Writing and Watergate

It’s no secret on this blog that I’m fascinated with Richard Nixon and Watergate. Like Charlie Brown, I’m fascinated by failure.

My latest Nixon/Watergate read is Sen. Sam J. Ervin Junior’s The Whole Truth: The Watergate Conspiracy. It was published in 1980, shortly after Nixon’s own memoirs came out. Ervin sees his book as a counter to what he called Nixon’s revisionism.

I don’t know what it is, except it’s at the same time boring, confusing, and fascinating.

Boring because for most of it, it reads like a courtroom brief with stilted language, clearly identified digressions and other bits of courtroom ephemera. Confusing because it assumes a lot of familiarity on the part of the reader of the times and characters included in the story – and this is coming from a person who has read a lot of books on Nixon and Watergate and who has seen many a documentary about the times and characters. Fascinating because it’s told without novelization, without the hokey drama the likes of Woodward and Bernstein introduced into All the Presidents Men and The Final Days. It’s a contemporary, eye-witness view of the scandal, told by a person who combines a knowledge and reverence of the Constitution (“The Constitution is not a schizophrenic instrument that speaks with a forked tongue,” he writes) with a backcountry hyuck factor that would confuse even the likes of Dan Rather (“[T]he White House emulated the preacher who was fired by a backwoods church and who inquired of the chairman of its board of deacons why the church had taken such action. The preachers asked, ‘Don’t I argufy?’ The chairman answered, ‘You sure do argufy.’ The preacher asked, ‘Don’t I sputefy?’ The chairman replied, ‘You sure do sputefy.’ The preacher inquired, ‘Then why did the church fire me?’ The chairman responded, ‘Because you don’t show wherein.’”) I still don’t know what it means, and the Internet ain’t helping. I think it means that if you say or preach or claim something, it’s got to have grounds in some concrete reality that others can see, which makes sense in this context as Ervin is trying to show that Nixon’s claim of presidential separation of powers as he interpreted it isn’t as clear cut in the Constitution as Nixon claimed.

At first, the courtroom briefness of the book bothered me, but I’ve grown used to it, and appreciate Ervin’s use of the rhetorical approach he takes. He saw a lot of twisting of truth, both in the committee investigating Watergate and obviously in Nixon’s memoirs. He wanted to demonstrate someone could write about the scandal with the truth, not with rose-colored glasses or an eye towards drama. To reveal the truth in such matters calls for clear, non-prosaic writing, so I applaud the senator’s approach.

So here’s something to learn about writing on a subject on which many words have already been written: Take a different approach. One that’s perhaps unexpected. Assume a lot of familiarity on the part of the audience with the familiar characters and tropes, and don’t belabor your readers plowing ground the second time. How this might work in fiction writing rather than history, I’m not sure. But there’s got to be a way to figure that out. That may be where we get the literary novel, or attempts to write in verse. The latter might be too anachronistic a style to work these days. Unless the writer is really, really good.

G. Gordon Good Lord . . .

Anyone who Godwins themselves twice in the first ten pages of his autobiography, you know they’re a badass. And knowing that I’m currently reading “Will,” the autobiography of G. Gordon Liddy, well, the badassery just continues apace.

I’ve long been fascinated with the Watergate Era, something I blame on Woodward and Bernstein’s “All the President’s Men.” I’ve long since read many a good book (and much better books that W&B’s, by the way) on the topic (or on Richard Nixon) and continue to be fascinated by the characters that populate these intertwining stories. Liddy is perhaps the most blunt and the most unapologetic I’ve read thusfar.

A few interesting things:

Given current flurry of worry over NSA spying on us all, it’s interesting to read how unapologetic Liddy is for wanting to stamp out leaks. I’m just to the first inklings of the Plumbers in Liddy’s book, but it’s already clear where he stands on leakers – mostly on their necks.

I admit to some ambivalence on the subject. Reading that the New York Times at the time leaked current US standings on a strategic arms limitation treaty being negotiated at the point seems over the top (though I concur that leaking of the Pentagon Papers likely wasn’t as damaging to US interests as the Nixon White House believed). Treating all leakers the same way seems extreme, but I suppose that’s a way some think to control them all, or at least put the fear of The Man on them. As if that even exists today.

Liddy is probably a libertarian. I’m not sure, as an example, whether he despised Robert Kennedy’s breakup of mob activity in Gary, Indiana, because it was a Kennedy/Democrat operation, or because it upset so-called civil liberties so much. From his book:

Robert Kennedy wrote a book including his experience in Gary called The Enemy Within. Not long after he finished his work there, the Gary I knew was gone. Half the public officials had been convicted, and the old way of life – in which the victimless crimes of gambling and prostitution were tolerated and controlled and numerous ethnic groups coexisted, each with a slice of the pie – had been destroyed. Whether the current state of affairs in Gary is an improvement, I’ll leave it to the judgment of those who live there today.

Liberterian leanings here, yes, but also the leanings of someone who is pretty amoral. Given what I’ve read of mob involvement in gambling and prostitution and ethnic relations in Capone, by John Kober, that idyll Liddy seems to missing Gary was maintained by fear, extortion, abuse of unions, and violence, with the complicity of politicians and police on the take and likely ready for any other kinds of handouts they could get from the mob or otherwise. Not really idyllic to my point of view, and Liddy makes it all sound like beer and skittles.

