Amid the plethora of left-field cultural interventions that indicated some Americans were less than thrilled by the presidency of George W. Bush was a catchy song by Sonny Meadows titled “I Never Thought I’d Miss Richard Nixon.”
It wasn’t intended to vindicate the 37th president of the United States, who had been excoriated by public opinion as well as much of the political establishment in the run-up to his resignation in August 1974 — the first time an American chief executive had exercised that option.
Much of the US heaved a collective sigh of relief when a helicopter conveyed Nixon away from the White House on Aug. 9. His unelected successor, Gerald Ford, declared that the nightmare was over, and most Americans accepted the notion that the presidency, after having descended to its nadir, had been rescued by a broader system that worked.
The idea behind Meadows’ lyrics was to point out that there was, in many ways, worse to come.
Reflections on the 40th anniversary of Nixon’s dishonorable exit this past week have inevitably focused largely on the Watergate scandal that precipitated his downfall. This related to the break-in at the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee by “plumbers” tasked by the White House. The apparent burglary in the Washington DC building known as Watergate was thwarted — and a pair of young reporters at The Washington Post, intrigued by the fact that one of the culprits was directly associated with the Committee to Re-elect the President (whose acronym, CREEP, was unintentionally appropriate), decided to dig further.
Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward were astonished by what they began to discover — a chain of culpability that seemed to stretch all the way to the apex of the American political structure. In reporting their finds, the pair set a new standard in investigative journalism. Yet the first few months of their reportage barely seemed to register in electoral terms, given that Nixon was returned to the White House by an unprecedented landslide in November 1972.
By then the White House was in full cover-up mode, determined to obscure the truth as far as possible. But, notwithstanding his penchant for violating the constitution, Nixon had surreptitiously set up a system for recording all conversations in the Oval Office and its environs. Amazingly, the hidden microphones — of which at least some of his leading aides, including Henry Kissinger, were apparently unaware — remained in place even after the cat was out of the bag, so to speak.
On more than one occasion, Nixon ordered his chief of staff, Bob Haldeman, to destroy all the tapes. Even these conversations were recorded — and, for reasons that are not altogether clear, the order was never carried out. Once the existence of the tapes became public knowledge and some of them were legally subpoenaed, the option of destroying the evidence effectively disappeared. The president was hoist with his own petard. It is widely acknowledged that but for the incriminating tapes, Nixon would not have felt obliged to quit.
He resigned in the face of impeachment proceedings that cited not just the Watergate affair but the secret bombing of Cambodia as part of the Vietnam War effort. In fact, it was activists opposed to that war who first provoked Nixon to violate the law. This included instigating a theft at a psychiatrist’s premises in an effort to undermine Daniel Ellsberg, who had leaked the so-called Pentagon Papers, which confirmed that the political-military establishment was well aware it was embroiled in an unwinnable conflict in Indo-China.
Arguably one of the Nixon administration’s worst misdemeanors was to thwart a Vietnam peace initiative launched in the dying days of Lyndon Johnson’s presidency, by interceding with the puppet regime in Saigon. Nixon had promised “peace with honor” but pursued war with a vengeance, even contemplating the use of nuclear weapons.
In certain other respects, though, Nixon pursued a relatively enlightened foreign policy, which notably included the overdue establishment of ties with Mao Zedong’s China (with assistance from Yahya Khan’s military regime in Islamabad, which was rewarded with the infamous “tilt toward Pakistan” in 1971) as well as detente with the Soviet Union.
Even on the domestic front there were some progressive initiatives, such as the Environmental Protection Agency. The primary trend, however, was overwhelmingly reactionary, and included relentless pursuit of the “southern strategy” whereby the Republican Party became the natural home for Americans disenchanted by the Democrats’ adoption of the civil rights agenda.
The bitter and paranoid personality Nixon brought to the White House in 1969 was in some part a consequence of his conviction that the Kennedy family had stolen the 1960 presidential election, which he narrowly lost to JFK. He is subsequently likely to have rued the fact that his downfall was precipitated not by constitutional violations per se, but by the almost accidental discovery of his direct role in crimes and cover-ups. And the dogged pursuit of the truth not just by Woodward and Bernstein, but by the likes of district court judge John Sirica, Sen. Sam Ervin and special prosecutor Archibald Cox.
“Forty years later,” Bernstein told the BBC’s Owen Bennett-Jones last week, “what we see is that the truth was far worse than we thought at the time. That the criminality was far more extensive, pervasive and basic to what this president and his presidency was.”
Several of Nixon’s closest aides and advisers — including Bob Haldeman, John Ehrlichman, John Mitchell, Charles Colson (who can be heard saying, accurately as it turned out, on one of the tapes that the worst instances of criminality would never be discovered) and John Dean — served time in prison, but the ring leader got away thanks to a pre-emptive presidential pardon from his successor. Gerald Ford, who lost the next election to Jimmy Carter after narrowly beating Ronald Reagan in the Republican nomination contest, also notoriously elevated to prominence two eventual stalwarts of the depraved George W. Bush administration: Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld.
Back in the day, meanwhile, artists more prominent than Sonny Meadows were singing a different tune. In Bob Dylan’s comeback tour of 1973-74, the verse “But even the president of the United States/Must sometimes have to stand naked” rarely failed to attract a round of raucous applause. Arlo Guthrie’s “Presidential Rag” featured the lines “You’re the one we voted for, so you must take the blame/for handing out authority to men who were insane”. And Phil Ochs, well before Watergate, had rewritten one of his best-known songs to say: “Here’s to the land you’ve torn out the heart of/Richard Nixon find yourself another country to be part of.”
