The View From 1776

Reflections on the Watergate Tragedy
By Jeff Lukens

To understand Watergate, we need to understand the times in which Richard Nixon was president. Nixon was the only president of the 20th Century to face an unyielding and organized resistance to a war. LBJ had handed him a war without end in Vietnam, and consequently, great unrest at home. Washington was regularly filled with thousands, even hundreds of thousands, of protesters. The counterculture movement, born in those days, was bent on overturning the very foundations of American life.

Skillful at old-time politics, Nixon was ill-equipped to oppose the guerilla war being waged against him. Wiretaps and IRS audits were no match for a force whose foot soldiers worshiped sex, drugs and rock and roll. Many called Nixon paranoid because he saw himself surrounded by enemies. But his enemies were real, and they were waiting for the opportunity to ruin him.

He had been a target for the Left ever since the Alger Hiss case in 1948. The worst thing that anyone can do to the press and the liberal establishment in Washington is to prove that they were wrong, and that was exactly what Nixon, as a young congressman, had done. Hiss was a sophisticated career State Department diplomat, but he was also a communist spy. The case also begged the question on whether or not there was a communist influence in Washington. With the help of Whittaker Chambers, Nixon exposed Hiss. But Hiss was one of them, the liberal establishment, and they never forgot it.

Consequently, the rules of discretion and respect the media and Congress applied to previous presidents did not apply to Nixon. In his position, he knew he should have been careful not to do anything wrong. Instead of accepting the double standard and holding himself to a higher level, he took for granted he would be treated in the same way as they treated Kennedy and Johnson. That was his first mistake.

The Origins of Watergate

The road to Watergate began in 1971 with the Pentagon Papers case. Nixon was outraged by Daniel Ellsberg’s leaks of classified information about the Vietnam War to The New York Times. When he tried to block the press from publishing any more of the story, the liberal Burger Court ignored the law and ruled against him. One senator even went as far as to enter the documents into the Congressional Record. It was truly outrageous. Nixon’s anger at the reckless disregard of national security by many people was quite understandable, but his response to it was not.

He pushed White House staffers to do something to stop the leaks. He pushed them so hard, in fact, that he effectively forced them to act outside the law. The “Plumbers” were formed and soon afterwards broke into in the office of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist hoping to gain embarrassing personal information on Ellsberg in which to discredit him.

That was over the line. Warrantless break-ins of any sort are unacceptable. We halfway expect this sort of behavior from the agents of the Left, but not from Republicans. Republicans, and conservatives overall, must call to a higher standard.

But why would Nixon risk so much to gain so little? Well, for one, leaks threatened to blow the confidentiality of his prize project, the secret diplomacy of Henry Kissinger. But there was more to it than that. Like so much else in Washington in those days, emotions overruled rationality. Nixon was apparently striking back in a fit of rage.

He should have known that break-ins would eventually cause something like Watergate. Although he denied it, there is a high probability that Nixon had prior knowledge of the Ellsberg break-in and may have even ordered it. At the very least, he was responsible for the actions of his subordinates. He compromised himself under pressure, and set a precedent that lead to his political destruction.

Break-in at the DNC

Even now, we can only speculate on the possible motive for the Watergate break-in. It has been alleged that Nixon’s wanted to know what the Democrats knew about a $100,000 donation from Howard Hughes to Bebe Rebozo, who passed the money through his Florida bank to the Nixon reelection campaign. Hughes Aircraft Company had many government contracts, and it was good business to have the president on your side.

Nixon may have been worried that the Chairman of the DNC, Larry O’Brien, would pull an October Surprise by revealing the payoffs from Hughes. Nixon’s ties to Hughes had hurt him in his losing 1960 and 1962 campaigns, and he did not want it to happen again.

The Watergate break-in likely came about by Nixon telling Charles Colson to find out what O’Brien knew about Hughes. Colson assigned the job to Howard Hunt who with Gordon Liddy used campaign resources to repeat the precedent of the earlier Ellsberg break-in.

