The Worst and the Grayest

Who Knows Their Names, who knows their faces? Grayness is crucial, anonymity is prized. Herb Klein, who has been with him longer than most, is memorable for never having done or said anything memorable. They seem men designed to function rather than to live. Who could, in happier, pre-Watergate times, tell Haldeman from Ehrlichman? One was John and one was Bob, but which was which? Efficiency is valued. They seem mechanistic more than anything else, more at ease with the mechanics of politics than with the humanity of it. Pleasure and joy make them wary. Pleasure may be sinful and it may be a sign of frailty; it may weaken the fiber. He is against weakening the fiber. There are speeches to prove it.

They are not prized for their individualism. Individualism is dangerous; there is only one individual, only one voice, only one ego. Were there moments of individualism in Hickel, Romney, Peterson, et al.? Did they make the mistake of believing that being a Cabinet official was real, that a Cabinet officer was his own man? Out. And no matter how much Pat Moynihan admired Nixon, he could never last long in that White House, because Moynihan, no matter what his politics, was simply too gay, too gregarious, too much a lover of friends and talk and human intercourse. Social intercourse and social contact are dangerous, because they can be revealing, and Nixon above all does not like to be revealed.

He himself is the most secretive and isolated of our leaders, the most leak proof. Lyndon Johnson hated leaks as much as Nixon, maybe more, but he was constitutionally unable to stop them, because he was so terribly human. He was always talking, arguing, rampaging, always hopelessly involved and engaged with other human beings. So the FBI, when directed by Johnson to check a particular security leak, would inevitably find that the source of the leak was Johnson himself. An excess of humanity has never been a problem for Nixon; he is the most private, secluded of men, the most deliberately hidden. To the degree that other men know him or want to know him, and are willing to talk about him, they tend to disappear from his life. He has been in the national spotlight for some 25 years and yet his thought processes are still a considerable mystery. (He has, however, developed the art of making others feel they are part of his processes, that their opinions are being weighed, when of course they are not.) His career is notable for the absence of lasting friendships in a profession where common struggle and human byplay normally produce strong and lasting relationships. To the degree that he had two old political friends, they were Bill Rogers and Bob Finch. No two men have been more publicly humiliated and emasculated in the Nixon years—not by the Senate, and not by the press, but by, of course, the White House.

So the new palace guard is modern functional, in his image, or the image that he would want to have. They have succeeded in part because they are colorless, they will not (with the notable exception of Kissinger) detract from the President, share his spotlight, create a constituency of their own, have an identity of their own. Poor Lyndon Johnson again, complaining that when Bill Moyers was press secretary. Moyers' image improved while his own crumbled. There will be no such problem in today's White House. They are a special new breed come to the political lore in this century, men with great and driving ambition and an extraordinary capacity to subjugate it for the good of The Man, which of course is the good of their own careers.

They are men fascinated by the means of controlling processes and techniques. They may not know (or care) whether the elevators work in the summer in the high-rise tenements in Harlem or whether in fact the very richest members of the society pay any income tax. (If the very richest in the society do not pay very much tax, then they are vulnerable to the state, afraid of the state, curiously powerless in the state, which is more important than paying their real dues to the society.) But they are experts at going into a foreign city and stringing the electronic gear necessary to get The Man on television, to get the right camera (concluded on page 167)The Worst and the Grayest(continued from page 151) angles, laying down the television dollies just so. They seem more linked to the men like them in other countries than to their own society. One thinks of them and senses the new breed coming to power in eastern Europe, the apparatchik as manager: function and career over belief, what can we get the state to do for us: they are all interchangeable parts with those in other governments.

They know their man and their job, and the uses of modern Executive power. They are modest, of course, but their role is not. They know which branch of the Government has an unlimited budget and jet airplanes for travel. They know that if a Senator or Supreme Court Justice goes to Peking or Moscow, hundreds of reporters and television teams do not follow, but that when the Executive branch travels the trips can be vast television spectaculars, with the most powerful executives in the television industry scrambling to go along as sound men. (Nothing was followed so carefully in Peking as the daily playback of what was being seen and said on U. S. television about the trip.) So they have learned that they can run for office against crime in the streets and decay in the cities and runaway inflation. and then once elected disappear from view, only to be televised at length in foreign lands. And they can, upon returning home, issue decrees saying that crime in the streets has been defeated, the cities saved, inflation curbed. They will not, after all, make the mistake of having him televised visiting a ghetto and saying there that crime in the streets has been curbed or visiting a meat market and talking there about how they ended inflation. They are modern men, truly Orwellian; reality is not life, reality is saying something on television.

Yet they are moralists. Pieties abound. They are here to save American society from the evils that lurk, to set a new national moral tone: We have their own speeches to prove it. Now, as we get to know them, we have a better sense of what their morality is: that it is better to be rich and strong than poor and weak; strength strengthens, weakness weakens: it is the obligation of the poor to become rich and of the weak to become strong. The president himself is a moralist on this; above all, he cares about the fiber of the nation. Having ended the war (with terms deemed to be peace with honor—honor simply because he says it is honor), he now wants to work on America's character. A favorite theme, with—surprise—his very own career as an Algerlike example: In his mind, myth has become fact. Hardship and suffering strengthened him, thus it can strengthen others. His interviews are filled with this theme: stories of the Nixons when he was a boy, a son sick with tuberculosis, the family poor, unable to pay the medical bills, but deciding that to ask for help was morally wrong. Thus, a son was lost. God's will. The right decision. So the President knows of hardship and suffering and how—it makes a man of you. Welfare offends. But not rich man's welfare, the welfare to Penn Central or Lockheed—there is no outrage there, just outrage against the Office of Economic Opportunity for offering the most pathetic of our society decent legal help. Nor does the President's own moral vision account for his slush fund as a young Congressman, nor for the enormous fees paid for him as an embryonic lawyer in New York after his Vice-Presidential years. Again the lesson of this Administration: It is all right for the rich to be caught in the act of being rich, but it is immoral for the poor to be caught in the act of being poor. So the pieties continue, the exhortations to return to good old-fashioned morality, the harsh talk about, bringing back capital punishment, and all the while the Watergate evidence mounts, linked conclusively to the White House. Should we be surprised, then, that when Watergate finally broke, and the stain reached everywhere, Henry Kissinger in a New York speech movingly asked for compassion for the men involved: What better definition of this Administration—compassion and mercy extend only to themselves.

And what of it? What of the fact that in terms of the democratic society and political liberty. Watergate is the most, chilling episode in recent memory, the most chilling of moral and ethical acts? Watergate is. finally, complicated, difficult and intricate, and perhaps only a small percentage of the country knows how truly frightening it is: so by the codes of the Administration, if the public does not understand the true immorality of Watergate. then it is not immoral. Morality is what you can get away with. Only at the end. when the lesser men cracked and the trail led to the very heart of the White House. did Nixon act. not in defense of liberty but in defense of Nixon. Which brings me back finally to a lovely graffito I saw recently in New York:

Who Would have thought that Richard Nixon would turn out to be Richard Nixon?