The American scene

The corruptions of success

Henry Fairlie

In so far as they may be regarded as single, the American people are not — not yet, at any rate — reacting with much excitement to the series of scandals by which the administration of Richard Nixon seems at the moment to be troubled. One of the reasons is plain. Such things as scandals hurt a government only when it is already generally believed that its days are numbered.

The importance of this fact was impressed on me during the summer of 1963 by R. A. Butler, when I asked him why Harold Macmillan was unable to handle the comparatively trivial revelations surrounding the conduct of John Profumo. "It is the end of a regime," said Lord Butler, with that repose with which he was used to contemplating the debacle of a colleague and even sometimes of himself. " When people begin to think that a regime is coming to an end, then nothing will go right for it, there is nothing that it can do well."

If this is true in Britain, it is even more true in the United States, where there are more scandals to be found, and a tradition of 'muckraking ' journalism which, from time to time, has a new life breathed into it and sets out to find them, unabashed by the methods which it must sometimes use. It was largely because Harry Truman's administration appeared to be the end of the long years of rule by the Democratic Party that it was constantly rocked by the revelations of new scandals.

People grow tired of a regime; they begin to believe anything of it; they may even have reason to do so since a party which has been in power for a long time is likely to have grown lax. Moreover, conflicts and jealousies will have developed within the party or the administration; the team is no longer confident and united; its members begin to split, in more senses than one. This was certainly a factor, for example, in the dismissal of Sherman Adams; his power in the White House was resented by those to whom he had said 'no,' especially by colleagues in his own party.

How paltry some of the scandals of the past seem. Harry H. Vaughan, the military aide to Harry Truman, received a deep freezer from a grateful client. Sherman Adams received from Bernard Goldfine, with whom he and his wife had been used to exchange presents over the years, accommodation at a hotel worth $2,000, a vicuna coat which had cost the Goldfine mills all of $69, and the loan of an oriental rug. His integrity was beyond any question; he had performed no special service for Goldfine; yet he had to go, and Dwight Eisenhower's account, in his memoirs, of the pressures to which he had to surrender in dismissing so honourable a man still makes uncomfortable reading. But, since it was already "the end of a regime," this personal sacrifice was not enough to redeem the administration: the odour, such as it was, clung to it as a whole.

People today do not think of the condition of the Nixon administration as that of "the end of a regime." He is still in the position, as Eisenhower would have .been before 1958, or as Macmillan would have been before 1963, of being able to get rid of a single colleague without people thinking that it would be better to get rid of the whole government. Indeed, there are those in Washington who believe that Richard Nixon has already made his first sacrifice: that John Mitchell's personal troubles were used as an excuse to fire him, and to set him up as the fall guy for the series of revelations now surrounding the Committee for the Re-election of the President.

There is a second reason why scandals have more impact in some periods than in others: that is, when they appear to symbolise a general decline in values in the society as a whole, and this decline is a matter of public concern. This was certainly true during the second term of Dwight Eisenhower, when the word ' payola ' (which is now rarely heard) was used to describe the entire society — " the payola society" — and the administration was ludicrously held responsible for the use of bribes in quiz shows on television. In much the same way, Harold Macmillan was accused during his second term of lowering the tone of British society, as if he were personally responsible for the corruption of every once lofty institution, such as the Athenaeum.

But just as the conduct of John Profumo would today probably be defended by the Times —IT IS NOT A MORAL ISSUE — and the rights of Christine Keeler would be celebrated as vigorously as those of Mick Jagger — the Archbishop of Canterbury in all probability washing her feet on television — so the troubled denunciations of a " payola society " in the United States have given way to a society in which the "rip off" is, not only applauded, but applauded especially by those who are meant to be the radical opinion leaders among the young. Since "ripping off" the society is regarded as praiseworthy by men such as Abbie Hoffman, there is really no ground, it seems, on which to object to a large corporation "ripping it off." In this respect, again, the mood of the country is such that Clark MacGregor, the new chairman of the Committee to Reelect the President, is almost certainly right when he said that — so far, at any rate — the public is not interested in what is revealingly called "The Watergate Caper," a revealingly belittling phrase. The fact of the matter is that in the United States — and surely in other countries as well — the "permissive society " has left no firm ground on which to question the "rip off." When "anything goes," then . one can hardly deny profit to those who make anything go; and one has only to look at the " review " and " magazine " sections of the supposedly more serious newspapers on both sides of the Atlantic to realise that they devote themselves to the advertisement and the celebration of the "rip off " in all its forms.

"How puritan we were back on the days of Harry and Ike," wrote T.R.B. the other day, one of Washington's most seasoned political observers; "how our sensibilities have changed. Those were pretty innocent days, weren't they?" Indeed, the sensibilities have changed, and perhaps the most unbearable aspect of the whole situation is that the Republican Party knows it, and is justified in knowing it.

A political party does not put together an election fund of $45,000,000 — for the election of the President alone, not of Governors or Senators or Representatives — without having a little more than a general connection with the banks and the corporations. One of the latest revelations in the case of the Committee for the Reelection of the President is that a contribution of $25,000 immediately procured for the donor a federal charter for a bank, much more quickly, as has been officially stated, than such a charter is usually made available. It is quite clear that the instances of which we know already are even less than the usual onetenth of the iceberg.

The connections are too direct to be denied. Just take the case of the dairies. On March 12, 1971, the Secretary of Agriculture announced that the federal support price for milk would remain at $4.66 per hundred pounds. Twelve days later, he announced that this price would be significantly increased. In the interval, the representatives of the dairies met both him and Richard Nixon; and the meeting with the President, on the day before the price increase was announced, has been described by William Powell, the President of Mid-American Dairymen, Inc:

We dairymen as a body can be a dominant group. On 23 March 1971, along with nine other dairy. farmers, I sat in the Cabinet Root of the White House across the table from the President of the United States and heard hint compliment the dairymen on their marvellous work in consolidating and unifying our indus' try, and our involvement in politics.

In the same letter, to another official Of Mid-American Dairymen, he said: "And I can assure you that the TAPE and ADEPT programs, as well as SPACE, played major part in this administration decision. TAPE is the acronym of the political arin and political fund-raising group of Mid' American Dairymen Inc, ADEPT of the same arm of Associated Milk Producers Inc., and SPACE of the same arm o_f Dairymen Inc. Tracking down these dummy organisations across the entire length and breadth of the country, througtl, the intricate structure of the thousands 01 large and small corporations, is an all but impossible task. But it has been reliablY reported that, in the two years preceding the mid-term elections of 1970, the mill'

producers contributed to the Republican Party a total of $420,000, a sum equivlent to t'ne single contribution of IT&T.

Most of such details have come to light only as the result of other legal actions: in this case, a lawsuit brought by the National Farmers Organisation against the Mid-America Dairymen. Is it surprising that Americans whose sensibilities are not yet paralysed wonder what remains to be revealed, and what four more years of such an administration would bring?