There were two break-ins at the DNC Headquarters at the Watergate complex. The first break-in occurred on May 28, 1972. When the bugs that were planted then failed to yield substantive information, Hunt and Liddy planned a second break-in three weeks later. It was the second break-in that made history. That break-in likely failed because Democratic Party operatives may have suspected it was coming and were ready for it. It is doubtful, however, that Nixon knew the details of the plan.

At the time, wiretaps were legal, so we can take no issue with them. After news of the story broke, Nixon was just trying to contain the political damage. One falsehood lead to another and soon it became a cover-up. Legally and morally, a cover-up of a break-in was wrong, and on a practical level, it was almost sure to fail. He and his people had taken many foolish risks, and too many people knew too much. When faced with jail time, many of them decided to save themselves no matter the cost to anyone else. This was especially the case with John Dean.

The Tapes

Nixon meant the tapes to be a private record of his presidency that he could later use for his memoirs. Many hours of the tape involve Nixon with his aides brainstorming and searching for ideas, both good and bad, to solve the problems they faced.

Years later, Nixon privately admitted it was a mistake not to destroy the tapes. Without the tapes, the evidence on Nixon would have been circumstantial and gone nowhere. Rather than serving as personal recollections, his own words becoming the basis for his fall.

Nixon also admitted later that he shouldn’t have discussed, or even thought about, cover-ups or hush money. While his opponents were quick to point out that he had discussed such things, they ignored that he rejected them as wrong a few sentences later. Although he discussed possible obstruction of the FBI investigation by the CIA in the “Smoking Gun” tape, no obstruction actually occurred.

Revenge Politics

As a political force against communism, and resolute in his convictions, to the liberal establishment, Nixon had to be brought down. The political firestorm that resulted was a coming together of many political factions. Congress, the press, the intelligence community and the federal bureaucracy all had reasons to see that Nixon fell. With the tapes available as evidence, Nixon gave his opponents the sword they needed to take him down, and they did.

Those who were after Nixon for Watergate had been after him for a long time. Watergate was just the pretext. They sought to prosecute him as aggressively as he had prosecuted Hiss and the Vietnam War. The relentless deluge of accusations hurled at Nixon day after day, both true and false, ultimately undercut his ability to govern. While the Ervin Senate Select Committee on Watergate held center stage, cuts in South Vietnamese aid, and limitations on what our military response could be, were being quietly slipped through congress.

In his 1990 book, In the Arena, Nixon writes:

“We remember as the Watergate period was also a concerted political vendetta by my opponents. Anyone who knows the workings of hardball politics knows that the smoke screen of false accusations - the myths of Watergate - were not at all accidental. In this respect, Watergate was not a morality play - a battle between good guys in white and bad guys in black - but rather a political struggle. The baseless and highly sensationalistic charges, blatant double standards, the party-line votes in congressional investigating committees, and the unwillingness of my adversaries and the media to look into parallel wrongdoing within Democratic campaigns, all should tip off the causal observer that the opposition was pursuing not only justice but also political advantage . . . When a balanced historical appraisal emerges, the partisan political dimension of the investigation and prosecution will stand out as the feature of the period . . . The smoke screen of false accusations magnified tenfold the public’s perception and outrage over the wrongdoing that actually occurred.”

A National Tragedy

After two years of Watergate paralysis, the nation braced for months of impeachment in the House and trial before the Senate. Maybe he could have survived by a vote or two in the Senate, maybe not. But they had marginalized Nixon, and the nation needed a full-time President. His final service as president was to resign rather than put the nation through more anguish.

Nixon, once a brilliant politician, would always be seen as a man shattered by his own determination to succeed. The Watergate scandal severely disappointed his supporters. I was one of them. It also portrayed Nixon as an invalid force in American politics, which was not true.

