Tag: Watergate

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From My Seat Sports

Our Pivot Point

World-changing events are rare, to say the least. But when we experience them — when we live them — the world-changing nature of the event is overwhelming. I count four of these events over my 51 years, “game changers” that took place before the current pandemic that has, indeed, altered our world. I’ve found myself measuring what’s to come by, in part, reflecting on how mankind reacted to the other pivot points of my lifetime.

I barely arrived in time for the Apollo 11 moon landing (July 20, 1969). But I grew up in a world — on a planet — that was merely part of something larger, and reachable by mankind. My parents shared children’s books about astronauts. The text books I read included Neil Armstrong among history’s most famous Americans. When the first Space Shuttle took flight (in 1981), the news entered my young mind, but didn’t force me to pause from that afternoon’s baseball practice. Humans fly in outer space. It’s what we do. When the Challenger exploded (in 1986), it sure as hell made me pause. Because the “custom” of space flight is never easy, never entirely safe, no matter how normal it might feel.

Watergate changed everything between American government and the media, and thus it changed the way the world interpreted the U.S. mission, the grand experiment of democracy (in the form of a republic). I learned about U.S. presidents with Richard Nixon’s resignation as the floor for standards. Eight presidents had died in office (four of them assassinated), but only Nixon’s forced departure exposed our country’s highest office to be one in which misbehavior would be held accountable. The Oval Office is no throne and a president’s decisions — to say nothing of his or her actions — must adhere to the larger mission of this country . . . or things fracture. Witness the current presidency.

I was a junior in college when the Berlin Wall crumbled, the literal destruction starting in the fall of 1989. I’ve always credited West Germany as much as Ronald Reagan or Mikhail Gorbachev for the fall of communism. The allure of choices, freedom, even luxury are too strong in the human psyche for a communist state to survive. Russia and China today are fascist states using a communist playbook. Communism is as dead as Norma Bates.

The fourth pivot point in my lifetime was the concerted terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. The United States — the idea, as much as the geographic region — became a target, and one susceptible to large-scale violence. No trenches to dig, no conventional bombs necessary. Those determined to kill in the name of a higher calling (however defined) live among us. Air travel will never feel as comfortable as it did on September 10, 2001. And “making the world safe against terrorism” has become somewhat of an oxymoron.

Which brings us to 2020, a year that may be remembered for other happenings, but will be known for the novel coronavirus, COVID-19, the pandemic that brought the concept of human extinction way too close to our front doorstep. Surely we’ll find a way to prevail as a species, but how significantly will our “herd” be thinned? How will “normal” be defined if we return to a version, any version? The most human act of compassion — a hug — may now be considered . . . dangerous? It’s too much to consider, at least now with social distancing part of our world’s cure.


We are living a pivot point, the fifth of my lifetime. We’ll remember it, however many days we have left. Be smart, be safe. Be both patient and determined. Most importantly, empathize. When the world changes, we all change together.
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Editorial Opinion

The Lessons of Watergate

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.

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Opinion Viewpoint

Enter the Prosecutor

In 40 years of covering Washington politics, I have never seen anything like President Trump’s amazing rise to power. I have seen presidents laid low by botched Congressional investigations that lead to special prosecutors. That’s why I’m starting to feel like I’ve seen this movie before.

Spoiler Alert: This political thriller ends with the president’s top aides striking plea bargains with federal prosecutors to reduce prison sentences.

Juan Williams

The U.S. has a rich recent history of special prosecutors. The odds are rising that one more is coming to look into alleged links between the Trump campaign and Russia.

The dwindling trust in the GOP majority in Congress to conduct such a probe is due to the fading credibility of the Senate Intelligence Committee. The Republican chairman of that panel, Senator Richard Burr, is widely perceived as a Trump acolyte. 

When FBI director James Comey announced shortly before last year’s election that his agents had reopened their investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails, Burr bragged there is “not a separation between me and Donald Trump.”

Senator Charles Schumer, the top Democrat in the Senate, was slow to bury Burr with a call for a special prosecutor, perhaps seeking to avoid charges that he was politicizing the probe. But on NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday, Schumer made that call. A special prosecutor was necessary, he asserted, to probe “whether the Trump campaign was complicit in working with the Russians to influence the election.”

Now Republicans, including Senators Lindsey Graham, Marco Rubio, and Susan Collins, are starting to peel away. Graham has said that if Attorney General Jeff Sessions spoke with Russian diplomats, “then, for sure, you need a special prosecutor.”

On cue, last week Sessions had to recuse himself from the FBI’s probes into the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia after The Washington Post revealed he met with the Russian ambassador to the U.S. twice last year. Those details seemed to contradict sworn testimony he gave during his Senate confirmation hearing. 

If trust in the Senate probe is weak, then the credibility of any House investigation is even weaker. House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) served with Sessions on Trump’s presidential transition team. Nunes was also one of the lawmakers actively recruited by Reince Priebus to counter stories about Trump’s ties to Russia. In a rambling press conference last week, he said he did not want the committee’s investigation to turn into a “witch hunt” and warned of “McCarthyism,” where innocent Americans were “haul[ed] before Congress.”

