Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974 (115 page)

On July 24 the Court decided unanimously that executive privilege did not apply in the Watergate case, a criminal matter, and ordered Nixon to surrender all the tapes to Sirica.
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After hesitating for a few hours, Nixon agreed to do so. It was too late, however, for the House Judiciary Committee was already concluding nationally televised discussions on articles of impeachment. Between July 27 and July 30 it voted to impeach the President for obstruction of justice concerning the Watergate investigation, for violation of constitutional rights concerning illegal wiretaps and misuse of the FBI, CIA, and IRS, and for violating the Constitution by resisting the committee's subpoenas. The votes, 27 to 11 and 28 to 10, revealed that seven or eight Republicans joined all twenty Democrats on the committee in the decisions to impeach.

While the committee was voting these articles of impeachment, the President's lawyers were listening to the tapes. What they heard staggered them, especially the tape of Nixon's order on June 23, 1972—six days after the break-in—in which he ordered the CIA to stop the FBI from investigating. This was the "smoking gun" that for many people cinched the case against the President. Republican leaders, sensing disaster, began calling upon Nixon to resign from office. These included Kissinger, General Alexander Haig, who had replaced Haldeman as Nixon's top adviser, Senator Barry Goldwater, and Republican national chairman George Bush. When the tapes were released to the public on August 5, confirming many of the worst suspicions about the President's behavior, pressure on Nixon to resign became overwhelming.

It was a mark of Nixon's tenacity—indeed his desperate passion for control—that he still tried to stay in office. But it was clear that he could count on no more than fifteen members of the Senate, which would sit as a court to try him once the House as a whole impeached him. Rather than prolong the inevitable, he gave an unapologetic speech on the evening of August 8 and told the American people that he would resign. Gerald Ford was sworn in as President the next morning.

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OMPARED TO THE TEN-YEAR TRAVAIL
caused by war in Vietnam, the Watergate break-in was trivial. Moreover, some of the illegal things that the Nixon administration did, such as wiretapping, had been tried by other Presidents, notably Kennedy. Nixon's profanity, of which much was made at the time, was common among politicians, as many who professed to be appalled well knew.
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If he had quietly destroyed the tapes, it is conceivable that he could have hung on in the White House, for few politicians, even Democrats, were eager to wade into the uncharted waters of impeachment unless they had solid evidence. Why Nixon preserved the tapes, thereby inciting a feeding frenzy of suspicion that led to a constitutional crisis, is yet another of the mysteries surrounding the whole business.
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Commentators who seek to avoid the doom-and-gloom postmortems that followed the scandal like to add that the controversy had some beneficial consequences. Among them of course was the forced departure from government of Nixon and many of his aides, who had endangered constitutional liberties and consistently lied to the public: fourteen top officials, including two from the Cabinet, were fined or went to jail.
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Celebrating this outcome, some people said that the affair revealed the stability and strength of America's political institutions, especially the press, the judiciary, and Congress. The resignation of Nixon,
Time
exulted, was an "extraordinary triumph of the American system."
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A Brooklyn man added, "It's great. I can tell my senator to go to hell, the rights are mine. I'm proud of a country that can throw out a president. . . . Democracy was strengthened by Watergate. It proved the Constitution works. The political system passed the test."
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It is hard, however, to derive great satisfaction from the resolution of the scandal. While it is true that the "system"—Congress, the courts, the press—helped to topple Nixon, it is also true that the President did much to hurt himself. If he had not insisted on preserving the tapes, he might well have survived. It required a good deal of luck for the "system" to bring him down.

In struggling to save his presidency, Nixon repeatedly claimed that opponents who harped on Watergate were undermining his domestic and foreign policies. There was a little bit of truth in this, for the declining political standing of his administration in 1973 and 1974 emboldened his foes. Defense Secretary James Schlesinger, who was hostile to Kissinger, openly undercut administration efforts to negotiate new SALT agreements in the winter of 1973–74. Opponents of detente in the House of Representatives, allying with friends of Israel, coalesced in December 1973 to pass the so-called Jackson-Vanik amendment, which sought to deny most-favored-nation status to the Soviets unless they agreed to major concessions concerning Jewish emigration.
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The possibility that this amendment might be approved in the Senate irritated the Soviets and soured relations with the United States. When Nixon journeyed to Moscow again in June 1974, he managed to accomplish nothing of significance.
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But it is difficult to argue that Watergate much changed policy possibilities in Washington. Nixon started his second term with no new programs in mind, save to cut back sharply on the number of federal bureaucrats (many of whom did all they could to oppose the President after 1972) and defiantly to impound congressional appropriations, especially for control of water pollution.
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These efforts greatly heightened partisan controversy with the Democratic Congress from the very beginning of his term and virtually ensured that little legislation of consequence would be approved. In 1974 he called for expansion of a guaranteed student loan program to aid college and university students, and he reiterated earlier requests for expanded health insurance and welfare reform. But, as in the past, he did little to follow up on his declarations of intent, in part because he knew that Democrats in Congress would by then block almost anything that he sought.
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Détente, moreover, had always been oversold by Nixon. The Soviets had supported it only when it suited their interests, reserving the right (as did the United States) to go their own way. In October 1973 Moscow did not inform the United States that Syria and Egypt were about to wage war on Israel. In February 1974 it expelled the novelist Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, leading the physicist Andrei Sakharov to go on a hunger strike on the second day of the summit in June. In claiming that controversy over Watergate endangered American foreign policy, the President and his defenders greatly exaggerated. Nixon himself later admitted that "the military establishments of both countries" stopped progress toward arms control. "These problems," he added, "would have existed regardless of Watergate."
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It is tempting to think that the Watergate scandal trimmed the imperial presidency down to more manageable size and that it revitalized moral considerations in the conduct of government business. Whenever later presidents appeared to exceed their authority or to resort to acts of doubtful constitutionality—as Ronald Reagan did in the Iran-
contra
affair in 1987—the misdeeds of Nixon were resurrected. Iran-
contra
became "Irangate."
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Still, the extraordinary popularity of Reagan to that time—as of other presidents since 1974 who have asserted large prerogatives in foreign policy matters—suggests that Americans have continued to admire bold executive leadership. While the backlash against Nixon's highhandedness (and Johnson's) has moderated the imperious temptations of his successors, it has not altered the constitutional balance of American government, which until the end of the Cold War remained heavily tilted toward 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue on military and foreign policy concerns.

