A million-dollar gloat
Anthony Holden
New York America's bicentennial election campaign needed a court jester to stifle the nation's Yawns, and suddenly it has one. It is not Jimmy Carter, whose nebulous 'looks-like- a-winner' appeal has been aptly dismissed as 'peanut envy'. It is no longer the sitting tenant, now patiently tolerated on all sides as President Dumb. Nor is it any of their respective opponents, of whose collective excrement a New York cab driver advised Me: 'Put it dis way, it don't taste like ice- cream'. It is none other than the shade of Richard Nixon, whose bones have been exhumed to be rattled and kicked around Just a little bit more.
It all started last weekend, when the nation thrilled to leaks preceding serialisa- tion and publication of The Final Days, an obituary of the butt-end of Nixon's presid- ency by the reporters who stubbed it out, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein of the Washington Post. San Clemente shuddered again as what might pass in Britain for un- printable rumour was noised abroad as unassailable fact. It was like an Iris Mur- doch novel: the Nixons hadn't shared a bed for fourteen years, both had been hitting the bottle, the President's aides had had to hold him back from suicide, Henry Kissin- ger had joined him on his knees in tearful prayer, then gone around saying that Nixon and his pal Bebe Rebozo were gay. Not quite the kind of detail the Sunday Times Went in for when chronicling the fall of Heath.
Woodward and Bernstein had already seen their editor, Ben Bradlee, sorely dis- comfited by the backfire of his own money- spinning memoir, Conversations with Ken- nedy. He was rightly derided for political naiveté, journalistic compromise, and gene- rally misguided exhibitionism. Their mi II ion- dollar gloat might just have shared his fate, for all their pained assertions that they Printed nothing for which they did not have at least two verbal sources. If it's OK by anybody to kick Nixon when he's down, there are a few who baulk when the highly- Paid kickers are those who became million- aires putting him on the deck. But Woodward and Bernstein will sur- vive, as next week they are officially de- clared immortal. Monday sees Phase Two of Nixon's turn in his grave: the simultan- eous premiere in fifty American cities of the 'Lim of their first book, All the President's Men. Before the eyes of the world, Wood- ward will be apotheosised as Robert Red- ford, Bernstein as Dustin Hoffman, and Bradlee as Jason Robards. Or is it the other Way round'? Nobody seems quite sure any more, after saturation coverage of the agon- ies of newsmen handing their reputations over to film stars, and Hollywood's un- canny recreation of the 1972 Post newsroom. A documentary filmed on the set com- pounds the optical illusion: it is a film about a film about a book about newspaper stories about a pack of lies about a pack of lies.
How is Nixon feeling about it all ? Well, nobody's losing too much sleep over that. But amid the barrage he has one tiny con- solation. The chat shows and the editorial columns go to great pains to avoid smack- ing of appeasement, let alone of rehabilita- tion of the monster. But a few, very tenta- tively, are beginning to go beyond the daring argument that Watergate was more purgative than curative. They are beginning to mention Nixon's name as something other than a term of abuse: as possibly the sacrificial lamb every decent liberal society needs now and then to keep its complex system of corruption in well-oiled running order.
It's not just Gore Vidal, plugging his latest historical epic on the Johnny Carson show, saying that most of the Capitol Hill mob should be behind bars. There is matter of more substance; but in the wake of Watergate it has the hollow ring of British parish pump corruption in the wake of Poulson. Already Howard 'Bo' Callaway, a former Secretary of the Army, has had to step down as Ford's, campaign manager because of alleged abuse of his Cabinet position for private gain. So what is it, the sages say, feathering transport routes to the ski resort in which he's the major stock- holder? OK, maybe in Britain all sorts of other people would have had to resign, but do you seriously expect such chickenfeed grafting to rub off on Ford? Frankly, in election year, and however unfairly, yes.
But there is a much more striking example of post-Watergate attitudes in the case of Daniel Schorr, a veteran newsman until recently starring as one of Walter Cron- kite's ace reporters on CBS news. For the
past eighteen months, Schorr dug and dug and went on digging into the developing story of the CIA. He often struck rich. His tenacity left him, last February, perhaps the only man with a leaked copy of the House Committee's report on CIA activities when the executive branch had successfully bottled it up. Feeling that he could not 'accept responsibility for withholding the document', he passed it to The Village Voice, for a guarantee of an unexpurgated version. Thus he became the man who gave you more (if by no means all) on Chile, Cuba, Kurdistan and elsewhere. It was not merely a contribution to the literature of man's inhumanity to man; it was a specta- cular blow against government secrecy and the unpardonables of American foreign policy.
Woodward and Bernstein's dogged pur- suit of truth deservedly won them prizes, fame and home comforts. Dan Schorr's has earned him indefinite suspension from his job, and the likelihood of a subpoena to a Congressional inquiry into the leak. Both stories won their writers the trust of fifth- columnists and the abuse of Presidents; but, post-Watergate, Schorr has been abandoned to his fate by the same powerful combines which helped Woodward and Bernstein to ride the storm.
It is often a tricky editorial problem when a reporter becomes a character in the story he is covering. Woodward and Bernstein were allowed to make it their strength, and have since managed to get away with self- hagiography on a scale Nixon would approve. Schorr was more pensive about it all, 'not quite understanding' how he came to be on Nixon's list of Top Twenty Ene- mies. CBS had no doubts at all; as soon as Schorr was denounced by Ford, they sent him home and got him a lawyer. If Ben Bradlee had done that, Nixon might still be in the White House.
A brief spring visit shows that all this is, of course, far from a prime-time bother to most Americans. Watergate's overlap with the current campaign has increased their political vocabulary, as is witnessed when the word 'détente' raises the biggest laugh of the evening at Pacific Overtures, a uniquely ludicrous Broadway musical ('I would recommend it to the world'—Clive Barnes) about the westernisation of Japan. But their attitudes remain one-dimensional, adequately witnessed by the extraordinarily ill-informed slogans which fuelled thou- sands of Irish-Americans through a sting- ingly cold St Patrick's Day parade in New York.
So Capitol Hill will be left to its own de- vices, if no one is prepared to put up Steve McQueen as Dan Schorr. The punch-drunk electorate has turned its back on the lot of them, journalists and politicians. There's always, mind you, the bicentennial celebra- tions. But so far David Vine, a Miami, dentist, has found no takers for his custom- made red-white-and-blue 'Bicentennial Smile' dentures, only £75. Perhaps it's Ix cause the '1776' engraving is extra.
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