At one point he and Haldeman and Ehrlichman are discussing the question of getting Mitchell to take the entire rap, thus drawing the lightning, but they suddenly remember John Dean’s earlier warning that the two high assistants might well be indictable themselves.
NIXON: We did not cover up, though, that’s what decides, that’s what’s [sic] decides . . . Dean’s case is the question. And I do not consider him guilty . . . Because if he—if that’s the case, then half the staff is guilty.
EHRLICHMAN: That’s it. He’s guilty of really no more except in degree.
NIXON: That’s right. Then [sic] others.
EHRLICHMAN: Then [sic] a lot of . . .
NIXON: And frankly then [sic] I have been since a week ago, two weeks ago.
And a moment later, Ehrlichman returns to the bad smell:
EHRLICHMAN: But what’s been bothering me is . . .
NIXON: That with knowledge, we’re still not doing anything.
So he knew that he was, at a minimum, reaching for the forbidden fruit—obstruction of justice—since he was in possession of knowledge of a crime which he was not revealing to any authority. One has to ask why he did not stop right there. Is it possible that in the tapes he withheld (as of this writing) there was evidence that his surprise at the burglary was feigned? that, in short, he knew all along that he was protecting himself from prosecution? At this point there is no evidence of this, so we must wonder at other reasons for his so jeopardizing his very position, and we are back again with his character, his ideas and feelings.
There is a persistent note of plaintiveness when Nixon compares Watergate with the Democrats’ crimes, attributing the press’s outcry to liberal hypocrisy. The Democratic Party is primarily corrupt, a bunch of fakers spouting humane slogans while underneath the big city machines like Daley’s steal elections, as Kennedy’s victory was stolen from him in Chicago. Welfare, gimme-politics, perpetuate the Democratic constituency. The Kennedys especially are immoral, unfaithful to family, and ruthless in pursuit of power. Worse yet, they are the real professionals who know how to rule with every dirty trick in the book. A sort of embittered ideology helps lower Nixon into the pit.
For the Republicans, in contrast, are naïve and really amateurs at politics because they are basically decent, hardworking people. This conviction of living in the light is vital if one is to understand the monstrous distortions of ethical ideas in these transcripts. Nixon is decency. In fact, he is America; at one point after Dean has turned state’s evidence against them, Haldeman even says, “He’s not un-American and anti-Nixon.” These men stand in a direct line from the Puritans of the first Plymouth Colony who could swindle and kill Indians secure in the knowledge that their cause was holy. Nixon seems to see himself as an outsider, even now, in politics. Underneath he is too good for it. When Dean, before his betrayal, tries to smuggle reality into the Oval Office—by warning that people are not going to believe that “Chapin acted on his own to put his old friend Segretti to be a Dick Tuck on somebody else’s campaign. They would have to paint it into something more sinister . . . part of a general [White House] plan”—Nixon observes with a certain mixture of condemnation and plain envy, “Shows you what a master Dick Tuck is.”
This ideology, like all ideologies, is a pearl formed around an irritating grain of sand, which, for Nixon, is something he calls the Establishment, meaning Eastern Old Money. “The basic thing,” he says, “is the Establishment. The Establishment is dying and so they’ve got to show that . . . it is just wrong [the Watergate] just because of this.” So there is a certain virtue in defending now what the mere duty he swore to uphold requires he root out. In a diabolical sense he seems to see himself clinging to a truth which, only for the moment, appears nearly criminal. But the real untruth, the real immorality shows up in his mind very quickly—it is Kennedy, and he is wondering if they can’t put out some dirt on Chappaquiddick through an investigator they had working up there. But like every other such counterattack this one falls apart because it could lead back to Kalmbach’s paying this investigator with campaign funds, an illegal usage. So the minuet starts up and stops time after time, a thrust blunted by the realization that it can only throw light upon what must be kept in the dark. Yet their conviction of innocent and righteous intentions stands undisturbed by their knowledge of their own vulnerability.
