Freedom Writing: 1972

Showing posts with label 1972. Show all posts

Tuesday, December 19, 2017

A Noteworthy Day in American History

Today is the anniversary of two noteworthy events in American history.

They are noteworthy for different reasons — and, on the surface, appear to have little, if anything, in common. But bear with me.

Now, something has happened on every day in the calendar — even if it was nothing more than people were born on that day and people died on that day. For a long time I believed that nothing of note ever happened on the day of my birth — other than the fact that a few famous people were born on that day and a few died — but I later learned that there were some historic — albeit minor — events on my birthday.

There are 365 days in a year (366 in Leap Years); in a few thousand years of recorded history it stands to reason that something, however great or small, must have happened on each at some time.

Dec. 19 is the anniversary of two significant events in American history, separated by nearly two centuries, but they both speak to the purpose of America.

The first event was on this day in 1777. Gen. George Washington and his men began to set up their winter quarters at Valley Forge, Pa.

Even if you never learned the specifics when you were in school, you almost surely learned of the Continental Army's struggle to survive that winter. They had been engaged in a battle with the British in early December, and Washington sought some place where his men could spend the winter.

There were several considerations — Washington needed a location that would support wartime objectives. Valley Forge was far from ideal, but it was easy to defend and had plenty of timber that could be used to build huts.

Everything was in short supply — food, clothing, shelter.

As for shelter ...

It was on this day 240 years ago that construction of the first hut at Valley Forge began. It was completed in three days. By February, 2,000 huts had been built.

Having shelter against the elements helped, but it did nothing for the food and clothing shortages. Contrary to popular belief, Valley Forge had comparatively little snow that winter, but the conditions were still frigid, the men were ill–clothed and underfed.

Why did they endure such hardship? Because they believed in the concept of freedom.

Fast forward 195 years.

On this day in 1972, Apollo 17 returned to Earth. It was a little more than three years since Apollo 11's historic voyage to the moon.

Consequently most Americans probably expected to see men walking on the surface of some other object in the heavens — even though Apollo 18 had been canceled more than two years earlier and no further space landings of any kind were on NASA's schedule. No such missions have been launched in 45 years, and no such missions are planned although the notion has been given plenty of lip service.

Most people probably didn't recognize it at the time, but America was in a truly transitional period. The idea of American exceptionalism had been taking a beating due to the Vietnam War and Watergate. There was a crisis in American confidence that continues to this day.

After Richard Nixon cruised to re–election as president in 1972, things began to change in American politics. In the next two decades, three incumbent presidents would be rejected at the polls by the voters (for comparison purposes, three incumbent presidents were rejected by the voters in the previous 80 years), and the only destinations for American space travelers were space stations.

If they could visit America today, the veterans of Valley Forge might wonder what has become of the country for which they sacrificed so much. What has happened to the courage that sustained them through Valley Forge and the seemingly impossible revolution against British rule? What has become of that "what's next" spirit of exploration that led Americans from the eastern shores of the continent to the western shores — and from there into space?

While it is true that President Donald Trump recently signed Space Policy Directive 1, which provides for a return to the moon — and beyond — Ethan Siegel writes for Forbes that ain't happening.

"With no plans for adequate, additional funding to support these ambitions," Siegel writes, "these dreams will simply evaporate, as they have so many times before."

Perhaps Siegel is right. Perhaps the objective needs to be more targeted. The scattershooting approach of returning to the moon then jumping to the next goal (Mars) and beyond may not be the way to go, as Siegel suggests.

"If we want to go to Mars, we should make that our goal and invest in it," he writes. "If we want to go to the Moon, we should make that our goal and invest in it. Pretending that one has anything to do with the other is a delusion."

Maybe so. But it also seems to me that the spirit of Valley Forge has taken a beating since the days of Apollo 17.

Wednesday, November 7, 2012

A Big Election About Small Things

"If you don't have a record to run on, then you paint your opponent as someone people should run from. You make a big election about small things."

Barack Obama
2008 Democratic National Convention

Presidential elections are seldom about what they should be about.

I probably should have learned that on this day in 1972 — or, at least, not long thereafter.

As I have mentioned here before, my mother was a huge supporter of George McGovern, the quixotic Democratic nominee who ran against President Richard Nixon that year. McGovern tried to run on the big issues of the day — the biggest of which was the Vietnam War, which had so divided America four years earlier when Nixon had been elected president.

And I frequently went with Mom when she was campaigning door to door for McGovern that fall.

She admired the fact that McGovern spoke about the difficult issues of war and peace, poverty and prosperity, and, while I don't remember McGovern's loss on this day being a surprise to her, as I mentioned on the occasion of McGovern's death last month, she must have known what was coming. Everyone did.

It was a different time, which is something, I suppose, that younger Americans simply cannot understand any more than they can understand how their elders used to listen to recordings on discs several times the size of modern CDs that were deceptively heavy and could only be played with — of all things — needles.

It was the last election in which the major party nominees did not debate at least once — Nixon had learned his lesson from the experience of debating John F. Kennedy and declined all such offers.

Such a move probably would be greeted by a huge public outcry today. Modern voters expect presidential candidates to debate each other, but it merited only a couple of references by most observers and then it was dropped when it drew no traction.

Neither, for that matter, did the Watergate break–in and coverup. Oh, Watergate was mentioned from time to time, but, as Jason Robards observed in the movie version of "All the President's Men" — "Half the country never even heard of the word 'Watergate.' Nobody gives a s***."

And that is my memory of the general attitude toward the break–in. It was one of those things that may happen in a political campaign. It was deplorable, everyone agreed; the people who participated in the planning and the execution of the plan should be brought to justice, but it wasn't the candidate's fault. The candidate, especially if he was an incumbent, could not possibly be expected to know everything that went on within his campaign organization and in his name.

People today — perhaps foolishly, given what we learned about human nature from that episode in our history — expect better than that from their candidates. They wouldn't stand for any of the old–school shenanigans and dirty tricks that, in hindsight, marked all of Nixon's campaigns in one way or another.

"It was customary, during and after the campaign, to say that the American people did not care," wrote Theodore H. White in "The Making of the President 1972."

"Wise men agreed, and the polls supported them, that it meant little — that Americans had become callous, too cynical to worry about morality in government."

White was torn on the issue in what was the final volume in his "The Making of the President" series. Based on his observations from the campaign trail, White wrote, people were concerned about what they were hearing about the president's men and what they had been up to.

And, based on the number of voters who came to the polls compared to four years earlier, White concluded that Nixon "failed to maximize his potential support."

"[I]t is possible," White wrote, "that at least 3 or 4 million Americans were so disillusioned by both candidates that they chose not to vote at all."

For those who did vote, however, there was "an open choice of ideas, a free choice of directions, and they chose Richard Nixon."

And, while some people did try to make the 1972 election about the big things — the war, the economy, Watergate — my memory is that the Nixon campaign focused on small things — inconsistencies in McGovern's voting record or verbal missteps — and didn't spend too much time talking about what Nixon had done or what he hoped to do.

Nixon had told voters in 1968 that he had a "secret plan" to end the war in six months, a plan he could not reveal because of the sensitivity of the information and the strategy. The war was still going on in 1972. He had failed to achieve the thing that most Americans wanted more than anything else.

If the campaign had been about that, Nixon probably would have faced — in the words of one of his successors — a "one–term proposition." And, privately, Nixon was bitter about the war with which Kennedy and Johnson had saddled him.

There were arguments that Nixon could have made that there had been real improvements on long–term propositions — because ending the war and reviving a sagging economy that was just beginning to experience long–term issues on energy really were long–term problems. It was unrealistic to regard them as anything else.

Of course, promising to end the war in six months was unrealistic and probably ill–advised, but even more ill–advised was any decision to vote based solely on that remark. McGovern did mention that promise from time to time in 1972, but my memory is that most people were dismissive of it. I don't remember any fist fights breaking out over the pledge.

