The Tyranny of Weakness

Fairly early in Nixon's first term, he held a bachelor dinner in the White House for "intellectuals" sympathetic to his reign. (It goes without saying that the gathering was a small one.) One guest at the meal said, later, he had looked forward to hearing from the President himself, from such little-known quantities as Haldeman and Ehrlichman, or from the other guests. But John Mitchell was the man who commandeered the table, steered and owned the conversation, thumped down opinions, course by course, not pausing for a question--and, all the while, Nixon fairly hung on his friend's words, looking proud of his performance. The least interesting man present had succeeded in interesting the one man who counted.

It is difficult now, after his fall, to appreciate the magic of John Mitchell's brutishness in its full blossom. Only a slight touch of that charm lingered when he appeared, rheumy-eyed and mottled, before Sam Ervin's committee-- a trace of the old manner preserved long after its base had been eroded. This trapped man could muster heartier contempt for his baiters than they could bring to bear on him. Without a leg to stand on, he remained stronger than most of the preceding witnesses. A worshiper of power could still be impressed--William S. White wrote a column full of praise: "In John Mitchell the President selected a man and not some spuriously golden-haired boy." But White learned, in his L.B.J. days, to enjoy being bullied. Most viewers saw only a lumpish insensitivity under the loose veil of liver spots woven over Mitchell's face.

To see what Mitchell looked like by candlelight to Richard Nixon, we must recall his time of power: setting up a Government, taking on a job (at Justice) without bothering to learn its requirements, casually suggesting to his predecessor (Ramsey Clark) that a friendly gesture initiated by Clark--after all Nixon's campaign attacks--would make the transition go smoother. Just before he was sworn in, Mitchell condescended to dispatch a young aide-- Kevin Phillips--to scout out his new assignment. Phillips seemed weirdly uninquisitive to those trying to instruct him in routines of the department--as if any question would imply self-questioning, convict him of Clark's own dubiety or hesitance. But Phillips made it clear he was not worthy to unlatch his master's sandal when it came to self-assurance: "Of course, Clark came up through the ranks and is more chummy with his staff than an outsider would be. But Mr. Mitchell will be the only personality in that room when he takes over. The others will be his assistants." Later, Mitchell would put this minion in his place: When asked if he agreed with Phillips' Southern strategy, outlined in The Emerging Republican Majority, he said: "I don't really have a practice of subscribing to the theories of my aides. It generally works the other way."

Last spring, I asked Phillips whether he had become disillusioned with Mitchell yet, and he replied: "I saw through him eight months ago." It took him, in other words, only four years--and Phillips is a bright young man, not one to linger with a loser.

Yet Phillips, in the long run, gives us no better clue than White to the original force of Mitchell in his friend's Administration. White liked being kicked, and Phillips was going to arrogance school-- apt pupil to a master teacher. Nixon, on the other hand, prefers kicking when he can get away with it, and realizes it is too late for him to acquire an imperturbable public air of assurance. Besides, the mystery of that White House dinner is only partly tied to Nixon's own admiration for Mitchell, his reliance on him during all his early steps in office. There is even greater puzzlement in Nixon's use of the man for this unlikely assignment. The dinner was meant to woo, however discreetly, men from a sector of the population hostile to this Administration--even though Nixon has, in the past, indicated that he thinks of himself as an intellectual, too. He works like a scholar in the areas he knows well and thought Kennedy (for instance) an empty dilettante in foreign-policy matters. As he once told Jules Witcover: "In order to make a decision, an individual should sit on his rear end and dig into the books." Nixon takes a justified pride in the number of books-- and the number of countries--he has "dug into" by sheer dint of study. Yet no one, not even Nixon in his most smitten days, could think of Mitchell as a very great digger into books. The man never hid his contempt for academicians--look, for God's sake, at the salaries they get. Challenged by party regulars over his lack of political experience before the 1968 campaign, Mitchell just reminded them of the money he had made--for him, that skill was the measure of all others. Asked if he might be awed now that his boss was President of the United States, he told an interviewer: "I've made more money in the practice of the law than Nixon, brought more clients into the firm, can hold my own in argument with him and, as far as I'm concerned, I can deal with him as an equal." No mere professor can make that boast.