And it helps to explain, this innocence and righteousness, why they so failed to appraise reality, in particular that they were continuing to act in obstruction of justice by concealing what they knew and what they knew they knew and what they told one another they knew. It is not dissimilar to Johnson’s persistence in Vietnam despite every evidence that the war was unjust and barbarous, for Good People do not commit crimes, and there is simply no way around that.
Yet from time to time Nixon senses that he is floating inside his own psyche. “If we could get a feel,” he says, “I just have a horrible feeling that we may react . . . ”
HALDEMAN: Yes. That we are way overdramatizing.
NIXON: That’s my view. That’s what I don’t want to do either. [A moment later] Am I right that we have got to do something to restore the credibility of the Presidency?
And on the verge of reality the ideology looms, and they scuttle back into the hole—Haldeman saying, “Of course you know the credibility gap in the old [Democratic] days.” So there they are, comfortably right again, the only problem being how to prove it to the simpletons outside.
Again, like any good play, the transcripts reflect a single situation or paradox appearing in a variety of disguises that gradually peel away the extraneous until the central issue is naked. In earlier pages they are merely worried about bad publicity, then it is the criminal indictment of one or another of the secondary cadres of the administration, until finally the heart of darkness is endangered, Haldeman and Ehrlichman and thus Nixon himself. In other words, the mistake called Watergate, an incident they originally view as uncharacteristic of them, a caper, a worm that fell on their shoulders, turns out to be one of the worms inside them that crawled out.
So the aspects of Nixon which success had once obscured now become painfully parodistic in his disaster. He almost becomes a pathetically moving figure as he lifts his old slogans out of his bag. He knows now that former loyalists are testifying secretly to the grand jury, so he erects the facade of his own “investigation,” which is nothing but an attempt to find out what they are testifying to, the better to prepare himself for the next explosion; he reverts time and again to recalling his inquisitorial aptitude in the Hiss case, which made him a national figure. But now he is on the other end of the stick, and, after a string of calculations designed to cripple the Ervin committee, he declaims, “I mean, after all, it is my job and I don’t want the Presidency tarnished, but also I am a law-enforcement man,” even as he is trying to lay the whole thing off on Mitchell, the very symbol of hard-line law enforcement, the former attorney general himself.
Things degenerate into farce at times, as when he knows the Ervin committee and the grand jury are obviously out of his control and on the way to eating him up, and he speaks of making a “command decision.” It is a sheer unconscious dullness of a magnitude worthy of Ring Lardner’s baseball heroes. There are scenes, indeed, which no playwright would risk for fear of seeming too mawkishly partisan.
For example, the idea comes to Nixon repeatedly that he must act with candor, simply, persuasively. Now, since John Dean has been up to his neck in the details of the various attempts to first discover and then hide the truth, should Dean be permitted by the president to appear before a grand jury, eminently qualified as he is as the knower of facts? The president proceeds to spitball a public announcement before Ehrlichman’s and Ziegler’s sharp judgmental minds:
NIXON: Mr. Dean certainly wants the opportunity to defend himself against these charges. He would welcome the opportunity and what we have to do is to work out
a procedure which will allow him to do so consistent with his unique position of being a top member of the President’s staff but also the Counsel. There is a lawyer, Counsel . . . [it starts breaking down] not lawyer, Counsel—but the responsibility of the Counsel for confidentiality.
ZIEGLER: Could you apply that to the grand jury?
EHRLICHMAN: Absolutely. The grand jury is one of those occasions where a man in his situation can defend himself.
NIXON: Yes. The grand jury. Actually, if called, we are not going to refuse for anybody called before the grand jury to go, are we, John?
EHRLICHMAN: I can’t imagine (unintelligible).
NIXON: Well, if called, he will be cooperative, consistent with his responsibilities as Counsel. How do we say that?
EHRLICHMAN: He will cooperate.
NIXON: He will fully cooperate.
EHRLICHMAN: Better check that with Dean. I know he’s got certain misgivings on this.
ZIEGLER: He did this morning.
NIXON: Yeah. Well, then, don’t say that.