Nixon could — and did — focus on big accomplishments, like forging new relationships with the Chinese and the Russians. But, mostly, his campaign was about little things.

Much like the campaign that just concluded.

While their political philosophies were different, Mitt Romney reminds me a lot of George McGovern — a decent man who sought to speak about big things but was frequently mischaracterized and belittled, first in his own party and then in the general election.

Romney handled it better than McGovern did. He didn't have to drop his running mate, after all. But, nevertheless, his was the first major–party ticket to lose both its home states since the 1972 election.

(Paul Ryan, of course, is a native of Wisconsin, but plausible arguments could be made that Romney's home state could be Michigan, the state of his birth, or Massachusetts, the state that elected him its governor. For the purpose of the argument, though, it doesn't matter. The GOP lost both.)

And Romney didn't lose in a huge landslide. It was a squeaker by historical standards. Obama's successful re–election was the most tepid I have witnessed in my lifetime — and he is the fifth president in that time to be re–elected.

Of course, three sitting presidents (including Gerald Ford, who is an exception because he was never elected president or vice president) have been rejected by the voters, too.

I believed Obama would join them. I was wrong.

He may yet join Nixon. I believe there is a lot about the attack on the U.S. embassy in Benghazi that has not been revealed. I don't know if it will be revealed before Obama's term is over. That may depend upon whether mainstream journalists are willing to explore the troubling questions that have been raised, no matter where those questions may lead them.

It should be a source of enduring shame to journalists the way they have often shilled for the administration and failed to act as the watchdogs of the truth they are supposed to be. (I see more egregious examples of this in broadcast journalism than I do in print — but, unfortunately, Americans seem less inclined to read than ever.)

It was the role of watchdog, perhaps more than any other, that attracted me to journalism when I was young — the dogged determination of the press to pursue Watergate wherever it took them. I hope American journalists will rediscover the value of that role.

Perhaps then, if we allow a big election to be defined by little things, it will not be because the press did not do its job.

Sunday, October 21, 2012

Death of a Good Guy

I knew when I heard that George McGovern was in hospice care that he was not long for this world.

According to reports Wednesday afternoon, the 90–year–old was "unresponsive" at a hospice center in South Dakota, the state he represented in Washington.

He lingered for a few days — never, to my knowledge, regaining responsiveness — and died earlier today.

History — or destiny or fate or whatever you want to call it — had an unusual plan for George McGovern's life. He was a real long shot to win his party's nomination, but he did — albeit with the help of Richard Nixon's "dirty tricks" squad.

But then he went down in flames in the 1972 general election. He lost every state but Massachusetts and the District of Columbia for a total of 17 electoral votes. It was the most one–sided election in 36 years — and, frankly, I doubted I would ever see its like again.

Twelve years later, though, Ronald Reagan trounced Walter Mondale. Reagan didn't receive as much of the popular vote (percentage–wise, that is) as Nixon did, but he held Mondale to fewer electoral votes than Nixon did against McGovern.

I heard that Mondale spoke to McGovern after the 1984 election and asked McGovern how long it took to get over a landslide loss. "I'll let you know when I get there," McGovern assured him.

(I don't know if McGovern kept that promise, but Bob Greene writes at CNN.com that he did overcome that massive landslide loss — although perhaps not in the way one might expect. Greene covered McGovern's 1972 campaign as a young reporter. His assessment of the man? "[H]e was an awfully good guy.")

Whenever I heard about McGovern over the years, I always thought of Mom. She was a diehard supporter of McGovern — in part because she agreed with him and admired his stance against the Vietnam War but also in part, I'm sure, because she despised Nixon.

In the fall of 1972, Mom went door to door in our county in central Arkansas, ringing doorbells for McGovern. I went with her on several occasions. Many doors were slammed in our faces so I guess she wasn't surprised when Arkansas voted better than 2–to–1 against McGovern that year.

Mom followed the news so I'm convinced she knew McGovern wouldn't be victorious. She had seen the public opinion polls.

(And, even though Greene recalled that McGovern confessed to being baffled by the discrepancy between what the polls were saying and what he was seeing on the campaign trail, I always thought McGovern must have known. My memory of that time is that everyone knew how the election was going to turn out.)

Mom never spoke to me about it, but I'm quite sure she knew what was coming. Hell, even I knew what was coming, and I was just a young boy.

I've been reliving those days this year. 2012 is the 40th anniversary of the Watergate break–in and McGovern's improbable march to the Democratic nomination.

I shook hands with McGovern twice that year. He made airport stops in Little Rock a few weeks before the Democratic convention that summer and again a few weeks before the general election that fall, and Mom and I were there on both occasions.

I worked my way up to spots where I was sure to be able to shake his hand when he came through — and I did, both times, but we didn't exchange any words other than cursory greetings.

Twenty years later, though, we did. I was in my first semester of teaching journalism at the University of Oklahoma, and McGovern came to the campus to deliver a speech about two weeks before the 1992 election.

When he finished speaking, I practically sprinted from my seat to greet him as he stepped from the stage.

"Senator," I said to him, "I'm sure you don't remember me, but I shook your hand at the Little Rock airport in 1972."

McGovern smiled and nodded. "I remember stopping in Little Rock," he replied, "and I remember that your governor, Dale Bumpers, told me we were going to carry Arkansas in the election!"

And we chuckled. We both knew how far he had been from even thinking about the possibility of winning Arkansas — much less actually winning it — even if he never said so publicly. Bumpers was one of McGovern's colleagues for the last six years of his Senate career. We both knew what a spin artist he was.

At that point, McGovern's attention was drawn away from me to others who wanted to shake his hand and speak with him briefly. I never spoke to him or shook his hand again.

As an adult, I didn't always agree with McGovern, and, on the occasion of his death, it has been mostly the notable figures from McGovern's own party who have offered tributes to him, but even Newt Gingrich had something nice to say.

McGovern was, he said, "[j]ust a great guy."

Saturday, September 15, 2012

When Nixon and Dean Conferred

From the day in July 1973 when their existence was publicly revealed until the Supreme Court ruled against him a year later, Richard Nixon fought to keep the tapes of his Oval Office meetings and his telephone conversations private.

In the end, of course, he wasn't entirely successful. But none of that was known 40 years ago today.

My memory of the summer of 1972 is that very little was known by a public that, by and large, really didn't seem to care. Perhaps it was too obsessed with the war in Vietnam.

But, occasionally, I heard the word Watergate, and, from time to time, I saw articles in the newspaper that had been picked up from the Washington Post — which was, for the most part, out there by itself in practicing the art of shoe–leather journalism, the hallmark of the early investigation.

Most of the folks in the media of 1972 did not care for Nixon — although most of their employers either endorsed him or took a pass — but they tended not to make their feelings known, and many columnists did not challenge the president.

Perhaps they were intimidated by his big (and consistent) leads in the polls — and the knowledge that he was virtually certain to win a second term.

But the truth was that Watergate really didn't receive the kind of attention in 1972 that it did the following year. If it had, it might have been dismissed as politically motivated — and might not have gained traction until 1973, anyway.

(I don't really think it would have made much difference. The "dirty tricks" of the Nixon operatives had succeeded in sabotaging the candidacies of most of the Democrats, and George McGovern was well on his way to the Democratic nomination by the time of the Watergate break–in.

(Replacing McGovern as the nominee would have been a major headache that dwarfed the logistical nightmare created by the scandal that necessitated dropping McGovern's running mate, Tom Eagleton.)

Nevertheless, Nixon and Dean were aware of negative reporting from some journalists. In his testimony to the Senate committee in 1973, Dean seemed to be blaming Nixon for the toxic atmosphere in the White House.

With the benefit of hindsight and the knowledge that almost nothing was done in the Nixon White House without the president's knowledge, that is a proposition that is easy to accept.

Their conversation, Dean said, "turned to the press coverage of the Watergate incident and how the press was really trying to make this into a major campaign issue. At one point ... I recall the president telling me to keep a good list of the press people giving us trouble."

