Watergate has been part of our political mythology for twenty years. It has become an article of faith, proving that not even presidents are safe from the ever vigilant watchdog press. And yet, who can explain why it was that the president, with all the secret powers of the intelligence agencies under his control, could not prevent a relatively trivial hotel break-in and his own tape recordings from destroying him?
Len Colodny and Robert Gettlin have suggested (Silent Coup, NY: St. Martin's Press, 1991) that Nixon was set up by his own people (Alexander Haig, John Dean, etc.), a thesis that is strong on how but weak on why. The reasons the authors suggest–the military's objections to Nixon's China and Vietnam policies–are not convincing. There was no significant change in US China policy after Nixon, and the ending of the Vietnam War had been decided much earlier, after the Tet offensive in 1968.
The thesis, though, that Watergate was a coup d'état, makes sense. If true, this coup was even more silent than the JFK assassination, because there hasn't been anybody at all until now, not even a wacko group of conspiracy buffs, saying that it happened. Assuming that it did, what could have been the reason?
I will suggest one–essentially the same one that killed Kennedy: Vietnam. Kennedy and Nixon were like parentheses around the war, encapsulating it, packaging it for the memory hole, to go down undigested. Kennedy had to go because he wouldn't start the war, and Nixon had to go because he couldn't end it.
Nixon did finally end the shooting, of course, but by the time he did the country was on the verge of revolution, which was a far greater threat to the powers-that-be than the Viet Cong, who were in fact never a threat at all. After being elected twice on a "peace" platform, like Johnson before him, Nixon sent 20,000 more Americans to their deaths and was the only war president left, after Johnson died in 1973. No amount of Orwellian rhetoric, and certainly not from Nixon's mouth, could have disguised the fact that the U.S. government had lost the war, 58,000 men, and the respect of most of its citizens. The country was in turmoil. There was Kent State, Jackson State, the Black Panthers, the Weathermen, etc., and Nixon was everybody's target. Some blamed him for fighting, some for losing, some for both. His response, perhaps the only alternative given his character and the bind he was in, was to mobilize the secret police and prepare for all-out war with the population (see David Wise, The American Police State, NY: Random House, 1976). Others were smart enough to know this wouldn't work. Clamping the lid down on a boiling pot is the surest way to make it explode, as the plotters of the abortive coup in the Soviet Union learned in August 1991. Yet something had to happen. The war had gone on too long. Too many people were angry for too many reasons.
Watergate was the solution. It solved the problem of Nixon's increasingly overt fascism and at the same time provided the country with the scapegoat it sorely needed for the war. The high tragedy of Watergate had nothing directly to do with Vietnam, but Nixon's fall was the catharsis that was supposed to lay the war to rest, in order for the power structure that was responsible for it to remain intact. Watergate told America: "Look, we've got the bad guy. Maybe for the wrong reason, but what does it matter? See how far he's fallen. Basta. Forget it. No more recriminations, no more questions."
The questions this megadrama was supposed to stifle were the same ones that had been debated throughout the 60s but were never answered. They still have not been answered. Should the US have fought in Vietnam? The fact that we lost is not an answer. The Establishment's lame admission that the war was a "tragic mistake," i.e. a well-intentioned failure, is not an answer either. What were those intentions, whose were they exactly, and were they right or wrong?
Watergate put a moratorium on this debate, obviating the soul-wrenching but cleansing self-examination that any nation normally goes through after losing a war. For this was substituted a dramatic but essentially trivial exercise: the by now familiar "What did he (Nixon) know and when did he know it?" game. This was necessary because neither Nixon nor the power structure he represented could have survived the real debate, which was Vietnam. If the war was a "mistake," how could we have been so stupid? This "explanation," portraying US policy-makers as well-intentioned (and thus forgivable) bunglers simply doesn't wash, in the long run. Eventually, people would realize what most of the immediate victims of the war–the men who fought it–were forced to learn the hard way: they got screwed.
No government, and certainly not one that pretends to be a democracy, can survive this judgement, once enough citizens come to share it. Vietnam left an extraordinary number of Americans feeling just this way–warriors and draft dodgers alike. This is the real "Vietnam syndrome"–the failure to accept the utter wrongness, the immorality, of the war. As long as the policies that led to and pursued the war are not understood and condemned, the individual is left to wrestle with his own conscience. The public debate which should have continued and been resolved was deliberately aborted, making the individual's struggle to understand and come to terms with the events he was caught up in vastly more difficult. It is not acceptable, even today, to say that the United States is guilty of genocide against both the Vietnamese and American people. This is an unthinkable thought. The ruling elite could not, and cannot, allow it because it would correctly identify them, and not the Viet Cong, as the enemy. It cannot be acknowledged because the power structure, and to some extent the same individuals, that gave us Vietnam are still firmly in place.
