By JULES WITCOVER,
August 8, 2010
The infamous Watergate tapes that were the undoing of President
Richard Nixon more than three decades ago have been called, as in the
Hallmark greeting-card slogan, "the gift that keeps on giving." They
are reminders of the perfidies, large and small, of our only resigned
president.
The cause of his departure was the June 1972 "smoking gun"
conversation in which Nixon spoke of his awareness of an attempted
cover-up of White House payments to the arrested Watergate burglars
for their silence. But other tapes also documented evidence of
Nixon's contempt for others and his willingness to let them take the
fall for him as needed.
A new, non-Watergate example has now come to light with President
Barack Obama's call upon the Senate to exonerate the Air Force
general who carried out Nixon's orders to bomb North Vietnam in
1971-72 and who subsequently was demoted and forced to retire.
Four-star Gen. John D. Lavelle said at the time he was just following
orders and called the outcome "a catastrophic blemish on my record
... for conscientiously doing the job I was expected to do." Nixon,
asked thereafter at a news conference about Lavelle's conduct and
fate, lied, saying: "It wasn't authorized. It was proper for him to
be relieved and retired."
But in a prior June 1972 taped conversation just spotlighted, Nixon
said to Henry Kissinger, his national security adviser at the time:
"I just don't want him to be made a goat, goddamnit. . . .Can we do
anything now to stop the damn thing?"
What Nixon could have done was to own up that he had authorized the
bombings, which were a subject of wide criticism from anti-war
protesters. Instead, 12 days later, he still was expressing his
compassion while holding his tongue.
"Frankly, Henry," he said to Kissinger on a tape, "I don't feel right
about our pushing him into this thing . . and then giving him a bad
rap. I don't want to hurt an innocent man."
Senate exoneration of Lavelle, who died in 1979, will restore him to
his highest rank. Nixon's 1972 comments about him were additional
revealing windows into the strange psyche of a president who
endlessly professed to be concerned about the fate of others without
it affecting his drive for political self-preservation. It worked to
the degree that many Nixon die-hards continue to this day to assert
he was railroaded out of office and did nothing that predecessors hadn't done.
Long after his resignation and exile to his home in San Clemente,
Calif., Nixon managed to churn out books, especially dealing with
foreign affairs, that became best-sellers and kept his standing alive
as a voice of wisdom in the field.
At Nixon's funeral in 1994, President Bill Clinton graciously, if
gratuitously, observed that Nixon's life should be viewed "in
totality," not by one event -- meaning the Watergate fiasco. But it
was Nixon's whole career -- peppered with lying and dissembling --
that warranted history's judgment.
Ironically, on the eve of the 1968 election, the unwillingness of
Democratic nominee Hubert Humphrey to believe the worst of Nixon may
have ensured his opponent's election. Humphrey decided not to make
public classified intelligence from President Lyndon Johnson
indicating Nixon, through an intermediary, was trying to sabotage
Vietnam peace talks, by offering the Saigon regime a better deal if
he were elected.
Humphrey later wondered in his memoir "if I should have blown the
whistle"on Nixon for trying to scuttle the talks. "I wonder if that
call did it. If Nixon knew. Maybe I should have blasted them anyway."
It was hard to understand then how Humphrey could doubt the public's
ability to believe Nixon was capable of such a self-serving action.
It seems even harder now, as more evidence of his deceptive nature
keeps trickling in.
--
Jules Witcover's latest book, on the Nixon-Agnew relationship, "Very
Strange Bedfellows," has just been published by Public Affairs Press.
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