Mitchell was as unlikely to impress intellectuals as they were to upset his certitudes. He spelled out his contempt in a 1970 pronouncement: "[Nixon is] aware of everything that's going on. I'll tell you who's not informed, though. It's these stupid kids.... And the professors are just as bad, if not worse. They don't know anything. Nor do these stupid bastards who are running our educational institutions." Nixon has, indeed, certain impressive claims to being an intellectual, which just deepens the mystery: Why has he been, from the days of Murray Chotiner to the days of Charles Colson, an intellectual who trave's in the company of thugs? It would be one thing if he used them as his buffer when dealing with the harsher side of politics--to awe the businessmen or show regulars how tough he is. But he brings out his less appetizing specimens precisely when he wants to move into circles where he should feel at home himself.

But of course he is not at home among even the friend'iest intellectuals. He talked once of teaching at "one of the fine schools--Oxford, for instance," if he lost his bid for the Presidency. Nothing could be less likely. Cast by history on the side of pseudo-Populist anti-establish-mentarians like Joe McCarthy, Nixon--who lacked their relish for assaults on intellect--was doomed to champion the "common folk" against uncommon elites. He continues to star in that comedy, even now. His is the Administration that will "play in Peoria," though Nixon has less of the common touch than any President of modern times. He hides away with millionaires, decking out his White House with trumpets and formality; he never feels more at ease than when secluded with a German professor talking about Asiatic statesmen. Nixon is a psychically displaced person--not at home with the crowds, even when cheering their attacks on establishment citadels; not at home in the establishment, even when its power centers have been put in his control. He is always a wary intruder--pirouetting from aggression to obsequiousness in mid-sentence, wooing and affronting at the same time. He mixes his deference with resentment, his admiration with envy, in ways that make him a man of half-gestures and permanently checked impulse.

That alone can explain his dinner and the Mitchell monolog. He was saying, by their mere invitation, that he wanted these men and could use their help. But he was simultaneously anticipating rebuff, letting Mitchell signal that he did not really need them. He does not have the righteous contempt for excellence that his Wallacelike role demands--he must lean on the brutal types for that. He relies on them to be worse than he is in front of those he obscurely considers better than he is. It is a curiously self-effacing assertiveness--he "toughs it out" through his minions because he is too sensitive and intelligent to do his own contemning. He travels with thugs because he is not a thug himself--these are hired insensitivities. He told Theodore White, in an unusually revealing interview, "I never shoot blanks." He meant that his bullyboys don't. Just as he said he knew nothing about Watergate--"the boys," as Mitchell called them, were supposed to take care of that. The tone was set by that Attorney General whose first judgment over Watergate was that "Kay Graham has her tit caught in a wringer."

Nixon's perpetually off-guard awkward attitude in most company--but most of all in company he respects--led indirectly (his only direction) to Watergate. Power is never so dangerous as when it feels powerless, grasping at desperate measures, all in self-defense (for which read national security). Our Federal Government has been an unwieldy giant for decades; but now it is a fearful giant--the kind we have best reason to fear. It is the man who wanted to teach at "one of the fine schools" whose aides tried to cut off MIT grants, whose Vice-President attacked Yale's president, whose closest advisor called university heads "stupid bastards," whose apologists mounted the most sustained threat of censorship since World War Two. The man who considers himself an intellectual has run an Administration openly at war with intellectuals. It is indicative that Nixon chose, as his fine school, a foreign one, not native. Mitchell might grump that no school run by the stupid bastards could be really good. But Nixon must have felt that none in America would have him. Dithery Hubert, dewlapped with half a century's chin wagging, was hired to lecture (interminably) at Minnesota. Eugene McCarthy, poetically hesitant, was posed in front of a poetry seminar in Maryland. But Nixon, knowing he knows more than either, knew well enough he would venture onto the campus as an alien, almost as a captive ape or display piece--and in grasping that inequity, he laid the basis for his friends' intense hatred of outsiders.

Outsiders, to the Nixon men, were all those who might misunderstand or wrong their leader--as he was wronged so often in the past. It was bad enough to be humiliated in the press, or mocked by the pretentious, when he was a private citizen. But for a President to be mistreated is a national disgrace. No precaution could be disdained when this was at stake. The White House guard had to worry about demonstrators, not only massed outside the White House but slipping into it--a woman might step forward out of a singing group and wave an insulting banner, musicians might refuse to play Hail to the Chief, some unconsidered worshiper might pray for peace at a prayer breakfast. A composer's (continued on page 138)Tyranny of Weakness(continued from page 118) text might contain some veiled insult-- best cancel it and stick to perfectly safe things, like the 1812 Overture.