Liddy’s admiration – and there’s no other word really to describe it – of some Nazi elements, repeated throughout the book, also fascinates. This is a man not worried about whose toes and sensitivities he’s going to step on. His first task as part of a secret group to investigate Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellensberg? Organize the group along the lines of ODESSA, the secret society of former SS members that terrorized many a repentant SSer for years following World War II.

Obviously, I’ll continue reading. This guy is nuts. But compelling nuts.

Instant Experts, Circa 1968

I wrote earlier this week about David Pell's commentary at Gizmodo.com on the Five Most Endangered Words on the Internet, and chastised him a bit for suggesting that this phenomenon of comment now, think later, is boren of the Internet age.

I offer tonight a brief excerpt from Victor Lasky's book "It Didn't Start with Watergate," published in pre-Internet 1975, speaking on the phenomenon of instant analysis:

By the time Lyndon Johnson left office, his administration was under bitter attack by the media and its subsidiary organizations. Thus in 1968 the journalism society Sigma Delta Chi had this to day: "The Credibility Gap, which as reached awesome proportions under the Johnson Administration, continued to be a grave handicap. Secrecy, lies, half-truths, deception -- this was the daily fare."

In turn there were those who felt that the press had its own credibility problems. Douglas Cater, special assistant to President Johnson, suggested that too often newsmen presumed an expertise they quite obviously didn't have.

"I'm concerned about the little demigods of TV who make an instant analysis of complicated events," said Cater. "There should be bounds on what TV men do, so much of which is delivered with flippant abandon."

It's a familiar criticism, as Pell says. The mainstream media sees this attitude -- with some justification -- in the blogosphere. It's a criticism they ought to be careful in making, since it's obviously a criticism that can be leveled at themselves quite easily, with some justification.

It's a common aphorism in most journalism circles that a journalist is an "instant expert." It's a cute thing to tell journalism students and rookie reporters, but it can also be a dangerous thing. I know I fell for it often enough -- not our of laziness, but out of sheer exasperation in trying to become an expert in something in a day or less, given the common deadlines we're given to work with. I note that the reporters and writers I enjoy the most aren't instant experts -- they're the ones who have toiled for years to understand their subject matter, and thus can write and speak on it authoritatively through their hard work, not through j-school bravado alone. If I learned anything in my short journalism career, it's that there is only a small leap of difference between an instant expert and an instant asshole. I'm intensely gratified that there exist areas of knowledge in which I can safely say I am somewhat well informed. I'm far from being an expert in anything.

It's as true in journalism as it is true in the blogosphere that there are many out there who babble on with the air of authority without really having the knowledge to back it up. It's equally as true in journalism and the blogosphere that here are many out there that know from whence they speak. The babbling jerks in the blogosphere may be part of the sphere as a whole, but they do not define the sphere. As Uncle Jay would say, "those who think they do ought to be embarrassed."

Things NOT to Do if You're Cynical About Government

Because I'm an incredibly geeky individual, I'm reading yet another book about Watergate. Well, it's not necessarily about Watergate, but centers on how the media handled the Watergate scandal and yet did not handle other scandals precipitated by Democratic presidents (Kennedy and Johnson) during the same time period. It's Victor Lasky's "It Didn't Start With Watergate." Fascinating, illuminating, cynicism-building stuff.

Lasky is rightly critical of national media outlets that gave the likes of Kennedy, Johnson, and later Carter a pass on some of the more lackluster shenanigans during their tenures (Kennedy's assassination attempts against Fidel Castro and the US-supported coups against leaders in Vietnam and the Dominican Republic, as examples) while putting Richard Nixon under the microscope for Watergate. He doesn't excuse Nixon for what happened -- in fact, he seriously shakes his head at what was done in the Nixon White House -- but does look jaw agape at how the scandals of a Republican president were brought out into the daylight while the media was complicit, or simply didn't bother to dig out -- the improprieties of Democratic presidents.

He even deflowers one of my political heroes, Sen. Frank Church of Idaho. I had always held him in pretty high regard, until I found out that he tried to suppress the results of his own committee's investigations into presidential meddlings in coups and assassinations of heads of state because it would have besmirched his idol Kennedy -- and after the cat was out of the bag, still tried to point fingers more at Nixon and Eisenhower than at the Democrats who were in power during the same time period. That seems like shoddy statesmanship to me.

This book isn't a complete indictment of the entire media-presidential complex, because Lasky does give kudos to journalists of both conservative and liberal stripes who did their jobs as journalists rather than to protect presidents with whom they were chummy. But it is an indictment against the establishment press that does not dig into allegations simply because they approve of the president against whom the allegations are levied, and then dig into the allegations against presidents whom they despise. This would be a good lesson for journalists today -- and a good sign that the lessons that could have been learned back then have not been learned at all.

You know, that's why I find that portion of American history so fascinating. So many lessons to be learned for politicians, journalists, voters and everyone else, but few of those lessons have been learned. We're still voting for style over substance, still assuming that if we like a guy he can do no wrong. And where we should have a healthy distrust for politicians and journalists and pundits and such, we instead have a cynicism -- which tells us that now we assume everyone is a liar and an asshole and going to steal the kids' lollipops after they kiss them. The kids, not the lollipops. That's counterproductive. Because to excuse someone for doing something simply because their predecessors have done it, that's wrong. And that's what I see going on with the current occupant of the White House. He's making the same mistakes as his much-hated predecessor, and yet he's being given a ride for it, because all he did was "inherit" the problems. That's horse caca. I voted him in so he could change things. Now we're getting a politician who won't do what he says he's going to do. So I'm looking to the next person. Maybe one of these days I"ll get something right.