Meanwhile, the wheels of justice were turning that summer — often silently, often slowly, but they were turning — and it was 40 years ago today that E. Howard Hunt, G. Gordon Liddy and the five Watergate burglars were indicted by a federal grand jury.

In hindsight, that was an important turning point in the Watergate investigation. If there had been no initial indictments, the legal basis for continuing with the investigation would have been completely undermined.

And the hope at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue was that the matter would stop there. History, of course, tells us it did not.

At the end of that Friday, White House counsel John Dean participated in a White House meeting dedicated to strategy on Watergate–related investigations. It was, Dean would later tell the Senate select committee chaired by Sen. Sam Ervin, the first time he spoke to Nixon about Watergate.

Indeed, Dean claimed, it was the first meeting he had with Nixon.

It's still unclear to me, after all these years, whether Nixon and Dean discussed the matter before Sept. 15, 1972, but the evidence is clear — via the president's own recordings — that they had access to the same sources for information.

At the time, the existence of the voice–activated recording system was known only to a select group — those who needed to know — and, in 1972, Dean was not among them.

Consequently, it was ironic when, the following year, Dean memorably told Republican Sen. Ed Gurney, a member of the so–called "Watergate committee," that "my mind is not a tape recorder."

Dean did not know until after his own testimony, when Alexander Butterfield revealed it under direct questioning, that a system for recording Oval Office conversations had been installed in 1971 — and it ultimately would confirm the credibility of his memory.

The recordings also proved Dean's memory was not flawless. But it was good enough that it earned the respect of investigators, even those whose loyalties were to the Nixon White House.

Dean said it was the very fact that he had been asked in to talk with Nixon that made the conversation so vivid in his memory. Even though he worked in the White House counsel's office, it was hardly routine for him to be invited to the Oval Office.

It's almost spooky now to read the transcript of the Sept. 15 conversation — as submitted by the White House in the spring of 1974 in a futile attempt to satisfy the subpoenas from congressional Democrats — knowing that the recording system was silently preserving everything.

As I re–read the transcript recently, I was struck, as always, by the casual way — visible even in the clearly doctored version — Nixon treated decisions that were intended to keep a lid on things. And by the anger — the raw sense of entitlement — that often flared when he believed others had not responded appropriately.

"You had quite a day today, didn't you?" Nixon said to Dean. "You really got Watergate on the way, didn't you?"

"We tried," Dean replied.

When Dean said that "some apologies may be due" — implying that further action could be avoided if such apologies were offered — chief of staff Bob Haldeman snorted, "Fat chance," and Nixon snarled, "Get the damn," the rest of which was labeled inaudible, although it doesn't take much imagination to complete the thought.

"We can't do that," Haldeman admonished the president.

But the rest of the 50–minute conversation focused on what they could do.

One such strategy revolved around the possibility of providing proof that a bugging device that had been found in a telephone in the DNC office had been "planted" by the DNC.

If such evidence could be found, Dean speculated, it could "reverse" the Watergate story.

When Dean testified before the Senate Watergate Committee the following year, he remembered that Nixon's primary concern was whether the trials would begin before the upcoming election.

Nixon also instructed him, Dean told the senators in June 1973, to "keep track" of those who tried to make Watergate a campaign issue "because we will make life difficult for them after the election."

According to the transcript of the conversation, which was released by the White House in April 1974, Dean was the one who first mentioned keeping a list of the president's critics in the press.

"[O]ne of the things I've tried to do," Dean was quoted as saying, "I have begun to keep notes on a lot of people who are emerging as less than our friends because this will be over someday, and we shouldn't forget the way some of them have treated us."

Knowing the lengths to which Nixon went to cover up his complicity in Watergate, it's certainly possible that the White House manipulated the transcript to make Nixon appear innocent — the transcripts were famously edited to delete the presumably off–color adjectives Nixon and his associates used in their conversations, and it was revealed after Nixon resigned two years later that roughly 17 minutes of the Sept. 15 conversation (during which Nixon was said to have threatened to fire Treasury Secretary George Shultz if he attempted to prevent the White House from using the IRS for political purposes) were missing from the White House transcripts.

(In the transcript, the absence of the remainder of the conversation was dismissed as being "unrelated to Watergate.")

But Nixon's dark side came through, in spite of any whitewash efforts that may have been made.

In the transcript, Nixon responded that "I want the most comprehensive notes on all those who tried to do us in. ... [T]hey were doing this quite deliberately, and they are asking for it, and they are going to get it. We have not used the power in this first four years ... but things are going to change now."

That strikes me as being pretty dark as it is. But what if that portion of the dialogue actually occurred before Dean spoke about keeping notes?

Wouldn't that suggest that Nixon gave Dean an assignment and Dean, in an attempt to butter up the boss in their first meeting, responded with, essentially, "Oh, yes, I'm ahead of you on that."

In the transcript, Dean certainly seems eager to occupy a spot on the president's good side. After Nixon spoke about using "the power" in his second term, Dean responded, "What an exciting prospect."

One can only imagine what might have been.

Thursday, August 23, 2012

Nixon's Convention

"It was neither to the audience of the faithful delegates at the convention, nor to the press, that Richard Nixon was talking. He was talking, as he had for months, and as he had designed his convention, to the people Out There."

Theodore H. White
"The Making of the President 1972"

In modern times, with political conventions as meticulously scripted as they are, the proceedings are wrapped up in four days. Just like clockwork.

Before television began to dictate things, it often took delegates several ballots to agree on a nominee. Under such circumstances, a convention could go on indefinitely.

But, in 1972, the Republicans actually completed their convention business in three days. Of course, there wasn't much to do. The platform was decided in meetings that were conducted well before the convention began. President Richard Nixon and his vice president, Spiro Agnew, faced no obstacles to renomination.

There was no suspense of any kind.

Mostly, the convention was little more than a series of speeches. In fact, it was at the 1972 GOP convention that the tradition of the first lady addressing the gathering began.

Pat Nixon wasn't the first first lady to address a convention, but she was the first Republican first lady to do so, and her speech in 1972 established what is now a commonplace practice in American politics.

The 1972 GOP convention was also the first major party national convention to have its keynote address delivered by a woman. Others followed, but Anne Armstrong of Texas was the first.

The reason for the abbreviated gathering was simple, really. The convention originally had been planned for San Diego, but the location was changed at virtually the last minute.

The city had already been experiencing a number of problems, but then columnist Jack Anderson revealed that a memo written by a lobbyist for International Telephone and Telegraph (ITT) recommended that the company make a substantial financial pledge to San Diego's bid in return for a settlement of the Department of Justice's antitrust case against ITT.

Because they were concerned about a scandal, Republicans decided three months before the convention to move everything to Miami instead. Ironically, around the time that the convention decision was being made, the seeds for a real scandal were being planted at the Watergate Hotel in Washington.

On Aug. 23, 1972, when Nixon delivered his acceptance speech, the Watergate break–in was barely two months old.

Less than a month later, the seven men who were arrested at the Democratic National Headquarters were indicted, prompting an Oval Office meeting in which White House counsel John Dean later claimed he first discussed Watergate with Richard Nixon.

There really were no indications on this night 40 years ago that Watergate was on Nixon's mind.

He was in Miami, where he was about to deliver his fifth acceptance speech to a Republican convention.

What I remember about that night is that my parents, my brother and I were in Washington, D.C., watching the convention on the TV in our motel room.

We were driving home to Arkansas after spending some time in Vermont visiting with some of my parents' friends. I suppose my brother and I were scheduled to start school the following week, and my best guess is that we probably spent the next two or three days on the road in order to get back on time.

We had spent a little time seeing the sights of Washington, but we were back in the motel room by the time Nixon spoke.

On this night, my recollection is of the four of us in those two beds, the sound of the air conditioning competing with the sound from the TV, a mixture of Nixon's voice and the roar of approval from the delegates.