Nixon, who has suffered through so many demeaning moments in his life, must be spared any further one, no matter how small the issue. Much of the Watergate team first gathered its resources to head off street demonstrations. That was Egil "Bud" Krogh's early assignment; the matter was too grave and personal to be trusted to D.C. police or the Justice Department.

The White House was under almost perpetual siege. People came in on tours and poured blood there, or carried insulting signs out front. The professors came, too, or praised the students for coming. No wonder those inside felt the aggression was all upon the other side, the outside. It was typical of slick Chuck Colson to pooh-pooh the White House enemies list as a mere screening process for those to be invited to the White House. But there was some genetic connection, after all: Each person entering the White House was seen as a potential enemy--even the friendly academics who were bored by Mitchell. If you cannot trust the Johnny Mann Singers, whom can you trust?

No one, really--and certainly not any professors. Even Pat Moynihan, while working up his style of sycophantic flamboyance for Nixon's delight, was not trusted by the keepers of the Presidential dignity. He not only talked too much but talked with too many people--even with the enemies. He was a new kind of security risk--a dignity risk in the starched and pompous White House. Anyone who laughs that much might well laugh, someday, at the President. In some covert way--who knows?--he was probably already laughing at him while pretending to laugh with him.

Indeed, it was his very access to the President that made him dangerous. Since Nixon is an intellectual (though not given proper recognition as one), he tests his mettle with a chosen few professors--a Kissinger, a Moynihan, a Shultz. This is inevitable, perhaps--but not a happy sight for those protecting him. He must be protected even from himself. Purge and attempted purge would be the order of the day near Nixon. When a Wally Hickel aligns himself with students, he must go. Even Kissinger sees too many acquaintances from Harvard. "Pete" Peterson goes partying in Georgetown. Len Garment is not only assigned to placate blacks but seems to like their company. For that matter, Klein even likes some journalists.

Mitchell, again, had been the first to hunt for infiltrating "liberals" in the Nixon camp. Even during the 1968 campaign, he was alarmed by Evans and Novak reports that some young staffers were not far enough right to suit the Nixon image. He hated to hear about a Bob Dole or a Bob Finch talking mushily when he was orchestrating barks and growls. After using Bob Mardian to sabotage Finch's HEW on the busing issue, Mitchell--beginning his own slow decline--still served as a bumper between Finch and Nixon in the White House. Mitchell was also upset at Ripon Society types who gravitated toward the Moynihan office. He once referred to Ripon's young members as "juvenile delinquents," and the society was a particular target for Kevin Phillips, who disliked its establishment style. Most politicians try to reach beyond their immediate constituency; Mitchell kept expelling people from that small first circle of Republican intellectuals--whence his first-strike offen-siveness at the White House dinner.

Others were learning the lesson of that dinner, along with the invited guests. If Nixon admired the boorish strength of Mitchell, a pre-emptive rudeness that anticipates insult, then Haldeman and Ehrlichman knew what path they must follow upward. And their righteousness had a solider base than Mitchell's mere self-satisfaction. Haldeman, lean and ascetic, with an insect's economy of feature and death's-head nose, was trimmed down to monomaniac devotion. Ehrlichman the teetotaler was meant to deal with the Hill, to indulge his contempt for drunken Congressmen--he just widened the voracious smile, as his guillotine eyebrows were gleefully drawn up and dropped. These two could out-outgrowl Mitchell in distrustfulness, could believe at last that Mitchell was not single-minded enough in his loyalty. Those closest to Nixon had to be shoved aside most energetically. When even Len Garment fell victim to this process, he was not surprised: "Considering the way Nixon squeaked in, they [Haldeman and Ehrlichman] were probably essential. Without them, he might have fallen apart." That is not disillusioned bitterness speaking--as Garment proved by going back to serve when there was even greater danger to the Nixon stability. Those who admire Nixon most also feel a need to nurse and minister to him. Theodore White quotes "one of the three men closest to him" (at that time, Mitchell?) as saying in 1970: "They'd driven one President from office, they'd broken Johnson's will. Were they going to break another President? They had him on the edge of nervous breakdown." The protectors' strength grows from their charge's weakness, his demand for shelter, for quiet and surcease from insult; from the fact that he has been wronged so often and felt it so deeply. What was simply a crude manner in Mitchell became a principled ruthlessness in Haldeman, an insensitivity toward the outside fed from acute sensitivity to Nixon's wounds and exposed nerves. Thus power grew by feeling powerless; aggression always looked like self-defense. Only terrified men institute a Terror.