Compare the situation in Germany. Why don't the Germans have a "World War II syndrome"? How did Hitler's veterans, the instruments and victims of Nazi policies, come to terms with themselves and postwar German society? Because they knew they had been screwed, and their view of reality has accorded with the mainstream postwar culture. Germans today (except for a few unreconstructed Nazis) have a clear relationship to their history, having lost their war but gained, as a forced consequence, their revolution. We lost our war but never got our revolution. We got Watergate instead. The Germans were able to regenerate, individually and collectively, because they could put their past behind them. We cannot. Grenada, Panama, and the Gulf War have made it abundantly clear that not much has changed since Vietnam, except that now we are "winning." The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution of 1964 was followed by the Persian Gulf Resolution of Jan. 12, 1991, with Congress again abdicating its constitutional responsibility, despite the War Powers Act. The spineless congressional majority was considerably slimmer in 1991 than it was in 1964, which offers some grounds for hope, but it is still a majority.
It is a clear indication of how superficial Watergate was and how little things have changed, and almost amusing, to see Nixon and his chief intellectual henchman, Kissinger, having risen like phoenixes from the charnel house of Vietnam to play the role of elder statesman today. Henry's stony visage and robotic voice, as if played back by remote control, are ubiquitous when foreign policy is discussed. On MacNeil-Lehrer he urges "surgical strikes" against Iraq, the same advice he gave Nixon about Vietnam and Cambodia, resulting in more bombs dropped in Vietnam than in all previous American wars, and which will no doubt wreak comparable devastation in Iraq.
Kissinger writes in Newsweek (9/2/91:44):
As for the United States, it should take care to avoid getting involved in these internal Soviet disputes. It must be seen to support principles, not personalities.
Substituting "Vietnamese" for "Soviet," the hypocrisy is astounding. On the next page he says:
Evoking a foreign danger has served as a means of suppressing differences between nationalities. No European country has sent its armies abroad as frequently and with such missionary zeal as the Russian Empire.
Again, the hypocrisy is mind-boggling, a veritable mirror-image of the truth. He should have written:
Evoking a foreign danger has served as a means of suppressing differences between social classes and ethnic groups. No country has sent its armies abroad as frequently and with such missionary zeal as the United States of America.
As a case in point, one wonders how the civil rights movement would have developed without the distraction of Vietnam. Was it mere coincidence that Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King were murdered in the summer of 1968, not long after both had finally declared their opposition to the war? The prospect of a coalition of blacks, the poor, and middle-class antiwar whites must have sent a shiver up the backs of the ruling class. This threat was met in the same way as Kennedy's decision (in October 1963) to pull out of Vietnam: with gunfire, followed by the Lone Nut theory of history.
RFK and Martin Luther King had to go too, since they would have not only ended the war prematurely, i.e. before the last penny of the $570 billion "costs" (= income; in 1991 dollars, cf. Newsweek 2/4/91, p. 45)) could be pocketed by the "defense" (= war) contractors, but they also had the charisma and popular support to shake the power structure to its very bones. Hoover had done his dirty best against King, but it wasn't enough, and Marilyn's skeleton, which had been planted in Robert's closet, didn't seem adequate to the job either. The more drastic alternative, assassination, became necessary again. This was dangerous, but as we have seen, it worked. The revolution was decapitated.
Watergate spared Nixon this fate. Phlebitis and humiliation are better than getting blown away. And he still has his friends, such as Time magazine, where he said in the April 2, 1990 issue:
Q. Some people say that...in 1969 you could have gotten just about what you got in the end–a kind of a decent interval, the North Viet Nam army's forces in place in the South, POW's–and that therefore the price in American lives was way too high.
A. I know that argument, and I don't agree with it. Kissinger and I have often talked about that. And there, we have to look at the intricacies of the peace agreement of '73. Had that agreement been implemented as it was, it would be a very different situation than it is at the present time.
But as you know, there were two aspects of the agreement. One has been totally forgotten. The two aspects were: one, that the U.S. would continue to support South Viet Nam, just as the Soviets would be expected to be supporting North Viet Nam. The other was that the U.S., in the event that the North Vietnamese complied with the terms, would also support them economically. In other words, there was the economic package.
Naturally, this is self-serving, but everything I say is self-serving. But had I survived, I think that it would have been possible to have implemented the agreement. South Viet Nam would still be a viable non-Communist enclave or whatever you want to call it. But because I think that I had enormous credibility with the North–because of what I'd done on May 8 [ordering the mining of North Vietnamese ports], because of what I'd done in December [ordering the bombing of Hanoi and Haiphong]–they thought, Well, this unpredictable so-and-so, we can't be sure if we attack. You've got to remember, too, that the peace agreement worked for two years.