Every once in awhile, my father would utter what the Nixon White House would later famously label expletives in transcripts of recordings of White House conversations. Dad despised Nixon so much that, when Oliver Stone released his biopic about Nixon in the 1990s, he refused to see it "even though they trash him in it."

Of course, Dad wasn't alone on that. Even many of Nixon's supporters despised him. There were many, many times in that 1972 presidential campaign when I heard Nixon described as "the lesser of two evils."

I frequently hear electoral choices described that way, but Nixon must have set some sort of record for it in 1972. I'm not exaggerating. No one seemed to like him.

Well, the Republican delegates seemed to like him well enough when he stood before them to give his final acceptance speech 40 years ago tonight.

"He had been around this track often enough to know the pace," wrote historian Theodore H. White, "and was hitting his adversary first with humor, then with scorn, before delivering the message."

Within two years, though, Nixon would return to California, a disgraced former president

Tuesday, July 31, 2012

The Short, Unhappy Candidacy of Tom Eagleton

We've reached the point in the presidential campaign when challengers select their running mates and incumbents (presumably) decide whether to keep theirs.

As I have said before, I don't expect Barack Obama to drop Joe Biden from his ticket — even though, as always, there are those in the president's party who advocate that — so there is probably little for Democrats to gain from this.

But Mitt Romney would be well advised to pay attention.

Forty years ago, only two weeks had passed since the McGovern–Eagleton ticket had been nominated by the Democrats to challenge the Nixon–Agnew ticket in the fall.

Things had gotten a little out of hand at the convention, and the presidential nominee wasn't able to give his acceptance speech until well after most people on the American mainland had gone to bed.

Most people, even the most optimistic of the Democrats, probably did not think that McGovern had much of a chance of defeating Richard Nixon. Nixon's approval ratings that summer ranged from the upper 50s to the low 60s.

When a president enjoys that kind of popularity about four months before the election, it usually suggests that a landslide is on the horizon — and Nixon's approval numbers in the summer of 1972 exceeded Reagan's in the summer of 1984 and were roughly the same as Clinton's in 1996.

(Both Reagan and Clinton were re–elected.)

Nevertheless, while Democrats might have been resigned to the idea that they were going to lose, they had reason to believe, as they left their convention in Miami, that they could win eight or 10 states — not just the state of Massachusetts and the District of Columbia, which is all the Democrats won that fall.

There was reason, in other words, for Democrats to believe that the nation would not tune them out before Labor Day, that their presidential ticket could at least keep up the pretense of being competitive long enough for their congressional candidates to get a foothold.

But that was before the train wreck of the Eagleton candidacy.

I guess the potential for the train wreck was there all along. The day after he clinched the presidential nomination, McGovern approached just about every big–name Democrat about the second spot on his ticket, and all turned him down. Time was running short so McGovern took the advice of Sen. Gaylord Nelson and offered it to Missouri Sen. Tom Eagleton.

Nelson wasn't the first to suggest Eagleton, only the latest. As McGovern observed in an op–ed piece he wrote for the New York Times four years ago, Eagleton clearly wanted the spot. He had been lobbying for it, but McGovern was hesitant to offer it because "I didn't know Eagleton very well."

His first choice had been Sen. Edward Kennedy, but Kennedy turned him down and recommended Eagleton. McGovern's next choice was Sargent Shriver, who also turned him down and also recommended Eagleton. Similar stories unfolded with almost every person who was offered the spot on the ticket.

For awhile, the possibility of offering the spot to TV news anchor Walter Cronkite was discussed. Cronkite, as McGovern observed, had been named the most admired man in America, and the idea of having him on the ticket was "intriguing."

Eventually, McGovern and his staff dismissed the idea as "too unrealistic."

"I later learned from Walter that he would have accepted," McGovern wrote. "I wish we had chosen him."

Of that, there can be no doubt.

Despite whatever misgivings he may have had, McGovern offered the spot to Eagleton, who had assured the nominee's political director that "there was nothing in [Eagleton's] background that would be considered troublesome." He offered the spot to Eagleton 15 minutes before his deadline for announcing his choice.

But haste makes waste, the old saying says, and Eagleton had concealed a few things.

It turned out that Eagleton had been treated for exhaustion and depression — including electroshock therapy.
He had been taking strong anti–psychotic drugs.
When McGovern saw a copy of Eagleton's medical records, he noted words like depression and suicidal tendencies.

Times have changed. In 2012, Americans are more tolerant of many things than they were in 1972.

And the revelation of a history of depression might not carry the same stigma today that it did then.

But the reaction that Eagleton encountered was hostile, fearful. In hindsight, it was inevitable that McGovern would have to drop his running mate.

But it wasn't that simple. There were complications.

He was hesitant, McGovern said later, to remove Eagleton from the ticket immediately because his daughter had suffered from depression, and he was concerned about how she would react.

That has a noble sound to it, but it was hard to reconcile with public actions — not unlike when Nixon's former attorney general and Watergate co–conspirator, John Mitchell, announced he was stepping down as director of Nixon's re–election campaign to spend more time with his wife.

[Bob] Woodward asked several members of the [Washington] Post's staff ... if they believed the resignation was unconnected to Watergate. They did.
The next day, metropolitan editor Harry Rosenfeld frowned and told Woodward, "A man like John Mitchell doesn't give up all that power for his wife."
Bob Woodard and Carl Bernstein
All the President's Men (1974)

Similarly, I suppose, a man doesn't give up a major party's vice presidential nomination unless the rattling from the skeletons in his closet becomes too noisy.

In late July 1972, McGovern infamously announced that he was supporting his running mate "1000 percent," but, by the end of the month, Eagleton was off the ticket, and Shriver agreed to replace him.

In military parlance, McGovern had surrendered the high ground to Nixon — and virtually without a fight.

Saturday, July 14, 2012

A Voice in the Wilderness

"... George McGovern was about to have his moment. The moment was 2:48 in the morning. ... [T]he audience for his speech had dropped from 17,400,000 to 3,600,000. Yet he was speaking beautifully. He had sucked up from his experience in one of the longest campaigns in American history a knowledge of precisely those keys of emotion he himself could touch best, and the organ keys he played now were poetic and evangelical."

Theodore H. White
"The Making of the President 1972"

From the rear–view mirror perspective of American history, George McGovern was the Democrats' version of Barry Goldwater.

He went down to defeat in a landslide of historic proportions, as Goldwater did, but he was a glimpse into the party's future.

Just as the 1964 ascendance of Goldwater, with his right–wing rhetoric, foretold a time when the moderates would be overthrown within the GOP and the conservatives would rule, McGovern's nomination in 1972 hinted at the day when nominating liberals would be commonplace in the Democratic Party.

Likewise, in ways that I didn't comprehend until many years later, 1972 had a huge influence on me. My mother played a big part in that.

Regular readers of this blog know how I feel about my mother so I won't go into detail on that. Neither should it be necessary to remind my readers that I was raised a Democrat and voted for Democrats for many years — but I now consider myself an independent.

The designation Democrat wasn't quite as restrictive when I was a child as it is today. In 2012, if one self–identifies as a Democrat, one is essentially embracing a left–leaning agenda, but 40 years ago, there were still quite a few conservative Democrats — and quite a few middle–of–the–road ones, too.

In those days, the Democrats' tent was big enough to accommodate them all — but not necessarily comfortably. It made for some pretty spirited debates — and, sometimes, some unpredictable outcomes.

Now, as I say, Mom was a Democrat. She was unapologetically a liberal Democrat, and I have no doubt she would feel quite at home in today's Democrat Party. But, while I'm sure Mom would be pleased that the party has moved more in her philosophical direction, she might miss the give and take of the Democratic scraps of her day.

See, in 1972, Mom was part of the liberal wing of the party. In large part because of its anger and frustration over the Vietnam War, that wing had been gradually seizing power within the party ever since Lyndon Johnson was elected in a landslide in 1964 and proceeded to escalate the bloodshed in southeast Asia.