Representative Adam Schiff, the lead Democrat on the committee, further diminished trust in any House probe when he said last week that the FBI director refused to share with the committee more than “a fraction of what the FBI knows.”

Last week, we learned that the Trump White House Counsel’s office issued a memo to all White House staff instructing them to preserve all documents related to Russia. If history is a guide, all that is left now is for public pressure to build on the GOP and the special prosecutor to be named.

Here’s a quick look at that history: During the Iran-Contra affair, President Reagan tried to put the scandal behind him by agreeing to the appointment of a special prosecutor, Lawrence Walsh. Walsh indicted several of Reagan’s top aides, including Defense Secretary Caspar “Cap” Weinberger.

During President Clinton’s first term, shady controversies from his time as governor of Arkansas led to the appointment of the special prosecutor Kenneth Starr and set the stage for the Monica Lewinsky sex story that resulted in Clinton’s impeachment.

President George W. Bush’s Attorney General, John Ashcroft, recused himself from a White House probe. His deputy then appointed an independent special counsel to find out who leaked the name of a CIA agent. That special prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald, won the conviction of the Vice President’s chief of staff,  Lewis “Scooter” Libby. 

Senator John McCain said that he has “more hope than belief” that the GOP Congress will properly investigate Trump’s ties to Russia. “Have no doubt, what the Russians tried to do to our election could have destroyed democracy,” McCain said.

Julius Caesar feared the Ides of March with good reason. As the middle of the month approaches, President Trump and his GOP supporters will be under fearsome pressure to go along with the naming of a special prosecutor.

Juan Williams is an author and a political analyst for Fox News Channel.

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Film/TV Film/TV/Etc. Blog

Politics And The Movies 1: All The President’s Men

Today, as neofascist candidate Donald Trump prepares to accept the Republican nomination, I’m beginning a new series on the Film/TV/Etc blog. Politics And The Movies will run approximately weekly until the election on November 8. I’ll be examining films whose subject or themes are explicitly political in an effort to relate them to the moment where we now find ourselves.

Dustin Hoffman, Penny Fuller, and Robert Redford in All The President’s Men

All The President’s Men was released in the election year of 1976, when Republican Gerald Ford, the only American president to ascend to the office having never received a single vote for either it or the vice presidency, faced Democratic challenger Jimmy Carter, a Naval nuclear engineer from Georgia. Ford took office upon the resignation of Richard Nixon in the wake of the Watergate affair, which was uncovered by the reporting of Carl Bernstien and Bob Woodward. One of director Alan J. Pakula’s best touches is the way he uses the constant drum of TV news reports of the 1972 presidential election as a counterpoint to increasingly paranoid plots taking place inside the newsroom of the Washington Post. Although the media environment of the mid-70s seems completely tame compared to the ravages of the 24 hour news cycle, the jarring tonal differences between the upbeat but sober reporting of Walter Cronkite and Bob Woodward (Robert Redford) and Carl Bernstein (Dustin Hoffman)’s journalistic cloak and dagger shenanigans struck a chord with the filmgoing audience. Not only was it nominated for eight Academy Awards and won four, but it also made an impressive $70 million on an $8 million budget.

All The President’ Men is a story about the inevitable intertwining of politics and media.Watching it today, the first thing that jumps out at you is the complete lack of computers on the desks of the Post newsroom. Our heroes spend much of the film on the phone, including an incredible extended take where Woodward wakes up a White House official in the middle of the night and tricks him into incriminating himself. Redford’s words are controlled and flat, but his body language and subtle facial expressions steadily ramps up the tension. Hoffman is similarly superb, rendering Bernstein as a neurotic ball of energy held together with nicotine and coffee.

The film leans heavily on its ripped from the headlines context. Nixon had only resigned eighteen months before, so events that Pakula and screenwriter William Goldman mention in passing carried much more weight in 1976 than they do 40 years later. But the movie left indelible impressions on film history. The X-Files ripped off its scenes with mysterious informant Deep Throat wholesale, with Mulder frequently meeting his exposition partner Mr. X in shadowed car garages. 2015’s Best Picture winner Spotlight is practically a remake, substituting rapist priests for crooked politicos.

Hal Holbrook as Deep Throat.

But I think the greatest contribution to political discourse is it introduction of the term “ratfucker”. Bernstein tracks down Donald Segretti, played by Robert Walden, who was the head of dirty tricks for the Committee to Re-Elect the President (CREEP). Over coffee and cigs, Segretti admits that any underhanded tactic was in play against the hated Democrats, but defends himself by saying that he and his colleagues only did things with “a little wit”.

Politics And The Movies 1: All The President’s Men

The ratfuckers got fatally caught in the Watergate scandal, but the culture of dirty tricks and demonizing the opposition thrived in the Republican party for decades. From the October Surprise to the Brooks Brothers Riot to Dan Rather’s forged poison pill, ratfucking has been at the heart of right wing electoral success for the last half century. We take it for granted now, but All The President’s Men shows that the amoral, win-at-all-costs philosophy that brought us candidate Donald Trump was once so shocking that it cost a president his job. The film’s commentary on the power of the press to create and destroy leaders rings just as true today is it did in 1976, but its faith in the basic decency of the Fourth Estate and the Americans who follow it seems like a rosy anachronism.