Watergate hearings - 5 May 1973

One day last week, an official of the Nixon Administration said to a reporter, “I don’t know why any citizen should ever again believe anything a government official says.”

The man might have thought twice if he’d known he was going to be quoted in print, but his bitter remark goes to the root of what is most disturbing about the Watergate affair: anxiety, now a general anxiety, over whether this administration, or perhaps any that comes later, can restore the faith of the people in a system of government that has taken many beatings in the past and in one historic upheaval was renounced by a whole section of the country.

But it has survived and a majority of the people have always been in the long-run able to distinguish between the system and the abuse of it. We hear a great deal today in all self-governing countries – from which I hasten to exclude those dictatorships cynically called "people’s republics" – about the evils of the system, and very often we hear it from people who are abysmally ignorant about how their system of government is meant to work, where and when it worked well or even brilliantly or badly, and how and when it was betrayed.

The American system includes a great deal more than two political parties elected by majority vote and the large bureaucracy surrounding and advising the presidency and 50 state governments similarly divided between the power of a governor and the power of their legislatures.

It also includes a Supreme Court to judge the fairness of all their doings. It defines the proper balance of authority in a long and meticulously-written constitution, which one of the greatest of English prime ministers called, “the most wonderful work of intellect ever struck off at one time by the brain and purpose of man.”

Well, allowing for the parliamentary rhetoric of the Victorians, we can still take up that constitution, written nearly two centuries ago, and read it carefully and apply its precise generalisations to any problem that hurts us today in our local or national government. It provides for every sort of dispute that can happen between a citizen and his township, his state, his nation, the courts, his employer.

It was no visionary blueprint. It anticipated the inevitability of discrimination, unfairness, brutality, greed, the ever-present possibility of tyranny, and it foresaw that its own articles would be administered by men of the usual frailty. It allowed for all sorts of calamities, including the supreme calamity of a president who might betray his office through high crimes and misdemeanours. It set up the procedure, in fact, for the impeachment of the President of the United States.

In the past week or two, the word "impeachment" has been tossed around rather freely, especially by the foreign press, and maybe I ought to tell you how it can happen and how it did happen once.

The Constitution provides that if the behaviour of a president is thought by some congressman to verge on high crime or misdemeanour, he may bring before the House of Representatives, the lower house, a resolution of impeachment, and the House thus acts as a grand jury.

Perhaps it would be useful to point out that the grand jury system existed in Britain until, I think it was 1933, when it was abolished, though it had given way to magistrates’ hearings about 20 years before that. At any rate, the magistrates, the grand jury, in a presidential impeachment case the House of Representatives, sits to decide if there is a case. And if it decides by a majority vote that there is, then the Senate, the upper house, is called upon to sit as a trial court; and if it votes by a two-thirds majority to find a crime, then the president is pronounced guilty and relieved of his office and the Vice President takes over.

It is a very long step from the secret hearings of a grand jury, such as we are now seeing in the Watergate case, to the arousal of the whole House of Representatives to a resolution of impeachment to the actual trial before the Senate.

It happened to the man who succeeded Lincoln after his assassination: Andrew Johnson, a tailor, a Democrat from the rebel state of Tennessee. He was a weak if stubborn president, and he was the victim of a radical Congress that went beyond the Constitution in stripping him of the powers that he, the president, held under the Constitution – like his power as commander-in-chief of the army and his power to dismiss federal officials without anybody else’s say so. He defied them by trying to remove his Secretary of War and he was impeached. The Senate failed by one vote short of the necessary two-thirds majority to throw him out.

Well you’ll see from even such a mini account of his troubles that they bore no relation to Mr Nixon’s. There is no possible analogy between the ordeal of Andrew Johnson and the ordeal of Richard Nixon.

