A Watergate Memento

A few weeks ago the progressive advocacy organization Common Cause held a meeting in Washington, DC to commemorate the 40^th anniversary of Watergate. Shortly thereafter I received this handsome certificate in the mail: 

Of course I was tickled to be so honored, though by the time I learned I was on the list, it almost seemed that there were more people on it than off it.

I had saved an old Washington Post article, dated December 21, 1973, that contained the list of 490 names of new Nixon enemies, on top of an earlier list of 216 names, and after rummaging through many old files, I found the clipping, yellowed and brittle, but still legible.

The headline caught my eye then, and still amazes me now. It declared, “Shultz, IRS Ignored Dean Bid for Audit of ‘Enemies’.” George P. Shultz, Richard Nixon’s Secretary of the Treasury, simply told White House Counsel John W. Dean and, in effect, President Nixon himself, to stuff it after Dean had presented the list to the IRS Director Walters in September, 1972.

By the time the story came out, both the IRS commissioner, Johnnie Walters, and John Dean had resigned. But what was interesting was that Shultz himself had ordered Walters to ignore Dean’s request for a special IRS audit of Nixon’s enemies. I don’t recall anyone saying at the time that  this was a act of courage, or at least of integrity, but it certainly was a reason to admire George Shultz, and to be grateful that the IRS wasn’t poring through my tax records.

Why was I on the list? In the 1960s and early 1970s I was the director of a small lobbying organization that played a role in the congressional effort to deny the Nixon Administration funds for a nationwide antiballistic missile system. We almost succeeded; the Senate vote was a 50-50 tie, which was not enough to win but sent a clear message that the program was in trouble.

Then, in 1972, I was on a defense advisory task force for Democratic Presidential candidate George McGovern.  One day a Washington Post photographer showed up at McGovern’s house to record a meeting of the task force – clearly a photo op designed to show he was educating himself on important national security matters. The photo that appeared next day in the paper was pretty clearly posed, and columnist Joseph Alsop, as I recall, ridiculed the whole affair as a farcical staged event.

 

When the second enemies’ list came out, almost everyone in the picture was in it, more or less in the order listed in the caption. That’s me, third from the right, listening to Sen. Frank Church. (If I’m not mistaken, everyone else in the photo has since died, though I haven’t kept in touch with McGovern’s secretary Pat Donovan – who was spared by the list makers).

As news continues to unfold about IRS workers examining the applications of right-wing organizations for non-profit status – seized upon by Republican critics as “auditing” them – it’s worth noting the distinctions between Nixon’s transgressions and Obama’s supposed involvement in the current brouhaha. There are plenty of them, not least that while Nixon not only knew of but ordered many of the Watergate abuses, President Obama was not aware of the possibly improper actions of a few misguided bureaucrats until he read about them in the papers, long after the mistaken actions had been found out and corrected. Were it not for the blood lust of the Obama-haters in Congress and the right-wing media, there would have been no reason for him to know that a few low-level bureaucrats had made a mistake.

Whether the so-called “Watergate Reforms” that followed the scandal have endured, and whether the political landscape has improved markedly in forty years is another question.  You could argue that the 2010 Citizens United Supreme Court decision, for instance, has done far more damage to the American political process than Nixon and Watergate ever did.