watergate.
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Which brings us to the third of the conventional interpretations of Watergate: how close we all came to the loss of our constitutional liberties. There is, of course, considerable evidence that the Nixon administration frequently did step over the line of legitimate behavior: excessive wiretaps; the extra-legal plumbers unit; the Huston intelligence plan; the break-in at the office of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist; attempts to manipulate the CIA and FBI; Watergate itself. Charles Colson at the height of his influence appears to have been a genuinely sinister figure, and too many other men in the Nixon White House, trembling under Haldeman’s ultimate and recurring threat, “If you can’t get the job done, we’ll find someone who can,” acted in ways that violated private and public decency. Moreover, the hardball politics was initiated and encouraged at the very top.
But this quite real problem of abuse of executive power has frequently been inflated out of reasonable proportion. One does not in any way have to accept Nixon’s various tu quoque defenses as exculpation for his crimes to concede that in fact it did not all start with Watergate. It is an exaggeration to argue, as some have done, that the kind of constitutional improprieties Nixon indulged in had constituted standard operating procedure for most administrations since Franklin D. Roosevelt, but it cannot be denied that he was, in a number of areas, armed with considerable precedent. Nixon was chief of presidential sinners, but he was neither the first nor the only one. We have the Nixon tapes; it is probably just as well, from what we already know, that we don’t have the Roosevelt, Kennedy, or Johnson ones.
Nor should it be forgotten that, as already noted, Nixon acted in part out of a genuine, if exaggerated, concern for national security. He cynically and egregiously invoked national-security concerns in the Watergate cover-up, where, of course, they were entirely irrelevant, but that was not always the case. Henry Kissinger and Nixon alike had become legitimately concerned over the effect of leaks of confidential information on the conduct of American foreign policy. Nixon’s may have been the paranoid style, but, as the saying goes, paranoids do have enemies.
It is virtually impossible to raise these points without seeming to excuse or at least minimize Watergate. Yet it is worth taking that risk if only in an attempt to counter the still widespread assumption that the Nixon administration came close to undermining the American constitutional system. That assumption found its classic expression a few years back in the widely popular television mini-series, Washington: Behind Closed Doors, in which the Nixonesque President, along with all his other sins, contemplates the suspension of national elections. That particular piece of hysteria had originally arisen among the more febrile elements of the radical Left during Nixon’s first term, and yet here it appeared again, only now blithely mingled in with all the things Nixon had done (or had ever been suspected of doing) in a program watched, and considered as truth, by millions of Americans. And the Nixon of that series, who is the Nixon large numbers of people have been led to believe is the genuine article, could have suspended national elections. What Nixon did was bad enough that we do not need to attribute to him intentions he never had, and Watergate by itself was bad enough—stupid, criminal, and inexcusable enough—that we do not need to make of it more than it was.
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III
If many of the received lessons of Watergate appear on examination to be trivial, exaggerated, or even downright misleading, there are other aspects of the affair that deserve closer attention than they have so far attracted. The recent memoirs by Sirica and Stans help us to consider these less obvious lessons of the scandal, though not entirely in the ways that the authors intended.
When Maurice H. Stans summarizes his Watergate experience as The Terrors of Justice, we immediately suspect hyperbole, if not dissimulation. Yet looked at dispassionately—at least so far as the official record can establish it—his is a genuinely harrowing tale. Ponderously detailed, awkwardly written and organized, this book nonetheless largely persuades, so long, that is, as it sticks to the details of the author’s experiences.
Prior to Watergate, Stans had one of those Horatio Alger careers so common in the catalogues of American experience that we forget how significant and impressive they are. Born to children of immigrants in very modest circumstances in Shakopee, Minnesota, in 1908, Stans rose, through ambition, talent, and hard work, to the very top of the accounting profession before entering public life. Having served in the Eisenhower administration, he developed a strong case of Potomac fever (his term) and decided by the mid-60’s to attach himself to Richard Nixon’s star as his most likely route back to Washington. His special talent was that of fund-raiser, and he took on that role for Nixon, first in the 1962 race for the governorship of California, and later and more enthusiastically in the 1968 campaign for presidential nomination and election. As with everything else that he took on in his career, Stans was good at his job (Dean has said that he was the only member of the administration “who could have tutored Bob Haldeman on efficiency”) and Nixon rewarded him with the position of Secretary of Commerce. Indeed, Stans had been too good at his job, and when it came time for the bid for election to a second term, Nixon put such heavy pressure on him that Stans, against his own real wishes, resigned his cabinet position in early 1972 to become finance chairman of CRP.