He had been correct about his opposition to communism. He had been correct about Alger Hiss and how to end the Vietnam War. But what did that matter to the Left? Watergate was the result of Vietnam, and the collapse of South Vietnam was the result of Watergate. The upheaval that followed his presidency in Southeast Asia, Iran, Afghanistan and elsewhere proved that his policies had been correct all along.

Nixon was devastated in an epic calamity partly of his own making, and partly from a liberal assault on a successful politician who represented traditional American values. It is an assault that continues to this day. Conservative politicians might earn the animosity of those who oppose them, but their methods and politics must always be above reproach to avoid a fate similar to that of Richard Nixon.

Jeff Lukens is a Featured Writer for The New Media Journal and a Staff Writer for the New Media Alliance, Inc., a non-profit (501c3) coalition of writers and grass-roots media outlets. He can be contacted at http://www.jefflukens.com

Everyone should be appalled by the terrorist murder of Pakistan’s former Prime Minister.  But the despicable manner of her death must not blind us to reality.

Read Ralph Peters’s article in the New York Post and Mansoor Ijaz’s op-ed piece in the Christian Science Monitor.

The First Things website carries a provocative essay by Richard John Neuhaus.  The essay explores the contention that, as Anti-Federalists feared in the 1787-89 Constitutional ratification debate, the judiciary has come to be the dominant power in the Federal government.

Without exaggeration, it can be said that most of the activist, anti-traditional measures of government have been judicially imposed.  Those have been predominantly aimed at outlawing Judeo-Christian morality, notably Roe v Wade and measures to banish spiritual religion from education and politics, while encouraging an accelerating descent into the cesspool of sensual gratification.

Such measures were judicially imposed precisely because there never has been sufficient public support for them to gain passage in Congress.  Federal judges have simply legislated what, in their person opinions, the law ought to be.

The effect of judicial activism since the late 1950s has been an unconstitutional establishment of atheistic socialism as the official religion of the United States.

Beginning with Chief Justice John Marshal’s Marbury v Madison decision, the courts have increasingly exercised legislative power, overriding Congress.  In the regard, see also Judicial Activism - Summary of Prior Postings.

The following are key excerpts from the First Things essay:

Budziszewski suggests we should pay more attention to the anti-Federalist writer who styled himself as Brutus and was probably New York’s Judge Robert Yates. Brutus claimed that the Federalists, and Madison in particular, were vastly overestimating the way in which their famous “checks and balances” would keep the judiciary from becoming the controlling power in the new political order.

In “Civilizing Authority,” Budziszewski quotes Henry de Bracton, the thirteenth-century English jurist who declared, Lex facit Regem—the law makes the king, not the king the law. The king is supreme within the system but not over the system. Budziszewski then notes the ways in which the anti-Federalist Brutus was prescient in seeing how, far from the courts being checked by the legislative and executive branches, the two latter branches would acquiesce and even collude in the protection and expansion of government power by letting the judiciary have the last word in saying what the Constitution means.

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Why America’s in the Gulf
By WALTER RUSSELL MEAD
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL EUROPE
December 28, 2007

Few subjects matter as much as oil, the Persian Gulf and American foreign policy. But few subjects are less well understood. Even relatively sophisticated observers will attribute American interest in the Persian Gulf to Uncle Sam’s insatiable thirst for crude, combined with an effort to gain lucrative contracts for American oil firms. The U.S. on this view is something like a global Count Dracula, roaming the earth in search of fresh bodies, hoping to suck them dry.

True, the security of America’s oil supply has been an element in national strategic thinking at least since Franklin Roosevelt met with King Abdul Aziz in the waning days of World War II. And true, the U.S. government has never been indifferent to the concerns of the major oil concerns. But the security of America’s domestic energy supplies plays a relatively small role in its Persian Gulf policy, and the purely commercial interests of American companies do not drive American grand strategy.