Haldeman was cruel out of an unquestioning kindness toward his boss. But other White House aides, more complex than he, had to ask some questions. They needed not only the instinct for averting scorn but a theory of their grievances--a way to account for the regularity with which that scorn did strike. Moynihan elaborated, in his memoranda, a view that liberal do-gooders were angered at their slipping hold upon the proletariat. He advised Nixon that he must not let himself be--as Lyndon Johnson was--"toppled by a mob": "No matter that it was a mob of college professors, millionaires, flower children and Radcliffe girls. It was a mob that by 1968 had effectively physically separated the Presidency from the people."

Patrick Buchanan thought the press was out to get revenge for the fading of Camelot. Both men talked of elitism and argued that the electorate (not so much the President) was the true victim of the intellectuals. Moynihan said the liberals meant to deprive the people of their President, and Buchanan agreed: "These men [TV commentators] are using that monopoly position [on the three networks] to persuade the nation to share their distrust of and hostility toward the elected Government." Moynihan thought liberalism, in its decline, had an almost Luciferian urge toward utter negation: "The leading cultural figures are going--or have gone--into opposition.... It is their pleasure to cause trouble." Buchanan describes the same phenomenon, of men "taking an increasingly adversary stance toward the social and political values, mores and traditions of the majority of Americans." To be an adversary of American political tradition is almost the definition of a traitor--a definition Haldeman would make even more precise when describing Nixon's Congressional opponents.

In attacking elitism for its scorn of the electorate, both men called their opponents unrepresentative. Who elected Walter Cronkite? Buchanan writes: "To whom do the gentlemen of the networks answer, other than some nameless executive, whose principal concern is less with the welfare of the nation than the Nielsen ratings and profit margins?" Here Buchanan skates on very thin ice. If Nielsen ratings control the networks, then viewers do elect Cronkite. And a disinterested effort at "the welfare of the nation," carried on despite its unpopularity, sounds, by irony, elitist.

Theodore White, trying to sort out the inconsistencies in Moynihan-Buchananism, to save its essential point, argues that the self-proclaimed guardians of the nation's good, who do not have to answer (continued on page 160)Tyranny of Weakness(continued from page 138) to popular mood, are family-owned newspapers such as The Washington Post and The New York Times. (CBS presents a problem to this theory, which White fudges in the few places where he cannot manage to forget it.) Mrs. Graham, in this theory, runs her wringer to please herself, not the public; and this private kind of rich kid's operation may catch up various parts of her person. White gives us, in politer terms, the theory adumbrated by Mitchell's crack.

And it is nonsense. The Times and Post are liberal not because they can afford to ignore their constituency but because their constituency is liberal. It is made up of the academic world and of those awed or influenced by that world. This is a self-certifying and self-perpetuating elite--a point so obvious that it is tautological. Buchanan sputters against "an arrogant and unelected elite"--as if an elite would be OK if it were Populist controlled (i.e., nonelite). A nobility is all right, as long as the commoners create it. But elites are self-certifying. It would make no sense for the uncredentialed to grant credentials. A professor of mathematics is judged by his peers, not by plebiscite. Even the Administration admits this in its calmer moments. Try to get a Government grant for research by taking a petition in the street. The military is a self-judging elite that Nixon's men think admirable. (When was the last time enlistees voted for a general?) The business elite is almost as acceptable. (His assembly line does not vote Mr. Ford into office.) So it is not elitism in itself that Nixonians deplore. Any elite that agrees with the electorate--i.e., with this Administration--is not only praised; its degree of self-certifying professionalism is a point of honor. The chosen heroes of this Government are, after all, the elite test pilots and scientists who meet the rigorous requirements to be astronauts.

No, what bothers Nixonians like White is any elite that dares oppose election returns--not simply by having different internal procedures from the plebiscite (the Army has those) but by questioning the vote's outcome, challenging widely accepted views, claiming an expertise over matters moral and philosophical as well as technical. Space engineers know how to get to the moon; and the military even used to know how to win wars. But whether we ought to go to the moon or enter a war--those large moral questions the democracy alone must judge, not allowing for privileged judgment by any minority. (Billy Graham, Nixon's only moral "expert," hastens to tell you he knows nothing special about distant places like Vietnam or Cambodia; his writ extends only to local familiar places, like heaven and hell.)