There, of course, disaster struck. Since he was the man in charge of the money, it seemed obvious to investigators—and to the media—that Stans must have known something about the uses of the funds that were raised first to finance the Watergate break-in and later to aid in the cover-up. Yet the record seems clear that he did not. Stans insisted from the outset on a clear separation of duties within CRP between the finance and campaign committees: his committee would raise and disburse the funds, but it was not its job to judge or verify the uses to which the campaign committee felt the monies should be put. If expenditures were properly authorized by a member of the campaign committee, the finance committee would meet them. And within the finance operation, Stans put his own energies to raising money; he left it to the treasurer of his committee, Hugh Sloan, Jr., to pay it out.
Thus the money for Watergate was paid out by Sloan to G. Gordon Liddy on the authorization of Magruder, Mitchell’s deputy director. Liddy was so secretive concerning the money’s purposes that Sloan complained to Stans; Stans checked with Mitchell, who assured him, without going into detail, that the payment was legitimate; and Stans told Sloan to pay the money. Stans’s only involvement with the cover-up was a payment of $75,000 on June 29, 1972 to Herbert Kalmbach for purposes that Kalmbach assured Stans were legitimate, but which turned out to be part of the payoffs to insure the silence of the Watergate burglars. On none of this are we required to accept stans’s word. The Watergate prosecutors never charged Stans with involvement in any aspect of Watergate, and none of the conspirators has ever suggested that he was part of their operations. We might wonder in a few instances why he did not raise more questions than he apparently did (it would seem naive to suppose that he did not harbor certain suspicions), but we have no good reason to doubt his absolute denial of criminal knowledge or action.
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Even as the actual record began to emerge, however, the media continued to tell the story of Watergate as if Stans had somehow been at the center of things. Although he was never officially charged with involvement, there is still because of that coverage a widespread public assumption that Stans was in some vague manner part of the Watergate scandal.
That assumption blends into the wider and near universal belief that the entire Nixon fund-raising operation in 1972 was one great sinkhole of corruption. The range of corrupt practices charged against the operation Stans headed has been astonishingly broad: that the Nixon campaign received enormous illegal gifts from foreign sources, such as the Shah of Iran; that CRP fundraisers, armed with lists of corporations in trouble with government agencies, went about exchanging promises of help for large contributions; that government contracts were promised in exchange for generous gifts to the campaign; that government jobs, especially ambassadorships, were in effect sold to the highest bidders (one potential contributor, assuming that was in fact the way things operated, bluntly asked Stans, “How much for Luxembourg?”; Stans tells us he informed the man that Luxembourg was not for sale); that CRP urged contributors to pay in cash in order that quid pro quo dealings and other corrupt operations would be harder to trace; that a massive “laundering” operation was carried on by the committee to hide the sources of contributions; that an “enemy list” of those who had refused to contribute was kept for later retaliatory action by the administration.
All of these charges, Stans tells us, came under exhaustive scrutiny and investigation by the office of the Watergate special prosecutor. None of them, he insists, resulted in the laying of any criminal charges, much less the securing of any convictions:
Insofar as the Nixon money-raising in 1972 was concerned, there were only a handful of nonwillful technical violations, and these were less significant individually and in the aggregate than similar oversights and violations by a number of other candidates who were not prosecuted.
That was the surviving sum and substance of all of the alleged financial corruption in the 1972 Nixon campaign. Not a single proven case of corrupt action. No favors granted. No contracts awarded. No cases fixed. No ambassadorships sold. No illegal contributions from foreigners. No overseas laundries. No illegal solicitations. No list of companies in trouble with the government. No enemy lists. No fund-raising by government officials. No extortion or coercion. No intentional circumvention of the law in a single instance. That is precisely what the Department of Justice, the Special Prosecutor, and the courts found.
Stans seems justified in describing the five counts on which he was finally convicted—and fined $1,000 per count—as “technical violations.” There were two charges of non-willful receipt of illegal corporate contributions and three charges of late reporting of contributions and payments. None of them, as described in detail by Stans, appears to have involved anything more than a minor and insignificant infraction of election-financing laws, and it seems clear that the violations would, under ordinary circumstances, simply have been ignored. Stans reluctantly pleaded guilty to these misdemeanors in 1975, he says, rather than face a protracted, expensive, and debilitating trial in a District of Columbia court which he feared would still be operating in an inflamed climate of opinion. One senses that a part of him now deeply regrets that decision.