The U.S. depends on the Mideast for a small portion of its energy supplies. Still the world’s third-largest oil producer and holding large coal reserves, America is significantly less dependent on foreign energy sources than the other great economies. Imports account for 35% of U.S. energy consumption versus 56% for the EU and 80% for Japan. Nearly half the oil and all the natural gas imported by the U.S. comes from the Western Hemisphere; sub-Saharan Africa supplies most of the balance. Only 17% of U.S. oil imports and less than 0.5% of its natural gas come from the Persian Gulf; 80% of Japan’s imports come from the Gulf, and by 2015 70% of China’s oil will come from the same source.

While U.S. import needs are projected to grow significantly, U.S. dependence on Persian Gulf energy is not, thanks largely to expected production increases in the Western Hemisphere and sub-Saharan Africa. U.S. energy imports from the Persian Gulf are expected to remain below 20% of total consumption. The oil market, of course, is global, and if something were to happen to the Middle Eastern supplies, prices would rise world-wide, and the U.S. economy would be seriously disrupted. But domestic supply is not the key to American interest in the Gulf.

For the past few centuries, a global economic and political system has been slowly taking shape under first British and then American leadership. As a vital element of that system, the leading global power—with help from allies and other parties—maintains the security of world trade over the seas and air while also ensuring that international economic transactions take place in an orderly way. Thanks to the American umbrella, Germany, Japan, China, Korea and India do not need to maintain the military strength to project forces into the Middle East to defend their access to energy. Nor must each country’s navy protect the supertankers carrying oil and liquefied national gas (LNG).

For this system to work, the U.S. must prevent any power from dominating the Persian Gulf while retaining the ability to protect the safe passage of ships through its waters. The Soviets had to be kept out during the Cold War, and the security and independence of the oil sheikdoms had to be protected from ambitious Arab leaders like Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser and Iraq’s Saddam Hussein. During the Cold War Americans forged alliances with Turkey, Israel and (until 1979) Iran, three non-Arab states that had their own reasons for opposing both the Soviets and any pan-Arab state.

Today the U.S. is building a coalition against Iran’s drive for power in the Gulf. Israel, a country which has its own reasons for opposing Iran, remains an important component in the American strategy, but the U.S. must also manage the political costs of this relationship as it works with the Sunni Arab states. American opposition to Iran’s nuclear program not only reflects concerns about Israeli security and the possibility that Iran might supply terrorist groups with nuclear materials. It also reflects the U.S. interest in protecting its ability to project conventional forces into the Gulf.

The end of America’s ability to safeguard the Gulf and the trade routes around it would be enormously damaging—and not just to the U.S. Defense budgets would grow dramatically in every major power center, and Middle Eastern politics would be further destabilized, as every country sought political influence in the Mideast to ensure access to oil in the resulting free for all.

The potential for conflict and chaos is real. A world of insecure and suspicious great powers engaged in military competition over vital interests would not be a safe or happy place. Every ship that China builds to protect the increasing numbers of supertankers needed to bring oil from the Middle East to China in years ahead would also be a threat to Japan’s oil security—as well as to the oil security of India and Taiwan. European cooperation would likely be undermined as well, as countries sought to make their best deals with Russia, the Gulf states and other oil-rich neighbors like Algeria.

The next American president, regardless of party and regardless of his or her views about the wisdom of George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq, will necessarily make the security of the Persian Gulf states one of America’s very highest international priorities.

Mr. Mead is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and the author of “God and Gold: Britain, America, and the Making of the Modern World” (Knopf, 2007).

The Times editorialists implicitly are horrified at the prospect that New Orleans might be rebuilt by free-market forces responding to present-day economic reality.  Their prescription is back (and I do mean backwards) to the Nanny State.

As noted in New Orleans: The Harsh Moral and Political Realities, New Orleans has for generations been rotten at the core as a consequence of the welfare state inaugurated by Huey Long in the 1920s.  The last thing needed, by its former welfare-dependent residents or by its working population, is to sink again into the swamp of socialist despond.

