HISTORY: The three morals of Tricky Dick
Watergate — learning the lessons thirty years on
Unplumbed
If a week is a long time in politics, the thirty years which have passed between the Watergate scandal and today might as well be a lifetime. A generation has come to political maturity for whom the language redolent of that era — ‘CREEP’, ‘Saturday Night Massacre’, ‘unindicted co-conspirators’, ‘Deep Throat’, 'expletive deleted' — could easily, for all its remoteness, date from Angevin rent rolls. Perhaps the hardest thing to recover, though, is the sheer shock it caused at the time, back when we all still had political innocence left to lose. Sure, Bill Clinton perjured himself before a grand jury — but so what? A few years later, it’s that blue dress we remember, and everyone smiles indulgently. Truly, we live in a different world now.
Yet three decades on, there are still lessons to be learned from the worst political scandal the US has ever known — lessons which might, who knows, perhaps interest the leadership of our own present-day Conservative Party.
1. Seize control of the narrative
In 1973, when the Watergate scandal broke, President Nixon’s legacy looked solid. He had guided America through unprecedented social and racial turbulence and had scored some handsome foreign policy successes. In Vietnam, every provincial capital was in Saigon’s hands; thousands of American servicemen were coming home. These were, by any standard, major achievements, and more than justification enough for his smashing landslide victory in the 1972 general election.
Yet America’s liberal intelligentsia harboured grudges against Nixon for exposing one of their own, Alger Hiss, as Stalin’s useful idiot during the McCarthy era; they resented his successful appeal to ‘The Great Silent Majority’ over their collective (and collectivist) heads. So once the Washington Post could give them anything — no matter how flimsy and circumstantial — to get their teeth into, they were quick to present Nixon as uniquely untrustworthy, corrupt, and opposed to exactly those values of decency and probity that ‘The Great Silent Majority’ valued most. (That, and the President swore, too!) Once this narrative of betrayal became established, it went on to become self-fulfilling. Where was the alternative, flagging up Nixon’s successes while treating the peripheral matters which so obsessed the Post as the historical sideshow that in retrospect they clearly were? It never arrived. Instead, the administration accepted the media narrative, treated it as important, and covered up accordingly. And we all know where that got them . . .
Moral: If the Conservatives accept without challenge a centre-left media narrative centring on what is ‘wrong’ with the party — lack of diversity, not being quite as liberal as Labour, being conservative, whatever — then we ensure that we remain associated with varying degrees of failure, rather than with our own genuine strengths and historic successes.
2. Don’t expect life to be fair
Once Watergate mushroomed into a fully-fledged constitutional crisis, Nixon was amazed by the double standards employed all around him. Jack Kennedy had been a serial adulterer who routinely harassed political opponents with the institutions of the state, Bobby Kennedy socialised with gangsters, foul-mouthed Lyndon Johnson bugged hotel rooms to keep up with the detail of Rev. Martin’s Luther King’s lovelife, J. Edgar Hoover did pretty much whatever he liked — and yet Richard Nixon faced impeachment for what were, in the first instance, events with no clear connection to the White House, and later for constructions of executive privilege which, at worst, inhabited a legal grey area. And still it goes on. Even if you don’t believe every word of Ambrose Evans-Pritchard’s excellent Secret Life of Bill Clinton, it's clear that a charming Democrat can now get away with — well, things that Nixon wouldn’t have done, to put it no more strongly than that.
Moral: As far as the mainstream media are concerned, there is one law for the left, and one for the right. Despite revelations about the financial transactions linking Bernie Ecclestone (Formula 1), Lakshmi Mittal (the steel magnate), and Powderject (the smallpox vaccine company) — to name only a few — to the present Labour government, somehow it’s the words ‘Tory’ and ‘sleaze’ that remained yoked together in the public consciousness. No matter how often Labour ministers succumb to ‘moments of madness’, sleaze remains a Tory issue — as does racism, sexism and factionalism. There is, however, little point in whining about this once it has been established as the dominant narrative (see above). It only looks defensive, while drawing attention to what remains, despite our protests, a vulnerability. So instead of complaining that the media are unfair — which of course they are — we should shift the conversation to more favourable terrain, such as well-fleshed-out policy proposals (assuming that we’ve actually produced any) or popular Tory principles (assuming that we still remember what these are).
3. Make sure the people who work for you are actually on your side
Nixon’s first administration, formed at the end of the Swinging Sixties, prided itself on young, brilliant high-flyers like John Dean — men who resembled sleek, East Coast liberals more than the usual White House staffers. Yet the adventurous electioneering tactics of the ‘USC Mafia’ did the administration no good; the revisionist line which posits Watergate as John Dean’s coup d’etat exaggerates matters a bit, yet enshrines a central truth. For all their intelligence and flair, these young men didn't share their leader's agenda; they didn't have his best interests, let alone their party at heart. Nixon had plenty of real friends, but when the crunch came, he had plenty of enemies on his own side, too. In the end, it was the latter that proved decisive.
Moral: The leadership of the Conservative Party must ensure that those in sensitive positions have not only good judgement but also a convincing track-record of adherence to the best values and methods of the party. Anything else — whether prompted by some pointless fascination with youth per se, or by a genuine desire to heal old factional splits, or sheer stupidity — carries major risks. And the more sensitive those positions, and the closer to the leadership itself, the greater the stakes involved. If, however, it's the leadership itself that has lost track of conservative principles, how do you tell friends from enemies? You don't. But then if that's the case, we're in a lot more trouble than the Grand Old Party was in 1973.
Drusilla Breckinridge, October 15, 2002 01:36 PM