"Self-serving" is right. There is a streak of honesty in the man. His rendition of the "intricacies" of the Paris Agreements, however, resembles neither what the documents actually say nor what he and Kissinger said at the time.
Article 1 of the Paris Agreements did not stipulate "that the U.S. would continue to support South Vietnam" (which never existed as a country for the majority of Vietnamese–that's what the war was all about) but the exact opposite: that "the United States and all other countries respect the independence, sovereignty, unity and territorial integrity of Vietnam as recognized by the 1954 Geneva Agreements on Vietnam" (see Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent, NY: Pantheon, 1988, p. 230-231).
The text of the agreements clearly recognizes two South Vietnamese political parties, the GVN (Thieu and followers) and the PRG (= NLF = Viet Cong = the Vietnamese who opposed the U.S.-puppet regime), which were to reconcile their differences through negotiations and without foreign interference, committing themselves to a total withdrawal of all "troops, military advisers, and military personnel including technical military personnel, armaments, munitions, and war material" (Articles 5, 7, 13).
On the same day the agreements were announced (Jan. 24, 1973), Kissinger violated them by pledging at a press conference to maintain "civilian technicians" in South Vietnam to "handle maintenance, logistics, and training jobs formerly performed by the U.S. military." The day before, Nixon did the same by announcing that the GVN would be recognized as the "sole legitimate government in South Vietnam." The South Vietnamese then proceeded to violate the cease-fire, since Thieu could not have won a fair election in 1973 any more than Diem could have in 1954.
The January agreements were essentially identical with the 9-Point Plan arrived at in October, but negotiations were delayed until after the November presidential election to avoid an "October Surprise"–the end of the war, which would work to peacenik George McGovern's advantage. This allowed Nixon to indulge in the Christmas bombings which he says gave him such "enormous credibility with the North," a statement of enormous incredibility, since the terms agreed to in 1973 were no different in substance from what the North had wanted in the early 60s and what the Geneva Accords had provided for in 1954. Nixon's explanation for why he delayed the Paris Agreements until after the election is astonishingly forthright:
I felt we would be in a much stronger position after the election, after a tremendous mandate, after the antiwar crowd had been totally defeated. I thought that then we could really get these people to, shall we say, cry uncle.
Here we have pure Nixon, the real man. The true enemy is not the Vietnamese, but the American people. If the "antiwar crowd" had been a minority this would be bad enough, but by 1973 it comprised a majority of the population. Nixon wanted them "totally defeated"!
What Nixon apparently still fails to see, but which his handlers in the Watergate era did see, is that "free" societies are not controlled by "totally defeating the enemy," i.e. the people. That is the strategy of dictatorship, which only works up to a point, namely to the point where the people refuse to be defeated and revolt. The techniques of control in a relatively open society are far more sophisticated. A "free" people must actually be free to a certain extent, and more importantly, they must believe they are free.
Watergate served this purpose magnificently. Ask anyone about some suspected cover-up, some scandal which has not been covered by the mainstream press in any proportion to its importance, and he will remind you: "But just look at Watergate: they brought down a president! If there's a shred of evidence, the press will dig it up."
The Watergate myth is particularly effective because the disproportion between Nixon's purported crime (covering up his staff's role in the break-in) and his punishment (resignation to avoid impeachment) is so great that we must ask: If the press can bring down a president for something like this, how could more serious crimes possibly go unexposed? The myth of the free press thus gains new strength while the dauntless "guardians of freedom" fail to pursue questions such as: Why was the break-in bungled so badly by seasoned CIA veterans who had to know better? Were they meant to get caught? Should we take the CIA's word that their ex-employees (does anybody ever really retire from the CIA?) were working directly for the White House and not for the agency? If Colodny and Gettlin are right about the Washington Post's Bob Woodward working with Haig and the others who set Nixon up, is it reasonable to suppose that such intrigue would be possible without the cooperation or knowledge of the CIA, which has a long history of "working with" the press?
It is inconceivable to me that Watergate could have happened at all if the CIA had been under Nixon's control, as it was supposed to be. By law the CIA is accountable to one man alone: the president. Nixon made the final decisions about what threatened the "national security" or not, and surely he would have considered his own tar and feathering as such a threat. How did the tapes survive? Why didn't he simply have the CIA and FBI do their job–which they are very good at–and get rid of them?
The lesson of Watergate, in case we have forgotten about Dallas, is that the president does not have a secret police, which would be bad enough, so much as they have him–and us as well, of course.