Politically, the squalid business of Watergate had significant partisan results, at least in the short run. Democrats scored major triumphs in the 1974 elections and sent Jimmy Carter to the White House in 1976. Conservatives in the GOP, leaping into the vacuum left by Nixon and his centrist allies, gradually established control of the party and blocked whatever hopes may have remained for serious consideration of such unresolved issues as welfare reform and health insurance. In 1980 they elected Reagan to the presidency. But policy-making from 1974 through 1976 did not differ much from what it would likely have been with Nixon in command. President Ford, after pardoning his predecessor, avoided new frontiers. Instead, he struggled much of the time to deal with already existing problems: tensions over court-mandated busing and affirmative action, highly emotional debates over abortion, and above all the stagnation of the economy.

The central issue raised by Watergate, finally, was not resolved. This was how to make American government, especially the President, more accountable to the people. A raft of legislation in 1973–74, including the War Powers Act of 1973, a law to regulate campaign financing and spending (1974), a Freedom of Information Act (1974), and a Congressional Budget and Impoundment Act (1974), tried to promote such accountability, but these laws for the most part failed to accomplish what they set out to do, largely because Presidents and other politicians figured out ways of evading them. As acts by subsequent Presidents made clear, White House high-handedness could and did happen again in the future.
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Well before these later abuses occurred, many Americans had feared as much. Watergate, they believed, proved—yet again—the deviousness and arrogance of government officials who claimed to serve the public interest. First, Lyndon Johnson and exaggerated claims about a Great Society. Then lies upon lies about Vietnam. Now, Watergate and many more lies. A teacher expressed the feeling of many Americans:

After Watergate, it's crazy to have trust in politicians. I'm totally cynical, skeptical. Whether it's a question of power or influence, it's who you know at all levels. Nixon said he was the sovereign! Can you believe that? I was indignant. Someone should have told him that this is a democracy, not a monarchy.
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RITICAL FEELINGS SUCH AS THESE
remained powerful in the United States after 1974. Together with abiding popular resentments about other domestic issues—busing, affirmative action, abortion, crime, welfare dependency—they sharpened social divisions and stymied liberal reformers. Conservatives maintained the initiative in Washington for much of the next two decades. While grand expectations about "rights" at home, as well as grand designs for America's role in the world, did not disappear after 1974—these were lasting legacies of the postwar era—many people seemed anxious and contentious. This was not because they were worse off absolutely—most people managed as well or a little better economically, especially in the mid- and late 1980s—but because their very high expectations became frustrated. The United States, so powerful for much of the postwar period, seemed adrift, unable to reconcile the races (or the classes or the sexes) at home or to perform as effectively on the world stage. A woman exclaimed, "Sometimes you get the feeling nothing has gone right since John Kennedy died. We've had the Vietnam War, all the rioting. . . . Before then you were used to America winning everything, but now you sometimes think our day may be over. "
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Most people, however, did not go through the day thinking about Big Political Issues. They tended, rather, to concentrate on concerns closer to home: their families, their neighborhoods, their work, their economic well-being, their futures. These private spheres seemed very different to people after 1973–74. Poll data suggested that more and more Americans after that time were losing faith in the capacity of the nation to move ahead in the future.
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The very high hopes of the previous decades—a key to the drive, the optimism, the idealism, and the rights-consciousness of the era—were becoming harder to achieve.

Nothing did more to generate these anxieties than the downturn of the economy in 1973–74. Signs of trouble, of course, had appeared earlier, leading Nixon to impose controls in 1971. But controls, while of some use in 1972, were a band-aid that could not stop the bleeding. All the structural problems that economists had warned about coalesced after 1973–74 to jolt American life. These included sagging productivity, declining competitiveness in world markets, accelerating inflation, rising unemployment, especially among minorities and the millions of baby boomers now seeking work, and a slowing down in the creation of good-paying, career-enhancing jobs outside of the increasingly dominant service sector.
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Nixon's New Economic Policy, resumed after the 1972 election, failed to curb inflation, mainly because it did not attack the underlying problem—too much spending, both public and private—and prices mounted in 1973. Nixon reimposed controls in June and relaxed them in August, but the cost of living kept moving up. The NEP, moreover, did nothing to deal with the deep-seated problems of American manufacturing. The automobile industry, already sluggish, was especially hard-hit, mainly by competition from abroad. Trying to repair the damage, Nixon devaluated the dollar again in early 1973. It did not help: American car sales dropped by 11 million in 1973, and unemployment—most worrisome in manufacturing—rose in 1974 to 7.2 percent, the highest since 1960. The AFL-CIO complained (with some exaggeration) that the United States had become "a nation of hamburger stands, a country stripped of industrial capacity and meaningful work . . . a service-economy . . . a nation of citizens busily buying and selling cheeseburgers and root-beer floats."
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