Refusing himself his tragedy, Nixon ends in farce. After another of many attempts at appearing “forthcoming” and being thwarted yet again by all the culpability in the house, he suddenly exclaims, “What the hell does one disclose that isn’t going to blow something?” Thus speaketh the first law-enforcement officer of the United States. Excepting that this government is being morally gutted on every page, it is to laugh. And the humor of their own absurdity is not always lost on the crew, although it is understandably laced with pain. They debate whether John Mitchell might be sent into the Ervin committee but in an executive session barred to the public and TV and under ground rules soft enough to tie up the Old Constitutionalist in crippling legalisms.
NIXON: Do you think we want to go this route now? Let it hang out so to speak?
DEAN: Well, it isn’t really that . . .
HALDEMAN: It’s a limited hang-out.
DEAN: It is a limited hang-out. It’s not an absolute hang-out.
NIXON: But some of the questions look big hanging out publicly or privately. [Still, he presses the possibility.] If it opens doors, it opens doors . . .
As usual it is Haldeman who is left to interpolate the consequences.
HALDEMAN: John says he is sorry he sent those burglars in there—and that helps a lot.
NIXON: That’s right.
EHRLICHMAN: You are very welcome, sir.
(Laughter), the script reads then, and along with everything else it adds to the puzzle of why Nixon ordered his office bugged in the first place, and especially why he did not turn off the machine once the magnitude of Watergate was clear to him. After all, no one but he and the technicians in the secret service knew the spools were turning.
As a nonsubscriber to the school of psychohistory—having myself served as the screen upon which Norman Mailer, no less, projected the lesions of his own psyche, to which he gave my name—I would disclaim the slightest inside knowledge, if that be necessary, and rest simply on the public importance of this question itself. Watergate aside, it is a very odd thing for a man to bug himself. Perhaps the enormity of it is better felt if one realizes that in a preelectronic age a live stenographer would have had to sit concealed in Nixon’s office as he exchanged affections with a Haldeman, whom he admired and whose fierce loyalty moved him deeply. At a minimum, does it not speak a certain contempt even for those he loved to have subjected his relationship with them to such recorded scrutiny? Can he ever have forgotten that the record was being made as count would show he has more broken speeches by far than anyone in those pages. He is almost never addressed as “Mr. President,” or even as “sir,” except by Henry Petersen, whose sense of protocol and respect, like—remarkably enough—John Mitchell’s stands in glaring contrast to the locker-room familiarity of his two chief lieutenants. He can hardly ever assert a policy idea without ending with, “Am I right?” or, “You think so?” It is not accidental that both Ehrlichman and Haldeman, like Colson, were so emphatically rough and, in some reports, brutal characters. They were his devils and he their god, but a god because the Good inhabits him while they partake of it but are his mortal side and must sometimes reach into the unclean.
To turn off the tapes, then, when an elementary sense of survival would seem to dictate their interruption, would be to make an admission which, if it were made, would threaten his very psychic existence and bring on the great dread against which his character was formed—namely, that he is perhaps fraudulent, perhaps a fundamentally fearing man, perhaps not really enlisted in the cause of righteousness but merely in his own aggrandizement of power, and power for the purpose not of creativity and good but of filling the void where spontaneity and love should be. Nixon will not admit his share of evil in himself, and so the tapes must go on turning, for the moment he presses that STOP button he ends the godly illusion and must face his human self. He can record his own open awareness that he and his two bravos are quite possibly committing crime in the sun-filled, pristine White House itself, but as long as the tapes turn, a part of him is intrepidly recording the bald facts, as God does, and thereby bringing the day of judgment closer, the very judgment he has abhorred and dearly wants. For the hope of being justified at the very, very end is a fierce hope, as is the fear of being destroyed for the sins whose revelation and admission will alone crown an evaded, agonized life with meaning. The man aspires to the heroic. No one, not even his worst enemies, can deny his strength, his resiliency. But it is not the strength of the confronter, as is evidenced by his inability to level with John Mitchell, whom he privately wants to throw to the wolves but face to face cannot blame. It is rather the perverse strength of the private hero testing his presumptions about himself against God, storming an entrance into his wished-for nature which never seems to embrace him but is always an arm’s length away. Were he alive to a real authority in him, a true weight of his own existing, such a testing would never occur to him. There are leaders who take power because they have found themselves, and there are leaders who take power in search of themselves. A score of times in those pages Nixon refers to “the President” as though he were the president’s emissary, a doppelgänger. Excepting in official documents did Roosevelt, Eisenhower, Kennedy, even Truman, so refer to himself? Surely not in private conversation with their closest friends. But to stop those tapes would mean the end of innocence, and in a most cruelly ironic way, an act of true forthrightness.