What is fascinating is that the supposedly conservative Nixon Government is ignoring history, our American past, and arguments that were recognized as conservative only a short time ago. Under Democratic administrations--under the alphabetic thralldoms of F.D.R., H.S.T., J.F.K., L.B.J.--conservatives regularly praised elites, thought they rescued people from popular fads. The educated class has always had an impact, for good or ill, felt to be necessary by most civilized nations. Whether the "creative minority" was actually creative or destructive, it did try out ideas that the more sluggish majority came in time to accept or reject. In the 18th Century, the buzz of an intellectual capital like London or Paris or Philadelphia brought about most changes despite resistance from the larger bodies connected to these heads. Even so democratic an ideolog as Jefferson thought this was as it should be and said an elite was needed in America. The Senate was at first conceived as an elite body of "lords" to balance the more popular "commons" of the House. In other words, the elite Jefferson had in mind was desirable precisely as it opposed more popular pressures, as a leavening and correcting force. What Buchanan calls its vice, Jefferson considered its main virtue. It has been impossible to maintain this ideal within the electoral machinery itself (though up until yesterday conservatives defended its remains in the poll tax, the seniority system, the filibuster, the Electoral College). Yet the educated will always have more time to spend on affairs touching government; they will reach positions of greater influence, employ skills needed by the nation. Haldeman tried to deny this kind of dependence, asking that MIT grants be canceled. A government that tries this is committing suicide, no matter what returns say at election time. Most people do no more thinking about government than to show up (if at all) every four years at the polls. In between these elections, there are all kinds of tasks that must be performed--rulers must rule, as well as get elected. It has been the tendency of Teddy Whitism to reduce government to elections; and Nixon, with his distaste for domestic affairs, and his private way of running the world with the help of Kissinger, hoped the rest of the country could be ignored between his periodic wooing of the masses. He was the real radical. He tried to deny the need for an intelligentsia.

In the time of his Kulturkampf, Vice-President Agnew liked to assert that protesting students were not typical of the young. He was right in terms of sheer number. They did not represent the apolitical, the apathetic, the grade grinds and jocks and minimal performers. But if you went onto any campus in the late Sixties, you invariably found that the head of the student government, the editor of the school newspaper, the class orator were critics of the war. Those who would in time become influential, the articulators, the politically involved, were out of sympathy with the Nixon Administration. That Administration likes to praise "achievers" in one of its moods-- the one that glorifies the work ethic and success. Yet it had to appeal to the mass of inert and nonassertive types to claim support among the young.

I realize, of course, that the educated are sometimes wrong, and always pompous; a dangerous class even when it is not an insufferable one. I realize that being an intellectual is not at all the same as being intelligent--that "the best and the brightest" can fail spectacularly. Still, any society that wants to be intelligent has to have an intelligentsia, if only to oppose it. The Nixonian conservatives, recklessly innovating, tried not only to ignore this factor but to destroy it. They took offense, not because the elite prevailed (how many votes did McGovern get, after all?) but because it dared tarnish the electoral victory, robbing it of an intellectual sheen that was given so easily to the Kennedy victory over Nixon in 1960. It is not enough, anymore, to diminish the establishment's influence or power; the very existence of "effete snobs" who can mock the people's choice is an affront to right order. Such people, in the words of Nixon's first press conference on Watergate, "didn't accept the mandate of 1972." The Nixon men felt an angry summons, therefore, to go on search-and-destroy missions whenever this elite looked vulnerable. The intellectuals' glorification of Ellsberg gave them license to break in on (or beat up) this enemy of the democracy. When Mitchell and Kleindienst ignored the law during illegal arrests on May Day, they made no bones of the fact that the people were on their side and that was the higher law and order of Law and Order.

The fury of this assault on the elite is perfectly symbolized by its concentration on the press. The academy is protected by the taboo of academic freedom. Experts safe behind doctorates are not as easy a target as the working journalist. The press is especially vulnerable because it has a double constituency. It is meant to inform the masses; but much of what it must report on, from developments in science to economic trends, involves talking knowledgeably with experts. Besides, the writing skill and broad curiosity increasingly demanded of those who rise in journalism means that they have closer and closer ties with the academic and literary worlds. Furthermore, beyond the wire-service and police-reporting level, those who will give their work a thorough and critical reading are themselves part of an elite. Thus, White's book describes a landslide Nixon victory, (continued on page 277)Tyranny of Weakness(continued from page 160) but most of his readership will have voted for McGovern.

