Richard M. Nixon – Memphis Flyer

It was some 44 years ago, in the dog days of a humid summer, when the members of the U.S. House Judiciary Committee met to consider articles of impeachment against the president of the United States, Richard M. Nixon. This was at a late point in the ever worsening saga that had begun with a criminal break-in of the opposition Democrats’ election headquarters, and, while hard and fast evidence of Nixon’s guilt — the so-called “smoking gun” — was not yet in hand, the president’s culpability in the series of high crimes and misdemeanors we now call Watergate had long since become obvious.

There was plenty of smoke, enough of it that several Republican members of the Judiciary Committee would forgo their partisan loyalties and join Democratic members in voting for one or more of the impeachment articles presented. But there were other GOP committee members who could not bring themselves to do so. One of them, a Pennsylvania congressman named Charles W. Sandman, became famous (or notorious) because of his unstinting defense of Nixon during the televised Judiciary hearings and his insistence that all the evidence aggregated thus far had been circumstantial.

“Specificity!” Sandman thundered over and over, making the point that even the crime of jaywalking required some physical and irrefutable proof to justify prosecution.

The odds against the president’s survival in office were already tilted irrevocably against Nixon — Sandman himself had conceded that 37 committee votes, a clear majority, were already committed to impeachment — and yet he and a few other Republican loyalists persisted in their defense. There was something pathetic, yet oddly admirable, about their determination to go down with the ship.

And go down they did. The committee voted its judgment, and only days later, one of the president’s surreptitiously recorded tapes surfaced publicly, and all the world heard Nixon strategize out loud about trying to subvert the FBI and the Justice Department to quell an investigation of the break-in at the Watergate.

For his pains, Sandman, who had been his party’s nominee for governor of Pennsylvania only the year before, was defeated for re-election to Congress that fall, along with other unregenerate loyalists.

The moral of that story for today’s congressional Republicans is obvious: Most of them continue to ignore the meaning of the ever multiplying facts that seem clearly to indicate improper collusion by the Trump campaign with Vladimir Putin’s Russian government during the 2016 presidential campaign and to obstruct an investigation afterward. Demanding uncontrovertible evidence, they parrot President Trump’s mantra of “No collusion!” Presumably, they equate a forthright recognition of Trump’s guilt with the specter of their own potential defeat at the polls.

But, like Sandman, they’ve got it backwards. It was a refusal to acknowledge plain truth and a reluctance to put country before party that doomed Sandman and the others whose political careers were wrecked or ended by Watergate. Most of the Republicans who owned up to the reality of Nixon’s misprisions were able to survive; most of those who could not do so, like Sandman, were in short order eliminated from public life.

It’s not a Sophie’s Choice. Admitting the obvious is the best way Republicans can save themselves and their party.

Gerald Ford was very briefly vice president of the United States and, following the resignation of Richard Nixon, somewhat less briefly president of the United States. He was an affable fellow, strangely guileless and yet a groundbreaker at what now gets little recognition: He was the first ex-president to sell the presidency.

Within a year of leaving office (1977), Ford had earned something like $1 million. He sat on corporate boards (20th Century Fox, for instance) and made paid speeches. He was available for conventions, meetings, and, I was told, the opening of a shopping center. A modest man of once-modest means, he soon had a home near Palm Springs and another one near Vail, where he liked to ski.

The shocking thing is how not shocking any of this now is — although Bill Clinton might be shocked at how little Ford made. Once upon a time, presidents left office and led monkish lives. They were not expected to accept outside income — except for book royalties, of course — and virtually none of them did. (Calvin Coolidge wrote a newspaper column, no way to get rich.)

Until 1958, former presidents did not even get a pension. (It’s now a bit more than $200,000 annually.) That changed when Congress took pity on Harry Truman and awarded him and Herbert Hoover pensions and funds for staff. Dwight Eisenhower left the White House with a nice nest egg. He had made a small fortune with his World War II memoir, Crusade in Europe, for which the government gave him a sweetheart tax deal.

John Kennedy followed Ike into the White House, and he, in turn, was succeeded by Lyndon Johnson. LBJ might have been a man of elastic morality, but he pretty much kept to his ranch, wrote the required memoir, and abjured buckraking.

Richard Nixon wrote books and sold a TV interview to David Frost, but paid speeches were not his thing.

Then came Ford, and everything changed. Skipping Jimmy Carter, who adhered to the Old Way, Ronald Reagan picked up where Ford left off. He made two speeches in Japan for $2 million. George H.W. Bush also gave paid speeches, but no one has raked it in quite like Bill Clinton and, of course, Hillary Clinton. The figures are astounding, virtual GDPs of small nations, some of which have given one Clinton or another a dictator’s ransom to say a few words.

A Nigerian newspaper group paid Bill Clinton $700,000 for a single speech. I’m sure it did wonders for circulation. The amounts for the Clintons are impressive indeed. Bill Clinton reported being paid more than $104 million from 2001 through 2012, just for speeches. He has become a very wealthy man, and I suppose I should say more power to him.

But while the numbers are astonishing, they are also troubling. Unless money ain’t money no more, someone is buying and someone is selling. The question is: What? Mostly, I would think, bragging rights. The nice people at Goldman Sachs or JPMorgan Chase did not pay to hear Hillary Clinton because they were getting privileged information. (It’s rare that anyone gets any information at all out of her.) What they were buying was proximity, the chance to take a selfie with her. These are groupies in Guccis, and they go off confiding to others what Clinton has confided to them — which is what was in the morning newspapers anyway. It would be cheaper to buy the paper.

There is nothing illegal in any of this. But it is troubling. The figures are so huge that one can speculate that a future president might curry favor with the awesome rich as a way of ensuring a voluptuous retirement. I mean, why make enemies out of people who will gladly pay you to say nothing much — and fly you on a private jet just to say it? It’s a nice life.

Jerry Ford also got on the boards of Shearson/American Express, Beneficial Corporation of New Jersey, and other companies and soon became rich. I suspect no one hired him for his expertise or his business acumen, asking him about interest-rate swaps, buybacks, or, in 20th Century Fox’s case, whether to open a movie in the summer or wait for the Christmas crowd. He sold what they were buying, which was the prestige of the presidency. As a result, it has less and less.