Nixon and after

The champion double-dealer of them all

Al Capp

The most deeply grieved of all Americans are the 61 per cent who voted for Richard Nixon. The others always felt he was a sonofabitch, so they're not grieving, they're gloating. Many of that 61 per cent, like myself, had never voted for him before; many, like myself, had campaigned savagely against him. Yet, when we were forced to compare him with the hysterical McGovern, and the hysterics who whooped it up for him, Nixon's nerveless cool left us no choice.

The mobs of haters howling around the White House had broken Lyndon Johnson's heart. He wanted to be loved. They didn't ruffle Nixon. He was used to being hated and he went on coolly doing what came naturally, bombing hell out of the Communists with no more passion than, a year later, he drank toasts with them. He coolly used the Presidency to make under-the-table deals with the double-dealers in Moscow and Peking, yet we all slept peacefully knowing that we were being represented by the champion double-dealer of them all. We still don't know who cheated whom, but we do. know that for the first time in thirty years, there was a glimmer of warmth in the Cold War.

He coolly used his power as commander-inchief to end the American muddle in Vietnam in a way which, to everyone's astonishment, has made it possible for our allies there to continue to stand up. to the Communists without the sacrifice of a single further American life. He coolly handled the race problems at home which were the inexorable result of the failure of the pie-in-the-sky Kennedy promises, and the collapse of the grandiose Johnson schemes, by making no more promises, launching no more Shangri-Las, and the race riots died down. He cooled the campuses by giving the unhousebroken 5 per cent on them the casual attention they deserved, but no more. I wrote a piece for the, New York Times in 1972 called, The New Cool,' and, along with 61 per cent of all other Americans, I believed every word of it. Now we know that behind that cool was a nasty spreading inferno, that the arsonists weren't courageous enough, or plain conniving enough, to stamp it out before it devoured them all. All but one.

And nobody gives much of a damn any more about that one, although some of the nicest of us seem to enjoy his anguish more than humanitarians should. It is James St Clair's job to come up with a case for the President, yet it's plain that he doesn't believe a word he's saying. St Clair must plough on, but the rest of us were transfixed, then silenced, by the true transcripts of the tapes. No one called the editing of them — the erasures, the twistings — devious. We all agreed that was incomparably dumb. All of it sooner or later had to come to light, and when it did, the most adhesive of us was stunned, insulted.

Richard Nixon's time in American history is, but for a few remaining ceremonial deathdances, ending. Yet it was not a wholly inglorious thing to have been Richard Nixon, nor was his a wholly inglorious administration. He was a President who knew the world too well, but understood his fellow Americans not at all. The crowds that cheered him in Russia were sophisticates who knew what the real world was like, what they in their grim history had learned it was like. The crowds of indignant Americans he came home to were offended by having learned that their President was as corrupt as any other leader of the real world, a world where the operative word is survival, cannibalism not excluded.

What is irresistibly engaging about the average American is his conviction that it is smart to avoid, if he can get away with it, any private act that has any inconvenient taint of honour or principle, but that his President, who represents him, must alone be above such acts. In a more worldly society than ours, Richard Nixon would have been cheered by Americans, too, for his deviousness in Moscow, Peking, the Near East, and his slyness at home tolerated on the grounds that nobody is perfect. It was, however, his ill-fortune to be hounded by a combination of press, TV, and newsmagazines, unequalled in piousness, power and long hatred for his opposition to their liberal orthodoxy. Far from being a sinister manipulator of presidential power, he was so clumsy at it that he left trails of failures which made the investigative work of journalists so easy they must blush at the $100,000 advances they're getting for their books. And if any clue was missing, that was supplied by the incredible daily taping of every thing said in the privacy of the Oval Office. These shattering revelations were so casually regarded that their existence was revealed by a minor White House employee, in an offhand remark, when asked about something else. Early on, an unsung adviser suggested to the President that he make a bonfire of those tapes on the White House lawn, and no journalist with a sense of irony would have quarrelled with his claim that his private conversations were as sacred as their conversations with gangland stool-pigeons. But Richard Nixon's fatal flaw is that he wants to seem a good guy. Well, he is many kinds of guy: he is a tough guy, he is a cruel guy, he is a shifty guy. In short, he may be precisely the kind of guy that is needed to keep the planet from being blown apart.

Yet, in his eagerness to seem to be a good guy too, he told us that, far from concealing those tapes, he'd be glad to let us hear them. And, while he was saying that, the tapes were being erased and mutilated.

He tried to have it both ways. A Congressman on the House Judiciary Committee said the other week, and it was not denied, that $25,000,000 had been spent investigating Richard Nixon. Few mortals could survive that amount of investigation. A fraction of it might have impeached Lyndon Johnson for his cur ious TV deals, an embarrassment we were all spared by the leadership of Sam Ervin. A fraction of it, spent on the investigation of possible manslaughter and perjury at Chappaquiddick — or simply following the trails of possible manslaughter and perjury pointed out in Robert Sherrill's recent story in The New York Times — and Ted Kennedy might still be serving time. But it was Richard Nixon's fate that an epidemic of superpurity all but crazed Sam Ervin and the New York Times, suddenly, without warning, when they noticed Richard Nixon up there for another four years. In an uncomfortable way, their standards of superpurity are coming more and more to resemble the standards of superpatriotism of Joe McCarthy's day.