Stans’s reluctance to face a trial is easily understandable in the circumstances. He had already endured a trial in New York in 1974 in which he and Mitchell faced charges of conspiracy, obstruction of justice, and perjury in connection with receipt of a $200,000 campaign contribution in 1972 from financier Robert Vesco, supposedly in exchange for helping Vesco with an investigation of his activities by the Securities and Exchange Commission. The jury, faced with what Tom Wicker of the New York Times described as “clearly a weak case” for the prosecution, acquitted the defendants on all counts.
Stans cherishes that acquittal, but, as already noted, he knows that millions of Americans will remain forever persuaded that, if only in some indefinable way, he was nonetheless “mixed up in Watergate.” That is his anguish, and it is impossible upon reading this memoir not in some measure to share it with him. It could be, of course, that he has not told us the full truth, that there are elements, of moral guilt especially, which he has not fully confronted. That, I must add, is not my reading of the book, and in any case—moral guilt or not—Stans does seem fully to have established that he was legally innocent of any significant wrongdoing in the variety of matters that have been gathered under the Watergate umbrella, and that he nonetheless became subject to an extraordinary and vicious campaign of smear and slander.
Stans lays out his case in excruciating and repetitive detail; he specifies what seem to him scores of instances of unfair treatment at the hands of investigators, prosecutors, district attorneys, politicians, public-interest groups, publishers, reporters, and editorialists. The massive misreporting of his situation by the media—some of it malicious, much of it simply ignorant and unprofessional—gets the most careful and, by any standard, devastating attention. Yet for all his sense of grievance and outrage, Stans maintains a restrained and dignified tone. Given all that he endured, he appears surprisingly free of bitterness and desire for vengeance. Moved at times to the edge of despair, he managed throughout his ordeal to hold on to his equanimity, largely through massive doses of old-fashioned American positive thinking. (During the Vesco trial, for example, Stans and his wife attended a variety of church services, “choosing among those listed in the Saturday papers the sermons with the most reassuring titles.” By this process, the Stanses found themselves in frequent attendance at the Marble Collegiate Church listening to Dr. Norman Vincent Peale.)
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Stans desires the exoneration of history, the reclaiming, as he told the Senate Watergate Committee, of “my good name.” But that is not the limit of his intentions. He believes there are lessons in Watergate that transcend his own case. He wants, in fact, though he does not say so directly, to begin the process of Watergate revisionism.
Some of his arguments make good sense. He shows, for example, that much of the post-1972 passion for campaign reform, which climaxed in the passage of the Federal Election Campaign Act of 1974, stemmed from a misreading of the Watergate experience. He dismisses the argument that the break-in occurred because the Republicans had so much money lying around they could indulge nasty impulses that a tighter budget would have required them to resist: “Watergate happened because some persons in authority wanted it to happen; in one way or another they would have financed it, law or no law, surplus or no surplus.”
More broadly, he argues that the 1974 law, which provided for government financing of presidential elections and which placed ceilings both on individual contributions and on campaign expenditures, swept through Congress on a wave of indignation over massive corruption in the financing of the 1972 Nixon campaign that, on this book’s showing, never occurred. Those violations that did take place, Stans says, were covered under existing law, and he makes a persuasive case that the pre-Watergate campaign act of 1971, which did not limit expenditures but which did require disclosure of all contributions over $100, offered sufficient safeguards against improper financial influence on elections and on political behavior. He takes some consolation from the Supreme Court decision of 1975 which threw out the provisions of the new law limiting expenditures. As for the remaining limits on individual contributions, Stans’s reminder that “special-interest money” is not restricted to large personal contributions should recommend itself to reformers currently exercised over the excessive influence of “single-interest” voting groups.
An ill-considered campaign reform law is not, however, in Stans’s view, the worst of the results of the Watergate affair. For him, the great untold story of Watergate is that the “terrors of justice” descended not only on Maurice Stans but on countless others who became victims of the “hysteria” of the times. Stans does not deny that Watergate involved real crimes—though he thinks they have been “exaggerated”—but the whole weight of the book is to emphasize the wrongdoings not of the conspirators but of those who, in their eagerness to expose the crimes of Watergate, trampled on the rights and reputations of the innocent.