And the liberals had come to realize, after settling for LBJ's vice president in 1968 when the Gene McCarthy candidacy fell short, that winning the presidential nomination was the gateway to public acceptance.

George McGovern's nomination for the presidency in 1972 was, in many ways, the fruition of the liberal wing's struggle for the heart and soul of the party.

In hindsight, that nomination probably wouldn't have been possible if it hadn't been for interference from President Nixon's campaign operatives, but, at the time, it was seen as confirmation of the party's permanent shift to the left.

And, whether intended or not, that has been the outcome. The party did seem to be moving back to the center with the election of Jimmy Carter four years later, but since Carter's time, Democratic nominees have tended to be — pardon the pun — progressively liberal.

I was a child in 1972, but I was an enthusiastic McGovern supporter. It wasn't so much because I understood many of the things of which he spoke but because Mom could always explain things to me in ways I could understand. And Mom was a McGovern supporter — so I was a McGovern supporter. Such was my logic in 1972.

The race for the 1972 nomination was extremely contentious. The party's more centrist establishment tended to favor the guys who had been on the '68 ticket, Hubert Humphrey and Ed Muskie, and the conservative wing liked George Wallace and Henry Jackson.

The emergence of an insurgent from the left drew a united effort to deprive McGovern of the nomination. It failed, but it made things quite interesting — especially after an attempt to assassinate Wallace inflated his vote totals in some late primaries.

Things didn't necessarily go smoothly when the Democrats held their convention in July 1972, but, to be sure, it was a lot smoother than it had been four years earlier, when antiwar protests turned into clashes with police in the streets of Chicago, but it was far from incident–free. In 1972, though, the Democrats kept their battles inside the convention hall.

In the buildup to the Democrats' 1972 challenge to Richard Nixon, they had relaxed their rules, allowing many groups that had not been adequately represented in the past to have an enhanced presence (and, consequently, enhanced power) at the convention.

That was a double–edged sword. Sometimes those battles had great substantive significance — debates over some platform planks went on all night — and sometimes they were frivolous.

Take for example the ridiculous fight over the vice presidential nominee.

For anyone who listened to the roll call of the states and heard some of the names of those who received a vote or two (actual people, such as McGovern's wife, Chinese leader Mao Zedong and TV journalist Roger Mudd and fictional TV character Archie Bunker), it was hard not to reach the conclusion that the groups who had been ignored in the past were flexing their newfound political muscles a bit — and they were doing so at their own nominee's expense.

Modern political conventions are so tightly managed that the nominee's acceptance speech is always delivered at a time that ensures maximum exposure in all 50 states. (This year, in fact, the Democrats forced the NFL to move its traditional season kickoff from Thursday night to Wednesday night so as not to conflict with Barack Obama's acceptance speech.)

But instead of giving his speech to a primetime audience on Thursday night, McGovern wound up speaking to a TV audience of mostly insomniacs. It was past midnight in most U.S. time zones when he started to speak.

McGovern tried to make light of the fact that his choice for running mate, Missouri Sen. Tom Eagleton, was challenged by "only 39 other nominees." He also poked fun at Nixon's selection of Spiro Agnew as his running mate four years earlier in a process that had been criticized as too rushed. As a result, he said, Democrats had learned "that it pays to take a little more time."

McGovern would soon regret those words.

Nevertheless, as White observed, he gave a great speech. But hardly anyone saw it.

I did.

It was summer, after all, and I was a kid. Staying up late was nothing special for me, and I remember sitting alone in the wee hours of the morning in my family's living room with my cassette tape recorder, dutifully recording the speech for Mom to hear the next day.

Like most folks, she had gone to bed long before the speech was given. I remember the house was mostly dark and mostly quiet — and I remember that I tried to keep the volume on the TV down so as not to disturb my parents or my brother.

I remember playing the tape for Mom the next day. She seemed to agree with most of it, nodded her head sometimes, broke into smiles at points, but she didn't seem as enthusiastic as I expected her to be.

Maybe she knew, somehow, what was to come. I was too young to realize it, of course, but I'm sure Mom was aware of the long odds McGovern faced.

"That was a good speech" was all she said after listening to my tape of the speech.

I was always sorry that she never got to see it.

Because, when you look at the 1972 campaign in that rear–view mirror of history, it is all too clear that George McGovern did not have many good days.

But this day 40 years ago was one of them — even though McGovern wound up delivering his acceptance speech to an audience made up mostly of children of the night.

Eagleton's withdrawal in a couple of weeks would not be a good day for McGovern, nor would the repeated spectacle of McGovern practically begging every prominent Democrat to be on his ticket — and being turned down by everyone until he came to Sargent Shriver.

There were no presidential debates in 1972. In fact, it was the last presidential election that did not feature at least one debate. It will always be anyone's guess whether a debate would have been a high point — or another low point — for the McGovern campaign.

And, on this night in 1972, what could safely be said to be McGovern's worst night of the campaign, his 49–state landslide loss to Richard Nixon, was nearly four months away.

Democrats in 2012 may feel they have been unfairly criticized at times, but their trials and tribulations have been laughable compared to what McGovern endured.

You could probably count the number of good days he had on a single hand — maybe two.

When he did have a good one, it had to be savored.

Saturday, June 23, 2012

The Smoking Gun

In an historical context, it's ironic that Barack Obama should claim executive privilege this week.

For two years, Richard Nixon got away with telling the American people that he was not involved in the Watergate coverup.

As time passed, fewer and fewer Americans believed what Nixon said, but his story (until he was forced to acknowledge otherwise) was that he hadn't known of the involvement of high–ranking White House officials until long after the break–in — and he stuck by that story.

Until the summer of 1973, when the existence of Nixon's White House recording system was revealed, it was Nixon's word against former White House counsel John Dean's. The knowledge that there were tapes of Oval Office conversations meant there was evidence that could prove which one was telling the truth.

Nixon resisted all attempts to force him to relinquish the tapes; he insisted they were protected by the principle known as executive privilege. But, in August 1974, the matter was before the Supreme Court, which ruled that Nixon had to turn over recordings of Oval Office conversations that Congress had been demanding and that Nixon had been trying to keep confidential.

The tapes included a conversation Nixon had with his chief of staff, Bob Haldeman, 40 years ago today — less than a week after the break–in — that clearly showed Nixon's complicity.

Earlier in 1974, Nixon agreed to release edited transcripts of certain conversations that had been subpoenaed — and those transcripts included conversations that occurred long before the one in which Nixon claimed to learn of the involvement of the higher–ups, but the earliest conversation in those transcripts had taken place in September 1972.

But as I wrote a few days ago, taped evidence of the first known conversation about Watergate in which Nixon participated was tampered with. No one will ever know what was really said on that occasion.

The tape of the June 23, 1972, conversation came to be known as "the smoking gun" because it proved that Nixon was an active participant in the coverup long before he acknowledged learning the details.

But it revealed more than that. It exposed aspects of Nixon's personality that had been hidden from public view.

In fact, the real smoking gun may have been destroyed in the mysterious "18½–minute gap" in a tape of a conversation between Nixon, Haldeman and John Ehrlichman three days earlier. Nixon's secretary, Rose Mary Woods, took the fall for that one, claiming to have erased it by mistake while working on the transcription, but it remains suspicious.

The meticulous notes that Haldeman always took at such meetings suggested that the conversation dealt primarily with Watergate, and electronics experts concluded that the gap was the result of at least four separate erasures — not one long one.

Consequently, the conversation that took place 40 years ago today may not have been the first time that Nixon and Haldeman spoke about the matter. But it's the first one of which evidence is known to exist.

Nixon's "initiating personal crime" came about "casually," wrote Theodore H. White in "Breach of Faith," when Nixon blithely "authorized use of the CIA to halt the FBI in its investigation of the Watergate break–in."