And so we must find other leaders. It will not be easy. Hubert Humphrey can't be revived, not again. Hubert is OK, but just barely. A couple of campaign aides of his are up on charges of having received sizeable contributions from dubious sources, and Mrs Humphrey, it is now revealed, accepted a $100,000 trinket from a foreign potentate, way back during Hubert's Vice-Presidency, which she didn't turn in to the government until it was revealed that when Mrs Nixon did the same thing, it was a crime.

No one knows what to do about Ted Kennedy. He can have the Democratic nomination, but then, of course, there will be only one issue: Chappaquiddick. There are scores of published theories about Chappaquiddick, and scores more coming, none of them resembling each other, or the Senator's version, and sometime during his campaign, he must tell the truth.

John Connolly looked good, especially to Richard Nixon, until somebody nobody ever heard of remarked that he had slipped Connolly $10,000 in cash for a political favour, and, although Connolly, has denied it, and the question has not been resolved, it has been enough, in these, super-pure days, to demolish him as a possible candidate.

Senator Proxmire became a hero for exposing unfair tax deductions by huge corporations, until it came to light that he had deducted $1.500, as a "medical expense" on his tax return, for a hair transplant. There is a Democratic Senator named Fritz Mondale who is almost totally obscure arid if he can keep it that way, he has a chance. Senator Henry Jackson has been around so long, he's been so angry for so long, everyone has heard of him, and just about enough. Governor Reagan will be in there swinging, but my mystic hunch is that although Americans will accept Republicans with such onfolksy names as Woodrow or Dwight, we call no more live with a Ronald than with an Adlai. There is always Governor Rockefeller, but there always has been Governor Rockefeller and that's the pity of it. Thus we must face a Republican ticket of Gerald Ford and Eliot Richardson opposed by a Democratic ticket of Ted Kennedy and George Wallace. To those who wonder at my daring to be so positive, I need only to point to my record. In 1970, elements of New York's Conservative Party asked me to run for the Senate. I said no thanks, get Jim Buckley to do it. He's used to being defeated. Buckley ran and became the first Conservative Party candidate elected to the US Senate. And so when I make a political prediction, you're not hearing from a man who hasn't made them before. When Clare Luce said of Tom Dewey that he looked like the little man on a wedding cake she demolished him for all time. It didn't matter what sound sense Dewey made, he was the little man on a wedding cake, and it was clearly ridiculous for him to have anY opinions at all, or for that matter, to be talking at all. Lyndon Johnson dealt Gerald Ford an almost equally fatal blow when he remarked that Ford had played football without wearing a helmet once too often. Ford does have the Stunned look of one whose head has been baked too otherlo long in sun, and buffeted too often by

the V Yet, as he continues to appear on our T screens, an unexpected Ford emerges. In an interview the other week with the graceful William Buckley, Buckley was terribly kind to him. Buckley is above being patronising to a Vice-President of the United States, but his kindness was just an eyelash short of that. As Ford lumbered on, you heard a case being built, with logic and firmness, of his idea of government; you were led, step by step, to the goals he felt were the sane ones for the nation.

There were no memorable phrases. What was memorable was that Ford, at the end of the hour, had quietly long since taken over the interview, and taken over anyone who, no matter how opposed to his political views, had heretofore dismissed him as a bumbling hack. It was reassuring, I am sure, to friend and foe alike, that from a crowd regarded with such hilarity as is the US Congress could step forward as strong and sound a man as Gerald Ford,

Ford as President seems likely at the time of writing, to choose Eliot Richardson as his Vice-President. It will be a ticket that will panic the liberals. Although a Republican, Richardson became a liberal hero when he resigned as Nixon's Attorney-General rather than fire Spe

cial Watergate Prosecutor Archibald Cox. One flaw has been found in Richardson's otherwise impeccable character: at the age of eighteen he was stopped by a cop under suspicion of driving while under the influence of alcohol, but not much good is expected to come of that, since exhaustive research is bound to turn up a Democrat who, although a heller at eighteen, served his country well for the next twenty-five years.

The 61 per cent who voted for Nixon are, irrevocably, disenchanted with him, but they're still as enthusiastic as ever about his law-andorder, tighten your belt and don't whine for government money, and peace-is-on-the-side-with-the-biggestnuclearbombs attitudes, and they will find all of those attitudes in Gerald Ford. After Watergate, the liberals will certainly deserve something, but they will throw it all away by nominating their only sure vote-getter, Ted Kennedy, who can't get enough votes if George Wallace is offended and runs as independent. And so they will offer Wallace the second position and he will accept it. It will be a diabolically smart political move with but one flaw: those who can accept Kennedy can't accept Wallace, and vice versa.