To Stans, the Watergate investigation stands in the tradition of Salem, frontier vigilante justice, racial lynchings, and the McCarthyism of the 50’s; it was, he charges, a witch-hunt, “where accusation was taken for guilt and association with Richard Nixon’s administration or reelection campaign was grounds for accusation.” Watergate, in fact, “was in most respects a vastly greater and more far-reaching inquisition than anything that had gone before.” These themes have eagerly been seized on by ideologues of the Right; the review in Human Events, for example, hailed the book for offering, at long last, the beginning of the “real history” of the scandal. This real history, the reviewer suggested, will expose the “official version” of Watergate as “a monstrous, unconscionable distortion of the truth” and reveal the actual record of “a reign of media and government terror unparalleled in American history.”
Such a view of Watergate involves, of course, a monumental loss of proportion and lack of perspective. It is simply perverse to summarize the affair as an instance of the McCarthyism of the Left. There are witch-hunts and witch-hunts (as Stans rather lamely concedes at the end of his Salem/Watergate analogy) and we can distinguish among them only by asking certain necessary questions: Were there witches present? What was their nature? Were the weapons chosen to fight them appropriate to the occasion? It is in the face of such questions that an identification of Watergate with McCarthyism disintegrates.
In Watergate there were real witches; they had to be exorcised; and the weapons devised to combat them, while sometimes put to crude or illegitimate uses, were not fundamentally inappropriate. McCarthy had a real enemy (despite what many cold-war revisionists suggest), but he fought Communism largely in the wrong place and with weapons that disabled more innocent than guilty. The innocents of Watergate—and Stans has shown us that there were some—were not, as were the innocents of McCarthyism, the central element in the story. That they were incidental victims does not make their experience less tragic, but neither does that experience rightfully figure as the heart of the matter. In the end, of course, McCarthy’s excesses badly discredited the anti-Communist cause. (He had considerable help, it should be noted, from those who, either out of willful ignorance or malicious intent, collapsed all anti-Communism into McCarthyism.) It is unlikely that Stans or anyone else will be able to persuade future generations that the pursuit of the truth of Watergate was so flawed in procedure as to suggest doubts concerning its purposes.
Keeping these distinctions in mind, we can nonetheless assess the elements of McCarthyism that did, in fact, creep into the Watergate investigations. One can fully believe that Richard Nixon and his associates deserved everything they got and still acknowledge that the investigation which brought them down included avoidable instances, official and unofficial, of false accusation, abuse and harassment, misrepresentation, and character assassination. There were occasions when the affair took on, as Stans says, a “Roman circus atmosphere” and there were too many assumptions of guilt by association. Genuinely innocent men suffered real injuries: loss of friends, loss of income, loss of reputation. Opportunistic politicians and social critics used the weapon of Watergate to settle old scores and to advance their ideological interests. Reporting and analysis by the media too often exceeded the bounds of fair comment. People who should have made it their business to discourage the populist fantasies concerning tyranny and corruption that Watergate inevitably bred instead fostered and nourished them. The Watergate investigation did what it had to do—uncover the crimes of the Nixon administration—but in the process it also did unnecessary damage to civil liberties and to political civility. It would be wrong to argue that partially discreditable means invalidated legitimate ends, but the cause neither of justice nor of historical accuracy would be served by denial of the tainted means.
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The tangled conflict between means and ends presents itself in acute form in consideration of the role of Judge John J. Sirica in the Watergate affair. The advertising for To Set the Record Straight describes Sirica as the “one true hero” of Watergate. That view matches the popular perception, but careful analysis of the record suggests that Sirica was a more ambiguous sort of hero than his publishers imagine. Sirica did play a critical part in uncovering the facts of the scandal. The cover-up began to fall apart with James McCord’s letter to the judge after the initial burglary trial indicating his willingness to break silence about the conspiracy (though there may well be exaggeration in Sirica’s claim that without McCord’s letter the case “would never have been broken”). Yet doubts arise concerning Sirica’s actions during the first Watergate trial and its aftermath, doubts which his memoir does not dispel.
In the pages of this book, Sirica frequently comes across as a kind of Harry Truman of the judiciary. As Truman did, Sirica clearly thinks of himself as a plain man without supposing for a moment that he is only an ordinary one. Sensitive concerning his limited education (he finished high school at night, skipped college, and only got through law school on the third try after earlier dropping out twice), Sirica, like Truman, compensates for educational deficiencies with brisk decisiveness, firm self-confidence (perhaps not always fully felt), and an uncomplicated assurance that problems can be solved and moralities secured without excessive cerebration, equivocation, or concern with customary rules of procedure. Such a personality is not at home with intellectual uncertainty or moral ambiguity. It is qualities like these that helped Harry Truman make the most momentous political decisions without tortuous agonizing, but sometimes also without sufficient reflection. It is a similar cast of mind that allowed Sirica relentlessly to pursue the deeper truths of Watergate, with little apparent concern—then or now—that in so doing he occasionally bent the rules of judicial behavior.