That was what always struck me as ironic about the Watergate scandal — a decision that had such profound repercussions on people's lives and careers, not to mention a nation's relationships with its leaders, was made in such an offhand fashion.

It's hard to tell just from the transcript of the conversation, but my best guess is that the Watergate–related exchange couldn't have taken more than five or 10 minutes, then it was on to something else.

Discussing what he called the "Democratic break–in thing," Haldeman told Nixon that "we're back in the problem area because the FBI is not under control, because [FBI director] Gray doesn't exactly know how to control it ... and their investigation is leading into some productive areas — because they've been able to trace the money ... through the bank source."

That was certainly a telling comment.

As anyone who ever read Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein's account of the Watergate investigation knew, the money was what their source, known as Deep Throat, advised them to follow. The money would lead them to the heart of the conspiracy, he said, and it did.

Nixon and Haldeman conversed for an hour and half that day. They had been away from Washington at the time of the break–in and in the days immediately following, when the president's lieutenants tried to control something that was already beyond their control.

Yet the transcript of their June 23 conversation suggests, as I say, that they spent little time on Watergate. Nixon instructed Haldeman to "Play it tough. That's the way they play it, and that's the way we're going to play it."

And it was on to other business. When I read the transcript of that conversation, I could imagine them speaking as casually as they would have if they were talking about sports.

In retrospect, maybe it was treated more as one item on the agenda for a single day — of no more significance and no more memorable than selecting the menu for a state dinner.

"Therefore," wrote White, "the matter had become an administrative matter for the underground, which successfully contained the scandal until after the election."

That was, after all, the supreme objective — the re–election of the president. No real thought ever seemed to be given by the conspirators to what they would do after they won the election and Nixon was inaugurated for a second time.

Those involved seemed to believe — at least, at this point — that Watergate would go away and cause no more trouble for them.

And, for awhile, it didn't seem they needed to worry about it. When the nation prepared to go to the polls in 1972, surveys indicated that a majority of Americans knew little or nothing about Watergate. To anyone who was paying attention, it seemed that Nixon and his co–conspirators would get away with it.

But that would change.

Wednesday, June 20, 2012

Rose Mary's Boo-Boo

Rose Mary Woods re–enacts the "Rose Mary Stretch" for photographers.

The official accounts of the Watergate break–in and its subsequent coverup all say that the Oval Office conversation in which the so–called "smoking gun" was found to be in Richard Nixon's hand occurred 40 years ago Saturday.

But it's possible — if not probable — that the gun had been smoldering for a few days.

Actually, all the evidence and testimony suggest that the Nixon White House's damage control machine was humming the day of the break–in, but Nixon and his chief of staff, H.R. Haldeman, were in Florida. There were things that could not be done until they returned.

On this day 40 years ago, the men who were ultimately held accountable for the coverup conspiracy held a series of meetings that were dedicated to damage control. The first newspaper story that linked White House operative Howard Hunt to the Watergate burglars had been published that day, and the president's men were determined that culpability for the break–in would stop with Hunt.

In mid–morning that day, Nixon had a phone conversation with his campaign director and former attorney general, John Mitchell, then he met for an hour with Haldeman and John Ehrlichman, a top adviser. The burglary was only three days old at that time, but Ehrlichman already had met with just about all of the principals by that time.

Nixon and Haldeman, as I say, had been out of Washington at the time of the break–in. On Tuesday, June 20, 1972, they were back in the White House and allegedly being brought up to speed on what had happened in their absence — and there may have been no one else who knew as much about Watergate at that point as Ehrlichman did.

Consequently, it made sense to many observers that Nixon learned many of the details of the break–in from Ehrlichman on that occasion, but the evidence that might support that theory was incomplete.

There was a recording of that conversation, and investigators subpoenaed the tape when the existence of the White House taping system was revealed in the summer of 1973, but, in November, it was learned that a portion of the tape had been mysteriously erased before Nixon's lawyers first listened to it.

The White House's position was that Nixon's secretary, Rose Mary Woods, who had been with Nixon for more than two decades and was decidedly loyal to her boss, had accidentally erased about five minutes of the tape.

According to her account, Woods had been transcribing the tape when the phone rang and she reached to answer it. Her feet controlled basic functions like stop, play and record with pedals that left her hands free for typing; she insisted that, somehow, while she was answering the phone and then carrying on a five–minute conversation, she stepped on the record pedal, erasing that section.

Her side of the story was met with quite a bit of skepticism. A rather short woman, there was no conceivable way that Woods could comfortably pull off the maneuver that she described (dubbed the "Rose Mary Stretch") — even if she was a contortionist.

But things were considerably worse than that.

The actual gap turned out to be more than three times as long as the one for which Woods claimed responsibility, and she denied that her erasure was anything like the 18½ minutes it turned out to be.

Because the pitch of the buzzing noise that was made by the erasure changed several times, the unavoidable conclusion was that several separate erasures had been attempted.

Privately (and, in some cases, not so privately), it was suggested that the tape had been deliberately erased. Alexander Haig, Nixon's chief of staff at the end of his presidency, openly suggested Nixon may have erased it himself, either accidentally or intentionally.

Nixon, he said, was never comfortable with mechanical devices, and he might well have erased a portion of the tape when he was trying to listen to it.

That provided a possible, unintentional explanation, but unless that can be proven, the alternate possibility — that someone, possibly Nixon himself, deliberately destroyed evidence — cannot be dismissed.

The tape of the June 20 conversation has always intrigued me. Of all the tapes of White House conversations, it is the only one that was destroyed — at least in part.

Ultimately, it was a tape of a conversation between Nixon and Haldeman on June 23, 1972, that came to be known as the "smoking gun." That was the tape that caused Nixon's base in Congress to crumble — and led him to conclude that resignation was his only option.

What must Nixon and Haldeman and Ehrlichman have said to each other 40 years ago that prompted whoever it was to repeatedly record over the tape until that portion of the conversation was entirely erased rather than risk having it revealed to the public?

Was it worse than anything else that was revealed in those tapes?

Could it have done any more damage to the relationship between the American people and their government?

Twenty years ago, in a TV program that commemorated the 20th anniversary of the Watergate break–in, I heard Woodward talking about the 18½–minute gap.

With all the evidence of a huge criminal conspiracy that went deep into the White House, Woodward said, Nixon would have needed something like an 18,500–minute gap to successfully conceal his involvement.

I believed that when I heard it. Twenty years later, I am even more convinced that is true.

Sunday, June 17, 2012

Forty Years Since the Watergate Break-in

"The absurdity of the idea still appalls in retrospect — the idea that there were secrets of value to anyone in the brawling, boisterous, open Democratic Party, whose appeal to the American people for so many generations had come from its air of humanity, its common vulgarity. The national Democratic Party is not a conspiracy; it is a continuing commotion, baffling to all logical, managerial–minded men. But the buggers and their superiors were insisting on penetrating what they thought must be a conspiracy. ... The conspiratorial theory of history was about to destroy its true believers."

Theodore H. White
"The Making of the President 1972"

Even after 40 years, the burglary of the Democratic headquarters at the Watergate Hotel in Washington defies logic and understanding, just as it did at the time.

No one really knew what to make of it in 1972. By Election Day, not quite five months after the break–in, much of the country had never heard of the word Watergate. My sense is that relatively few Americans have much better understanding of it today.

And, to be fair, it was — and remains — a far–reaching, complex scandal. Some people have been studying it for 40 years, and there are still things about it that they are learning. There are still layers to be peeled away.

Of course, at the time, no one realized that the burglary was merely scratching the tip of the iceberg. The coverup had little to do with the break–in, as Robert Redford summarized in his portrayal of Bob Woodward in the Hollywood version of "All the President's Men". It was intended to keep all the other illegal activities of the president's men secret.

The coverup, which is probably seen by most as Richard Nixon's most grievous offense, had little to do with the actual break–in that occurred 40 years ago today. It was mostly about continuing to conceal all the other, more serious things that had been going on in the Nixon White House.

