The American Scene
Why Watergate?
Al Capp
The Watergate case (no longer lightly referred to as a "caper") provides new revelations every day, not only of the squalid behaviour of the convicted hirelings of the Republican Party, but of the senators who are investigating them. One investigating Senator last week announced that McCord (the Valachi of the Watergate gang) had given* evidence that Haldeman, one of the President's most intimate advisers, was one of the instigators. Two other senators, who were privy to the same evidence, announced the following day that McCord had not provided a shred of proof that involved Haldeman.
McCord then revealed that he had bugged his conversations with the Republicans who had hired him to bug the Democrats, and we don't know, of course, what that will prove, except that McCord suffers from a streak of scepticism.
.rtnd so, with the details of the case shifting from hour to hour, let us look at its broader questions. The first question is: Why? Why, with the election assured by every poll, with more of the life-sustaining ingredient of „American Presidential campaigns, money, in, greater Republican supply than ever before in its history; with 80 per cent of the hitherto anti-Nixon press endorsing him, what could the Republicans possibly learn from bugging the Democratic headquarters except how to lose elections, at which they were already past masters? The reason for Watergate seems to have been precisely that. The Nixon people never did quite recover from their victory in '68. Victory wasn't what they were accustomed to. And they simply couldn't believe it could happen again. Although fanatically, almost suicidally loyal to the President, they failed to see him as voters saw him: as the President who had made cautious but eager friends of China and Russia; who had brought half a million GIs home from Indochina, and who, once the POWs were freed would certainly never send another, whether it was peace with honour, as he hoped, or peace with war, as it seems to have turned out. The President's people had no less confidence in his record than the American people. They were convinced that he needed a bit of dirty work done for him, and they were caught.
The first sentences — up to twenty years — bought this comment from one familiar with Washington criminal justice: "If only the Watergate gang had committed a rape or a murder on their way in, they'd have gotten off With six-month sentences, suspended."
• Not even the most devout Nixon-haters here genuinely believe that any proof exists that the President himself was involved. He became involved only after the fact, when he tried to protect his indiscreet admirers in the White House by claiming their positions as his personal aides gave them the immunity from Congressional investigating committees he enjoys. In reply, Senator Erwin. the chairman of the committee, roared that he didn't know of any royalty in the US, and that if those aides refused to testify, he'd send the Senate's Sergeant-at-Arms to the White House to arrest them, same as any ordinary citizen.
Well, that brought pressure on the President from his supporters, as 'ordinary a group of citizens as has ever made up a landslide, to permit those aides to testify, and, at this moment, it appears that they will.
And so, although it is unlikely that anyone else will go to gaol, a few more reputations will be ruined, possibly deservedly, and a few
more new faces will appear at the White House. The President, with most of his four years ahead of him is, even at this turbulent time, doing a bit better than surviving. Meat prices are down, and employment is up to a record high. To a practical, and politically cynical people, that is more significant than the arrest of a half-dozen drab James Bonds with electronic equipment in an office building.
Two heroines of the American Left called a press conference this week. Joan Baez, at hers, announced that she enjoyed sex. What made that announcement grave enough to call a press conference, was that Miss Baez reveals that she enjoyed sex with girls as well as boys.
Jane Fonda, at hers, denounced those of our returning POWs who claimed they were tortured by the North Vietnamese as liars and hypocrites.
No one knows why Miss Baez made her announcement. One theory is that her records aren't selling, and this was an effort to gain the support of our lesbians, a group which seems more numerous than we suspected, or, at any rate, more numerous in the leadership of our Woman's Liberation movement than its founder, Betty Friedan, suspected. Or it may be that Miss Baez was simply lonesome, and wanted everybody, anybody, to know they were welcome. The story was hardly mentioned by our press and wholly ignored by our radio and TV news shows. Americans have grown up. We have no more interest in public figures' sex lives than in their bowel movements.
Miss Fonda's press conference was called after she had been offended, beyond endurance, by the accounts of our returned POWs, of torture while in the hands of the Communists. On a visit to Hanoi, last year, she had personally visited several POWs, selected by her hosts, and reported to the US that they were happy about everything except our refusal to take her and Senator McGovern's advice and beg for peace. Now, some of those very POWs are saying they had been tortured into agreeing to give. Miss Fonda the correct answers to her questions, and threatened with death if they deviated. For giving her misleading answers in Hanoi, she denounced them as liars, and for going back on their word to Hanoi, once they were out of it, she denounced them as hypocrites. And quite rightly.
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