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For Sunday’s sermon topic at the Black Rock-Long Ridge Congregational Church (North Stamford, Connecticut), Pastor Steve Treash chose “God’s Presence is Closer Than You Think.” Michelangelo symbolized the relationship in his famous Sistene Chapel ceiling painting of God stretching down from heaven to touch Adam and bring life to humanity.

Christmas calls us again to thank God for the miracle of His Advent through the birth of Jesus Christ, bringing Grace and the Holy Spirit to all of humanity who choose to hear and accept the Gospel.

God literally is everywhere in everything, but the world is not God. 

God is existence preceding essence.  The entirety of the universe - past present, and future - existed beforehand in the Mind of God.  He imparted the qualities of the universe to it at the moment of creation. 

If you prefer scientific terminology, God IS prior to the Big Bang.  At the instant of the universe’s creation, God imposed an intelligent design upon it, from which come the laws of physics, chemistry, and quantum mechanics.  The laws of science, in Biblical terms, are the Word of God.

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.  Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.  And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. (Genesis 1:1-3)

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. (John 1:1)

Despite our lowly state as His sinful creatures, God, through Jesus Christ, has given us direct, close access to Him.  He endowed us with immortal souls that can be opened to the transcendent illumination of His truth, if we choose to follow his commandments to worship only Him and to treat our fellows with the same love that He shows us and the same love that we want from others.

The closeness of God to His creatures is described in Genesis 3:8:

Then the man and his wife heard the sound of the LORD God as he was walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and they hid from the LORD God among the trees of the garden.

I will praise the LORD, who counsels me; even at night my heart instructs me.  I have set the LORD always before me.  Because he is at my right hand, I will not be shaken. (Psalms 16:7-8)

As Don Osgood, one of our interim ministers, used to say, “See God in everything.” God is close to us if we quiet our souls in prayer and listen for His inspiration.  But He often manifests His presence in unexpected ways.

But after [Joseph] had considered this, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said, “Joseph son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary home as your wife, because what is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit.  She will give birth to a son, and you are to give him the name Jesus, because he will save his people from their sins. (Matthew 1:20-21)

Jesus Christ came into the world as superficially an ordinary human being.  In the perception of the world around Him, Jesus’s birth was an ordinary event in everyday surroundings.  Yet God revealed to shepherds in the fields and to the Magi its extraordinary character.

Especially at Christmas time we should quiet ourselves and withdraw from the hustle and bustle of the commercial world, recognizing that God’s presence is closer than we think and that we have but to listen for His direction in our lives.

After Jesus’s resurrection:

Then the eleven disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain where Jesus had told them to go.  When they saw him, they worshiped him; but some doubted.  Then Jesus came to them and said, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me.

Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age." (Matthew 28: 16-20).

Read Lawrence Auster’s Deification of Gore in View From the Right.

Regrettably, well meaning Christian ministers like Rick Warren are supporting Mr.  Gore’s junk scientism and the power of man over the earth, rather than sticking to faith in the one True God as Creator and Regulator of the cosmos.

In so doing they are verging perilously close to the social gospel, a phenomenon of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.  The social gospel reflected the rising popularity of the secular political state and its presumed capacity, when properly structured on the socialistic model, to produce earthly salvation without need for God and the Holy Spirit.

It would be a difficult task to argue that Al Gore is not a progressive-socialist.  He is the perfect icon for Protagoras’s view that man alone is the measure of all things. 

As I wrote in Truth:

Even before the 1917 Russian Revolution, leading universities in the United States had begun a transition from the Christian roots of our nation into atheistic, secular materialism in their teaching of the so-called social sciences.

Nominally-Christian theological seminaries were in the vanguard of the movement toward socialism.  Rochester Theological Seminary’s professor Walter Rauschenbusch, one of the best known socialist spokesmen of his era, was a founder of the Social Gospel movement late in the 19th century.  Social Gospel was nothing more nor less than socialism masquerading as Christianity. 