And, as most such conspiracies do, that one failed to meet its objective.

But, on this day in 1972, no one knew where the road would lead when Woodward, a young reporter for the Washington Post, took the first tentative steps that eventually led America to its first presidential resignation.

Initially, the break–in wasn't considered a priority for the political writers, all of whom were busy on election–related stories. The assignment fell to Woodward and Carl Bernstein.

Woodstein, as the pair became known, built the story into the most compelling domestic political story of my life. When they had done that, other newspapers began picking up their articles from the news wire, and the investigation began to gain momentum. But, in the early days, few newspapers were printing them.

The story was just too preposterous. All of Nixon's potential rivals were imploding, and it was coming down to the weakest candidate in the field, George McGovern, to carry the banner for the Democrats in the fall.

There was no obvious reason for Nixon and the Republicans to sabotage the Democrats. The Democrats appeared to be doing a dandy job of sabotaging themselves.

(To put it in proper perspective, imagine if Barack Obama's Republican opponent this year had turned out to be someone with extremely limited national appeal, even among his/her fellow Republicans — a Newt Gingrich, perhaps, or a Pat Buchanan. Even if the White House had done nothing to engineer such a nomination, it would probably seem to most observers that the president had the election locked up.)

But, as more became known about the break–in and the reasons for it, the national perception changed dramatically.

Today, Woodward and Bernstein have concluded that, contrary to the conventional wisdom that emerged in the last four decades, the coverup was not worse than the original crime.

The Nixon White House, Bernstein said, "became, to a remarkable extent, a criminal enterprise." The coverup was business as usual.

Woodward concurred. For Nixon, he said, the presidency was about retribution, and he had launched five wars for that reason: "The first against the antiwar movement, the second against the press, the third against the Democrats who threatened to take over the White House from him and deny him a second term.

"And then the fourth when there was the Watergate burglary, the coverup, the obstruction of justice. And then interestingly enough, Nixon never stopped the fifth war, which is against history, to say 'Oh, no, it really is not what it shows on the tapes and all the testimony and evidence.' "

In a damning indictment of modern journalism students, Dan Zak wrote in the Washington Post in April that Woodward and Bernstein are skeptical that aspiring journalists could uncover something like Watergate today.

A big part of the problem is their misplaced faith in the internet, according to Woodward, who was asked to read papers by journalism students at Yale on investigating a Watergate in the digital age and then speak to the students via speakerphone.

Woodward said he "came as close as I ever have to having an aneurysm, because the students wrote that, 'Oh, you would just use the Internet and you'd go to 'Nixon's secret fund' and it would be there.' "

Woodward tried to explain to the students how naive that is.

But that is a long and, in many ways, separate discussion that would all but surely distract us from the subject at hand if we dwelt on it too long.

The Nixonian White House was adept at legal double talk, which prolonged the investigation in the 1970s. Just about everyone was educated in the law, political science or advertising.

If a Richard Nixon occupied the Oval Office in 2012 and was involved in similar activities, my guess is he still would surround himself with people with those backgrounds, but he also would include in his inner circle people with expertise in computers.

Nixon had a truly adversarial relationship with the press, and modern media goes well beyond the traditional print media. It includes things that were still evolving in Nixon's day (television) and things that were not yet conceived (the internet, which, by extension, includes things like blogs).

The actual Nixon was concerned almost exclusively with the print media. His hypothetical 21st century equivalent would have had far more to worry about.

Even Nixon's critics would have acknowledged, if asked, in 1972 that he was an intelligent man — his greatest flaw, most people have agreed, was his deep insecurity — and he would have been smart enough to surround himself with experts in the dominant news delivery system of the time.

My take on it is this: The Watergate scandal that began 40 years ago today was, ultimately, a triumph both for the fundamentals of good, solid journalism in its role as public watchdog and for the relatively smooth operation of the American system.

It all worked pretty much as the Founding Fathers intended.

Read the book Woodward and Bernstein wrote about their investigation — "All the President's Men." Or watch the movie that was based on it.

You won't read about or see journalists as rock stars. It could hardly have been less glamorous. Woodward and Bernstein embarked on a long, arduous road in which doors were slammed in their faces, and they must have often felt as if they were at the end of a long branch and their colleagues in journalism were furiously sawing away.

Their survival was remarkable, and their work deserves to be remembered on this day.

Personally, though, I will settle for a time when every scandal that comes along does not have the suffix "–gate" added to it.

That has led to some pretty clever — and awkward — phrasings over the years.

For example, when Ronald Reagan's policy of selling arms to Iran in exchange for the release of hostages and to raise funds to support the Nicaraguan Contras was publicly revealed, I saw/heard it referred to, alternately, as Irangate or Contragate.

And when Bill Clinton's relationship with a White House intern was revealed, it was referred to by some as Zippergate.

Watergate was an important event in this nation's history — it helped to establish limits on presidential power — but it was not this nation's first presidential scandal, nor was it the last.

Before Watergate, I was a young boy, but I have no memory of any public scandal being called whatever–dome, after the Teapot Dome scandal of the Harding years. Perhaps there were "–domes" in the half century between Teapot Dome and Watergate, but, if there were, they have all receded into the long shadows of ancient history.

Each scandal is different and deserves to be remembered (or forgotten) on its own merits.

When future scandals are no longer referred to as a gate, I suppose it will be a signal that our culture has grown and matured.

Tuesday, May 15, 2012

The Day George Wallace Was Shot

There were quite a few assassinations — and assassination attempts — when I was growing up.

But I believe the one that occurred 40 years ago today — in which Alabama Gov. George Wallace was shot while campaigning in Laurel, Md., for the Democratic presidential nomination — was the first to show both the assassin and his would–be victim together in the same photos and film sequences.

It was a Monday, and school was going to close for the summer in another week or so. Everyone was eager for summer vacation — the students, the teachers, everyone, I guess, except the mothers who would soon have their children under foot 24 hours a day.

Otherwise, it was just an ordinary Monday — and, sometime that afternoon, I learned that Wallace had been shot. I don't remember now if word spread while I was still in school that day or if I learned what had happened when I got home, but, when I did get home, it was all over the television stations, wiping out the cartoons I usually watched after school.

So I got on my bike and rode over to the home of two guys who were in my grade in school, Danny and David Johnson — and, as I often did in those days, I stayed for supper.

I've written here before about that occasion. Danny and David's father was a well–known Arkansas segregationist who managed Wallace's independent presidential campaign in Arkansas in 1968, and the attempt on Wallace's life earlier that day inspired political reporters in Little Rock to seek his reaction.

They got a quick response from him — he called it a "dastardly act" — and my memory of that day is that nothing else was said about the shooting around that table that night — other than Mr. Johnson's wry comment to his sons and me that his remark "sounded like a bad word."

He grinned his trademark grin when he said it, and, even though I was a small boy and didn't understand all the things that were happening in the world, I felt confident that Gov. Wallace would not be like the Kennedys and Martin Luther King, that he would survive the shooting.

Which he did. But he never walked again.

It was the end of an era, and, historian Theodore White asserted in "The Making of the President 1972," his book on the 1972 election, Richard Nixon's re–election was assured thanks to the Wallace shooting.

In his paranoid way, Nixon feared Wallace, who nearly succeeded in his quest to deny both Nixon and Democrat Hubert Humphrey a majority in the Electoral College in 1968. If Wallace won the 1972 Democratic nomination, Nixon reasoned, he might win outright.

"For two years, George Wallace had haunted the planning of the White House," White wrote. But, after Wallace was shot, "it was all over. Only the question of margin remained; whether the president could get that mandate for which his lonesome soul so longed, that landslide authority which might let him act with the largeness of the great presidents of the past."

Nixon did, indeed, win a landslide victory over George McGovern in 1972. A few years later, when White wrote his thoughtful examination of Nixon and the Watergate scandal, "Breach of Faith," he credited Wallace's influence for many of the decisions and actions of the Nixon White House.