But there are analogies in the administration of President Harding during the first years of the 1920s. Those unprecedented scandals involved several of Harding’s cabinet officers – the Secretary of the Interior for one – and the deputy head of the infant FBI, who turned out to have been in the first war a German spy, but mostly, the scoundrels who fattened their pockets on government oil leases and industrial patents and on the funds of the Veteran Soldiers’ Bureau secretly and illegally. These were the so-called Ohio Gang, the hometown and home state buddies that Harding had brought into the White House as advisers.

Well the question that now springs to mind is not whether President Nixon’s Watergate Gang is or is not as shady as Harding’s Ohio Gang, but whether they have deceived Nixon as completely as the others deceived Harding. There is very little doubt today that Harding was politically naïve and a ruinously indulgent judge of character who assumed that his poker-playing buddies were as honourable in the conduct of their public office as they were lovable in private.

There is alarming evidence already that the Watergate Gang in the White House thought of itself as a team of crafty public relations men determined to sell Richard Nixon to the voters by foul means or fair. Most of them were not politicians; they would have been far more discreet if they had been. They had come from the worlds of advertising and public relations and real estate and cosmetics – they were fixers – and so far there’s precious little evidence that the majesty of the Constitution or the glory of the American system was much on their minds.

The original crime, the bugging of the Democratic headquarters by a handful of simple-minded men who feared Fidel Castro’s threat to the United States, this now looks like something too wild and schoolboyish to be believed.

When these men were caught and indicted and tried and thrown into jail, it did look, as the president implied, that it was a crude and ludicrous plot properly punished.

When the Washington Post began to dig and hint at a possible cover-up by people in the White House, the head of Mr Nixon’s committee for his reelection accused the paper of “innuendo, third-person hearsay, unsubstantiated charges, anonymous sources and huge scare headlines which the Post knows to be false.”

Well the Post knew no such thing. It was on to pay dirt and it knew it. The president assured us all eight months ago, categorically he said that “no one in the White House staff, no one in this administration presently employed was involved in this very bizarre incident.”

But the president found himself, after his sorrowful and stumbling speech to the nation last week, talking afterwards to the press and forlornly hoping that “I am worthy of your trust”. It’s a hope we must all share, but the frailty of that hope is at the heart of the case. For who was involved? Who has resigned? Who are now highly suspect? The president’s own White House lawyer; his chief campaign fundraiser, a former secretary of commerce who encouraged businessmen to contribute hugely to the reelection with large and secret campaign funds; four personal White House assistants; most of all men at the very top of the White House hierarchy – the White House chief-of-staff and the president’s chief adviser on domestic affairs: Haldeman and Erlichman – “two of the finest public servants,” the president said only last week, “it has been my privilege to know.”

But now it comes out that these two fine public servants ordered the burgling of the files of a psychiatrist who had treated Ellsberg, the defendant in the Pentagon Papers Trial.

Meanwhile, we heard that the judge in that trial had been approached by the White House with the suggestion that he might like to become the head of the FBI. It’s almost too monstrous to take in. Not to mention the fake letter sent out under the fake letterhead of the Democrat, Senator Muskie, and the so-called citizens’ telegrams composed in the White House and quoted by the administration as proof that the people were behind the president in his bombing of Hanoi.

Is it conceivable that Mr Nixon knew nothing of the Watergate bugging, the elaborate cover-up planned by his own top staff, the fakery of the telegrams, the enormous slush fund (some of it illegal) being raised on his behalf? He says it is so, that he is a man more sinned against than Warren Harding.

But now, in the moment of seeming contrite, he’s ordered all his past and former advisers to refuse to talk to a grand jury or a congressional committee about any conversations on Watergate that they held with him. Why, if he’s innocent, should he do this? What he has now done is to prod into new life, new defiance, Senator Sam Ervin’s Senate Committee that begins to investigate Watergate in televised hearings in mid-month.

Yet I think that we must, for the time being, give the president the benefit of the doubt, for to believe that he knew all about it is to say something worse than that Mr Nixon is a disastrously gullible judge of character.

It is to imply that a vast majority of the voters are morally numb. And if that were so, then the days of the Republic would be numbered.

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