Sirica’s vigorous desire for natural justice and his untroubled sense of right and wrong persuaded him from the outset to use the burglary trial to get at the “truth” of Watergate hidden behind the simple facts of the break-in. His reputation in Washington legal circles as “Maximum John” did not at all hurt his efforts to find that truth. Sirica’s reputation, combined with his clear indication of frustration and anger during the course of the trial that those behind the burglary were avoiding detection, no doubt inclined McCord to the view that honesty was, with this judge at least, a prudential policy. It was just four days before he was due to be sentenced that McCord decided to confide in Sirica.
Both before and after McCord broke, Sirica went to considerable lengths to bring the full story of Watergate to the surface. Unsatisfied with the prosecution’s efforts to get at the higher-ups behind the burglary, he subjected Hugh Sloan, treasurer of CRP, to intense questioning concerning the origins and intended purposes of the money Sloan had handed over to Liddy. In the course of the questioning, Sirica made abundantly clear his suspicion that Sloan was telling less than the full truth. But Sirica’s questioning of Sloan turns out to have added nothing substantial to what had already been revealed in the court record; its only significant effect was to impugn the honesty, before the court and the nation, of a man who, as Sirica himself now admits, had not lied. Yet Sirica feels no need in any way to apologize for his actions in the Sloan interrogation. He has, he says, “no regrets” over his action during the trial: “The more I think about it, the more I believe that it was the proper course to take and in fact the only course to take. . . . Simply stated, I had no intention of sitting on the bench like a nincompoop and watching the parade go by.”
Sirica also used sentencing procedure both as a deterrent and as a method of getting behind the cover-up. Thus in March 1973 he sentenced Liddy to a $40,000 fine and up to 20 years in jail (at several points Sirica reveals the strong dislike he had developed for the “smart-alecky, cocky” Liddy); with the other break-in defendants, he issued “provisional” sentences of 35 to 40 years, on the understanding that those sentences would be reduced if the defendants cooperated with the continuing Watergate grand jury and with the Senate Watergate Committee. Again, Sirica appears entirely unable to understand the “great furor” created by his use of draconian discretionary sentencing in order to coerce testimony on the larger questions related to the case. Federal statutes allow for the provisional sentencing procedure, and Sirica does not find it necessary to meet objections that that procedure was inappropriate in these circumstances. He does insist that he at no time meant to follow through on the threat implicit in the provisional sentences: “I never had any intention whatsoever of putting those men in jail for thirty to forty years,” he says. That is reassuring, but it still does not meet the question of the propriety of making the threat in the first place. (Eight months later, Sirica did issue final, lesser sentences to all the defendants except Liddy.)
In assessing the judge’s actions in the break-in trial, it is necessary to keep in mind that the prosecutors had their own plans for breaking the cover-up. Sirica himself notes U.S. Attorney Earl Silbert’s intention, once he had obtained convictions in the break-in, to give grants of immunity to the burglars and haul them all back before the Watergate grand jury “to give the full story behind the break-in.”
One need not be in any measure an apologist for the Watergate criminals to raise questions over Sirica’s behavior. Reviewing Sirica’s memoir in the New Republic, Joseph L. Rauh, Jr., a former national chairman of Americans for Democratic Action and a prominent civil-rights, civil-liberties, and labor lawyer, pointedly notes the statement of the American Bar Association that “the only purpose of a criminal trial is to determine whether the prosecution has established the guilt of the accused as required by law, and the trial judge should not allow the proceedings to be used for any other purpose.” Observing that Sirica not only allowed but himself used the proceedings for “other purposes,” Rauh concludes that “there was no warrant for Sirica to go beyond his proper judicial role”:
And the statement of the Court of Appeals, in affirming the burglary convictions, that Sirica’s conduct of the trial “was in the highest tradition of his office as a federal judge,” is more a commentary on anti-Watergate hysteria than a justification for Sirica’s misuse of judicial power. This same hysteria brought spokesmen for the greatest civil-liberties organization in the history of the nation (American Civil Liberties Union) . . . to applaud Sirica’s conduct. But all of this cannot alter the end-justifies-the-means philosophy that surrounded Sirica’s actions.