Social Gospel embraced the avowed aims of socialism, which sound similar to the results that flow from the Bible’s commandment to love one’s neighbor as he would wish to have his neighbor love him.  The insurmountable problem is that socialism, and therefore Social Gospel, is atheistic and materialistic, i.e., the antithesis of Christianity and religious Judaism.

To believe that Social Gospel is true Christianity is to believe that the Soviet dictatorship of the proletariat was truly democratic.

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A Daily News article dated December 23, 2007, reports:

MANCHESTER, N.H. - Hillary Clinton predicted Saturday that just electing her President will cut the price of oil.

“I predict to you, the oil-producing countries will drop the price of oil,” Clinton said, speaking at the Manchester YWCA. “They will once again assume, once the cost pressure is off, Americans and our political process will recede."

The more likely world reaction would be an accelerated drop in the foreign exchange value of the dollar, with a corresponding increase in prices of all imported goods and services. 

If Democrats win the Presidency, they will move to raise taxes (causing business to crater) and increase Federal spending (causing a further over-expansion of the money supply).  With Hillary Clinton, or any of the Democratic candidates, at the helm, expect a major recession with a high probability of repeating the 1970s stagflation: soaring inflation, high unemployment, and a real case of the blues, politically and spiritually.

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Socialists historically have advocated what used to be called free love, today’s sexual promiscuity.  See Hurrah for Sexual Promiscuity!

The reasons are obvious.  Traditional families and individual morality stand in the way of the collectivized political state, whose leaders and bureaucrats must be the sole source of rules for personal conduct (with, of course, the counsel of the New York Times editorial board). 

Families over the eons have taught sexual abstinence to their children, understanding that sexual promiscuity is the antithesis of family solidarity and survival.  Individuals were taught, especially in Western civilization’s Judeo-Christian ethic, to heed their individual consciences.

But such standards are anathema to the liberal-progressive-socialist state.  Good liberal-progressives must give their allegiance to the group, as in mass demonstrations, classroom sit-ins, and other emotional actions that stifle individual thought. 

For that reason, John Dewey’s progressive-education methodologies, propagated by Columbia University Teachers’ College and adopted by the socialistic teachers’ unions, have enthusiastically promoted classroom sex education.

Needless to say, liberal-progressive-socialists vigorously oppose teaching sexual abstinence.  Recent news articles tell us that Federal statistical analysis proves the preferability of explicit sex education that teaches young children how to use condoms and encourages them to experiment with “safe sex.”

The Wall Street Journal edition of December 6, 2007 reports:

U.S. Teen Birth Rate Rises

ATLANTA—In a reversal, the nation’s teen birth rate rose for the first time in 15 years, surprising government health officials who had no immediate explanation…

Several experts said they have been expecting a jump. They blame the shift on increased federal funding for abstinence-only health-education programs that don’t teach how to use contraception.

Apparently, however, the results depend upon what sort of sex education young students get.  The Washington Times edition of December 20, 2007, tells us:

Sex-ed found to prolong teen virginity

The researchers found that girls who were virgins when they received sex education were more likely to stay virgins than peers who didn’t have sex education. The virgins with sex education also were more likely to stay virgins past age 15, or 10th grade. The same effects were seen among boys.

Ashley Herzog explains what’s going on:

Abstinence isn’t the problem

Abstinence opponents like to say that they’re not encouraging teens to have sex, they simply want them to be fully informed. Last year, a school-sponsored speaker at Boulder High School in Colorado promptly put an end to that myth. During a panel discussion on teen sexuality, the speaker explained to the students—some as young as 14—that he was “different” from their other teachers because “I am going to encourage you to have sex and encourage you to use drugs appropriately.”

What gets lost in the shuffle is an incontrovertible historical fact.  Before the 1960s and 70s, when such sex education became the norm, out-of-wedlock pregnancies were so uncommon that such an occurrence stigmatized the unfortunate girl.  Since then, sexual promiscuity and out-of-wedlock pregnancies have risen to levels never experienced before in history.

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