If such was his drama, he forged the sword that cut him down. It was a heroic struggle except that it lacked the ultimate courage of self-judgment and the reward of insight. Bereft of the latter, he is unjust to himself and shows the world his worst while his best he buries under his pride and the losing hope that a resurrected public cynicism will rescue his repute. For it is not enough now, the old ideology that the Democrats are even more corrupt. The president is not a Democrat or Republican here, he is as close as we get to God.
And if his struggle was indeed to imprint his best presumptions upon history, and it betrayed him, it is a marvel that it took place now, when America has discovered the rocky terrain where her innocence is no more, where God is simply what happens and what has happened, and if you like being called good you have to do good, if only because other nations are no longer powerlessly inert but looking on with X-ray eyes, and you no longer prevail for the yellow in your silky hair. The most uptight leader we have had, adamantly resisting the age, has backhandedly announced the theme of its essential drama in his struggle—to achieve authenticity without paying authenticity’s price—and in his fall. The hang-out—it is a marvel, is unlimited; at long last, after much travail, Richard Nixon is one of us.
American Playhouse: On Politics and the Art of Acting
2001
Here are some observations about politicians as actors. Since some of my best friends are actors, I don’t dare say anything bad about the art itself. The fact is th
at acting is inevitable as soon as we walk out our front doors and into society. I am acting now; certainly I am not using the same tone as I would in my living room. It is not news that we are moved more by our glandular reactions to a leader’s personality, his acting, than by his proposals or by his moral character. To their millions of followers, after all, many of them highly regarded university intellectuals, Hitler and Stalin were profoundly moral men, revealers of new truths. Aristotle thought man was by nature a social animal, and indeed we are ruled more by the social arts, the arts of performance—by acting, in other words—than anybody wants to think about for very long.
In our own time television has created a quantitative change in all this; one of the oddest things about millions of lives now is that ordinary individuals, as never before in human history, are so surrounded by acting. Twenty-four hours a day everything seen on the tube is either acted or conducted by actors in the shape of news anchormen and -women, including their hairdos. It may be that the most impressionable form of experience now for many if not most people consists in their emotional transactions with actors, which happen far more of the time than with real people. In the past, a person might have confronted the arts of performance once a year in a church ceremony or in a rare appearance by a costumed prince or king and his ritualistic gestures; it would have seemed a very strange idea that ordinary folk would be so subjected every day to the persuasions of professionals whose studied technique, after all, was to assume the character of someone else.
Is this persistent experience of any importance? I can’t imagine how to prove this, but it seems to me that when one is surrounded by such a roiling mass of consciously contrived performances it gets harder and harder to locate reality anymore. Admittedly, we live in an age of entertainment, but is it a good thing that our political life, for one, be so profoundly governed by the modes of theater, from tragedy to vaudeville to farce? I find myself speculating whether the relentless daily diet of crafted, acted emotions and canned ideas is not subtly pressing our brains not only to mistake fantasy for what is real but to absorb this falseness into our personal sensory process. This last election is an example. Apparently we are now called upon to act as though nothing very unusual happened and as though nothing in our democratic process has deteriorated, including our claim to the right to instruct lesser countries on how to conduct fair elections. So, in a subtle way, we are induced to become actors, too. The show, after all, must go on, even if the audience is obligated to join in the acting.
Collected Essays Page 50