In the course of his book, Sirica delivers himself of some gratuitous pronouncements on the character and fate of Richard Nixon that are worth noting. At one point, he discloses that had Nixon refused to turn over the tapes to the court, he would have found the President in contempt and forced compliance by levying large daily fines, because, he says, “I knew the President loved money.” Sirica also announces that Nixon should not have been pardoned, but should have been indicted and tried, and had he been convicted in Sirica’s court, “I would have sent him to jail.” To the argument that Nixon could not have been tried because the proceedings would have dragged on for months or even years, disrupting the country, Sirica replies that any such delays would only have come from the defendant himself, and he proceeds to a truly bizarre camparison:
Nixon’s tactic was really the same as the tactic behind the behavior of the Black Panthers and others who in those years disrupted their trials by yelling and throwing things and screaming insults at the judge. Nixon’s threatened uproar would have taken the more genteel form of legalistic objections and emotional appeals for sympathy, but that made him no different from the others. The only difference between them was that Nixon got away with it.
The argument here is doubly peculiar. In the first place, even granting that Nixon by his actions in Watergate invited a kind of permanent open season on himself, it still seems excessive to anticipate and criticize behavior on his part that never occurred. He surely has enough real sins to account for that it is not necessary to create imaginary ones for him. Beyond that, it seems incredible that a federal district judge could be so injudicious as to find no distinction between tearing up a courtroom and making “legalistic objections.”
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It is in connection with Richard Nixon that Watergate issues the greatest challenge to our capacity for reasonable judgment. The problem, of course, involves not Nixon’s role in Watergate itself—judgments are all too easy to make there—but relating Watergate to our larger conclusions concerning the Nixon Presidency. It will always be impossible to think of Nixon without thinking of the scandal that drove him from office, but severe distortion results when, as is often currently the case, everything in the Nixon years is viewed sub specie Watergate. It is probably still too early to establish the necessary distinctions, but the process ought to start soon. (A good place to begin, incidentally, is with Nixon’s own memoirs, which are considerably more useful and revealing than many critics have suggested.)
Those who hope to see Nixon given his due will do well to avoid the approach taken in The Terrors of Justice. Stans makes ritual concessions concerning the evils of Watergate, but he still finds it hard to take them all that seriously. The break-in was, he acknowledges, a crime, but it was only “a very minor one except for the political repercussions that followed it” (which is a little like saying that the striking of the iceberg by the Titanic was insignificant except for the sinking that followed it). In his handling of the affair, Nixon “stumbled over a molehill,” and it still seems to Stans tragically unfair that because of Nixon’s “clumsy handling of a small incident” it became possible for a coalition of “opportunistic politicians, an aggressive and hostile media, ambitious prosecutors, and organized ‘public-interest’ groups” to combine to bring down the administration. The worst that Stans can bring himself to say about Nixon and Watergate is that Nixon was a President “who tried too hard.”
It is clearly unacceptable to plead for justice for the Nixon administration on the grounds that Watergate did not make any difference or that it was not the President’s fault. Watergate was an ugly and unforgivable business, and Nixon’s tragic destiny was of his own making. What the liberals, the commentators, and all the rest of his ancient enemies could not have done to him, Nixon did to himself—and to all of us (particularly those who shared, in varying degrees, in his administration’s aims and purposes).
The only path to historical rehabilitation for Richard Nixon will be the recognition that there was more to his administration than Watergate. Stans is unconvincing as an apologist, but he becomes more persuasive when he suggests that there were a great many people who, because they lost their emotional and intellectual balance or because they harbored ideological purposes, unfairly decided after Watergate that everything and everyone associated with the Nixon administration were irredeemably corrupt. Watergate became a symbol of total depravity, and too many people who should have known better swept together under the Watergate umbrella, without discrimination, all that the Nixon people had ever touched. That was unfair; more important, it was historically inaccurate. It is at this point that historical revisionism on Watergate might fruitfully begin.
1 To Set the Record Straight: The Break-in, the Tapes, the Conspirators, the Pardon, Norton, 394 pp., $15.00.
2 The Terrors of Justice: The Untold Side of Watergate, Everest House, 478 pp., $10.95.
3 RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon, Grosset & Dunlap, 1120 pp., $19.95.
4 Atheneum, 338 pp., $10.00.
5 Blind Ambition, Simon & Schuster, 415 pp., $9.75.
