The American Scene
Lynch mob
liberals
Al Capp
Last week David Broder of the Washington ton Post was the first member of the liberal press publicly to recoil from its ceaseless torment of our troubled President. No accused murderer, from Chessman to Manson to Oswald, has been treated with greater revulsion before his day in court. Decent men are caught up in the lynch mob. James Reston last week abandoned veracity for venom when he berated the President for having said that the matter of the tapes should be left to the decision of the court, and then displayed his hypocrisy in reJecting the finding of Judge Sirica's court. Judge Sirica's is, of course, one of several COurts, and the President is, like any other ?i,__ttzeo — like Mr Reston's New York Times in luel suits — simply exercising his right of iti)Peal. Reston knows that in appealing the resident did not reject the court, but is accepting it, and its privileges. The President is 'eunded enough, his defences are feeble `n°ugh, to give the Restons safe openings to d,, , 'aw blood at will. It isn't necessary to sneak In a foul blow. Arthur Schlesinger Jr. in the Standard ondemned the President for his reluctance to r„elease the tapes. The same Arthur ichlesinger, acting as the then Mrs Jackie ennedy's emissary a few years ago, tried to persuade William Manchester, the late !resident's biographer (chosen by Mrs Ken`NY), not to release certain notes she had glv. en him, which, on second thought, she felt Night be misunderstood.
An Eastern newspaper, which had jeered at Julie Nixon Eisenhower's defence of her father, wrote sympathetically of Joseph Kennedy Jr.'s lunatic driving, which left a teenage girl paralysed. It agreed with the judge's gentle admonition that the young man owed it to the memory of his father sincerely to try not to do it again.
Senator Henry Jackson was conducting a hearing in Washington at the same time as the Watergate hearings. Only one moment of it made national TV. Jackson, who is a nice guy, but like all Democratic Senators becomes Attila the Hun when facing a Nixon appointee, was displeased by an answer from Secretary Butz. Although the subject was wheat, Senator Jackson, whose thought processes are too deep to be understood by mortal men, roared " You've been going around the country, criticising Senator Sam Ervin. You ought to be ashamed of yourself."
The mindlessness of the lynch mob reached its peak in the Inouye incident. After jeering at R. H. Haldeman's inability to recall every nuance of conversations of a year and two years before, and after the TV camera had switched to Senator Ervin, who, for a blessed moment was not telling hill-billy stories, a voice was heard, loud and clear, saying "What a liar!" It was unmistakably Senator Inouye's voice. Less than .a couple of minutes later, an interviewer asked the Senator about that comment made about a witness, before an audience of thirty million. The Senator said that he could not recall having made it. The next day he did recall saying something like it. But the thirty million people, he chuckled, had gotten it wrong. He recalled that what he said was "What a lawyer!" The tapes would of course settle the question as to exactly what the Senator said, and whether he had lied, and whether he was fit to sit on a committee seeking truth. Yet this did not occur to one liberal commentator in our press or on national TV, not to James Reston, not to Arthur Schlesinger Jr., not to the Civil Liberties Union, not to the cowed Republican senators sitting on the Committee, not to the seekers of justice forall on the Committee's staff, which all of us, including R. H. Haldeman, pay nearly ninety thousand dollars a month.
When, for example, the Kennedys (and the Kennedys are inescapably the moving force in the Watergate affair, for it is their loyalists in the media and in public life who are the leaders of the lynch-the-President mob) proposed a minor and dubious judge from Massachusetts, named Morrissy, for a Federal post, and it developed that his law degree was issued from a diploma mill above a barber shop in Atlanta, Georgia, the nomination was allowed to disappear with dignity. No red-hot team of Washington investigators was assigned to find out exactly what favours the little judge had performed in the past to earn the gratitude of the Family, although few people around Boston had not, for years, been acquainted with the hilarious details.
When liberal Senator William Proxmire, a thunderer against the aircraft industry's tax deduction claims, was discovered to have listed as "medical expenses," a two thousand dollar hair transplant from his armpits to his pate, he was good-naturedly allowed to revise his returns retroactively, and no hard feelings,
When William Sullivan, formerly the number two man at the FBI, revealed that 'during the previous two liberal administrations, the break-ins and phone-taps outnumbered those in the Nixon administration by over 2 to 1, a spokesman for the Sam Ervin committee said they intended to ignore that on the grounds that it was " distasteful," And that is the explanation of the bloodbath that has been made of such a traditional and time-honoured bit of skulduggery as Watergate. It is " distasteful " to embarrass the Good Guys. It is a public duty to string up the Bad Guys. That's what got so many rednecks forgiven for having shot blacks, in the old days, but got so many blacks lynched for being accused of stealing watermelons.
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