"[T]o eliminate the threat of Wallace in the future," White wrote, "[Nixon] was to use, in 1970, trickeries against the Alabama governor only slightly less dirty than those he used against Democratic candidates in 1972."

And, as we all know, Nixon ultimately was forced to resign because of the dirty tricks his 1972 campaign used against the opposition.

But that was still in the future on this day in 1972. Forty years ago today, the shooting of George Wallace was a cause for somber reflection on both political extremes.

Although not as polarized then as they are today, the right and the left were forced by the shooting to examine their own philosophies and their attitudes about George Wallace and his role in the political debate.

For voters on the right, Wallace was the spokesman who articulated their hopes and dreams — and fears. For those on the left, he was symbolic of everything they believed was wrong with the nation.

He was both — at the same time — I suppose. And he was neither.

I'm inclined to think Wallace was a politician — and, like most successful politicians then and now, a panderer.

Early in his political career, when he was a circuit judge, Wallace had a reputation for being fair and impartial. Race did not matter in his courtroom. But then he lost a governor's race in which he had been endorsed by the NAACP and the winner had enjoyed the support of the Ku Klux Klan.

Wallace claimed he had been "outniggered" and that it wouldn't happen again. He kept his word. When he ran for governor four years later, he took a solidly segregationist stand and won by a landslide.

"I tried to talk about good roads and good schools and all these things that have been part of my career, and nobody listened," Wallace said. "And then I began talking about niggers, and they stomped the floor."

Perhaps the most troubling aspect of the Wallace shooting for many was the fact that, like the shooting of Gabrielle Giffords last year, the assailant had no real political motive.

Had there been one, it might have been easier to accept. But when the diary of Arthur Bremer, Wallace's would–be assassin, was published, it indicated that his only real objective was notoriety — not unlike the would–be assassin of Ronald Reagan, who wanted only to impress an actress.

There was nothing that could elevate the intended sacrifice, not even a biblical sense of justice.

Wednesday, March 14, 2012

The Politics of Rage

"Wallace was getting 50 percent in the first scattered returns; the lead shrank in the first half–hour to 47 percent, then to the low 40s, and then stabilized at 42 percent. But the 42 percent had a profile — it was not simply the north and the piney woods rednecks that were voting for George Wallace."

Theodore H. White
"The Making of the President 1972"

The history books tell us that George McGovern was nominated by the Democrats to run against Richard Nixon in 1972.

And, in fact, that is what happened.

Things tend to look a lot more cut and dried in history books than they did at the time, though. We have the advantage of hindsight. We know what the outcomes were — in the primaries that were held that spring, in the conventions that were held that summer and in the general election that November.

But 1972 was a funny kind of year. It was a year when a win wasn't really a win — and a loss wasn't really a loss.

Sometimes they were, though — and, in the traditional ways, a win was still a win and a loss was still a loss. But, in the Democrats' primaries (and there were far fewer of them in 1972 than there are in 2012), there didn't seem to be anything resembling momentum.

McGovern was, as I say, the eventual nominee, but he didn't win any of the first four caucus/primary contests. He performed better than expected in New Hampshire when front–runner Ed Muskie appeared to implode, but he hardly made a ripple in Florida a week later.

Nothing was clear as Florida prepared to hold its primary. People often forget that the charismatic George Wallace was a formidable foe in the primaries in the spring of 1972, and he looked quite imposing in Florida, receiving more than twice as many votes as anyone else.

I wasn't yet a teenager when Wallace sought the 1972 presidential nomination — but, while I suppose I was seen as a bit precocious at the time with my knowledge of history and the presidency, one thing about the Alabama governor was clear to me in spite of my youth.

In fact, I remember thinking that, if it was clear to me, it had to be obvious to everyone else — but I am far from certain that it was.

It probably goes without saying that Wallace had a reputation for being a racist and perhaps he was — but there is a difference of opinion as to whether he really was a racist or a racial opportunist (after all, Wallace apologized to the black citizens of Alabama in his later years and wouldn't have won his final term in office if it hadn't been for the support of black voters).

Not that there is — necessarily — much of a difference between the two. But Wallace's 1972 campaign showed that he was really more about the politics of rage than he was about the politics of race.

At times, yes, it was a racist rage. But most of the time it was a populist rage.

And that is the thing that was clear to me at the time. I think it must have played a significant role in the thought processes of those who worked for Richard Nixon.

The Nixon White House feared George Wallace. He had carried five Southern states as an independent in Nixon's narrow win in a three–way race four years earlier, and Republicans were concerned that he could do considerable damage to Nixon's campaign for re–election if he won the Democrats' nomination.

At the very least, they were worried about a possible rerun of 1968, with Wallace being the spoiler again. The last time, it had been to the benefit of the out–of–power Republicans.

But, in 1972, the Republicans had held the White House for four years. They had inherited Vietnam, but it had ceased to be Lyndon Johnson's war and was now Richard Nixon's war.

In the rear–view mirror of history, it's hard to imagine anyone defeating Nixon in 1972. His approval ratings were consistently in the 50s and were on an upward trajectory after his trip to China in February; in November, he received more than 60% of the popular vote and carried 49 states.

Just a year earlier, though, he had been struggling in the polls, and the possibility that he might be denied a second term seemed very real. A Harris Poll in August 1971 suggested that Muskie would beat Nixon if the election had been held at that time.

I remember that a political board game was developed in 1971 called "Who Can Beat Nixon?" It was designed much like "Monopoly," and several people could play — but no one could be Nixon.

It was mostly meant as a novelty, I think, but the parents of one of my friends had it, and I do remember my friend and I tried to play it a few times. My memory is that the cards were stacked heavily against Nixon — and it probably should have been called "Can Nixon Win?"

Anyway, that was the political atmosphere in 1971 and, to an extent, early 1972 when George Wallace was campaigning for president — and he found a receptive audience in Florida. His victory there didn't really surprise people, but the margin did.

And it scared some people, too. Wallace got 42% of the Florida vote, more than twice what the runnerup, Hubert Humphrey, received. Humphrey, it should be noted, specifically targeted the labor vote, the black vote and the Jewish vote. Wallace focused on the broader theme of alienation.

For some voters, that was expressed in anger over busing. That may well have been based in racism, but the arguments against it sounded reasonable. Many parents protested that they weren't against integration, but they were against busing their children long distances from their homes to achieve it.

Wallace told the voters that he was on the side of the little guy. It was the "feel your pain" message of its day, I suppose.

"The average man was being gutted by government. Taxes were important in George Wallace's message. ...

"But, above all, busing. Busing was what really got to the average man. ... This was 'social scheming' imposed by 'anthropologists, zoologists and sociologists' (Wallace loved to draw out the word 'sociologist') ...

"It was clear for the last three weeks before primary day that George Wallace would lead in the spread–eagle Florida primary. ... But it might be close."

Theodore H. White
"The Making of the President 1972"

In the end, though, it was far from close.

And, for awhile, there was some real anxiety in Democratic circles about the possibility that Wallace would develop some momentum that could carry him to the nomination.

But that didn't happen — at least, not outside the South.

Wallace chose not to compete against Muskie and Henry Jackson in the Illinois primary the following week, and he edged out Humphrey for second place against McGovern in Wisconsin three weeks after the Florida primary.

The air was escaping from the balloon he grabbed in Florida.

Wallace finished a distant fourth in Massachusetts in late April, and he ran second to Humphrey in Pennsylvania but still lost by a mile (if you consider 14 percentage points a mile in politics).

In the two–month interval between Wallace's victory in Florida and the attempt on his life, Wallace won only two primaries — Tennessee and North Carolina.

No one realized it in March 1972, but Wallace's apparent ascendance in national politics would end well before the convention.

Outwardly, it ended on that day in May when Arthur Bremer tried to kill Wallace in a shopping center parking lot in Maryland.

Realistically, it reached its peak 40 years ago today.

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