There is nothing surprising about this, nor deplorable. The press, by reason of its twofold direction (looking to the sphere of words and thought on one hand, and to the public it must serve on the other), acts as a bridge between the populace and the establishment, the electorate and the educators. That is why Cronkite, even though he is elected in the sense that he gets favorable viewer response in a competitive industry, stands a little to the left of the man we elected President. Agnew quite rightly suspects that Cronkite and his peers are consorting with the literary folk and with professors. But far from being divisive, as Buchanan argues, this keeps various parts of the nation in touch with one another--minorities with other minorities and with the majority. Maybe the people listen only to Nixon and the professors only to McGovern; but both listen, at least part of the time, to Cronkite--who therefore fulfills the abrogated Nixon promise to "bring us together." The press complements, rather than parroting, polls and election returns. It stands slightly apart, commenting. Without it, the electorate and the elite would have little if any contact with each other--and that is what Buchanan really wants. He condemns the press not for dividing but for uniting.

The Nixonian's hatred of the elite is magnified because he is not really at home with sneers at the pointyheads. Nixon, if anything, is more relaxed among the old Populists' real enemies-- with millionaire entrepreneurs like Bebe Rebozo and Robert Abplanalp, like C. Arnoldholt Smith or W. Clement Stone. Nixon would be awkward company in taverns. The oddity of his claim to be the people's kind of man is summed up in the fact that Agnew was trotted before us as a hoity-toity Harry Truman in tennis outfit and John Held, Jr., hairdo, camping out in the debris of the Rat Pack. Nixon's band of fearful little men, most of them disaffected intellectuals themselves, lacks the earthy disdain, the visceral sincerity that other politicians, at home in crowds and with common people, exude without an effort. Nixon must make up for that easy identification with the people by obsession with the one thing that links him to them--the common enemy, those intellectuals he envies as well as contemns. To remain the fake Populist he is, he must reject the more congenial type he might have been--the type he heaped ridicule on when it came before him as an Adlai or an Acheson, trying to cut them all down to the measure of Hiss, and just diminishing himself in the process. It is this self-maiming for which, in Nixon's eyes, the world still has something coming to it.

So every Democratic opponent, from Muskie to McGovern, had to be cast as an Ellsberg, while Ellsberg was being typed as a Hiss. The Senators running for President were "consciously aiding and abetting the enemy," Haldeman claimed as the election year began. It has been especially important for Nixon, from the day of his own election in 1968, to make people realize that Edward Kennedy is the elite's spoiled favorite. It was for a long time dogma in the White House that Teddy would be the opponent in 1972. The whole re-election race was shaped as a vendetta for the Kennedy defeat of Nixon in 1960. A dossier on the Massachusetts Senator was early begun and devoutly maintained. Kevin Phillips was already thinking ahead to the Kennedy race as he helped with the Humphrey one. Even after Chappaquid-dick, Teddy haunted the White House. Mitchell held strategy sessions on ways to get Teddy savaged (though not defeated) in his re-election race for Senator. He wanted a hard right-winger to take the Republican nomination, one who would not be finicky about snide side references to the accident. (Colson, who was becoming the White House Kennedy expert, put up Al Capp's name for the job--at the height of Capp's frenzy against "long-hairs," and before his own legal troubles with a young girl began.)

Kennedy's misfortunes, instead of placating the Nixon forces (as removing him from competition), just seemed to inflame them more. He could get away with things denied to Nixon (who lamented, while Bobby was still in the 1968 race, "Oh, hell, why does Bobby get to be so mean, and why do I have to be so nice?"). Teddy acts like a spoiled child, yet remains the darling of the establishment, given undeserved help along the way, a flunk-out with professors at his beck and call, the campus cutup and admired subtle tyrant, bullying with charm--a very Steerforth in the world where Uriah Heep must climb by obsequious skill, watching charismatic bunglers get all the praise. Teddy is every Alger Hiss who ever blocked Nixon's rise, making him climb by self-abasement. Heep lives at the contradiction point in a society that admits invisible distinctions while crowing its belief in competition. He is not understandable except in conjunction with Steerforth, he of the easy destructive charm. Heep, that is, cannot be understood until he can almost be excused. He is the spokesman of competitive merit in a world that honors it only in theory, one cheated by the system unless he cheats; speaking for the open race yet wronged by it and needing revenge upon it, even though--by being false to its own principles--he seems to vindicate it.

It was not enough for these people that the academy itself had begun to turn on Camelot and was documenting just how wrong elites can be. Colson still had to help float a forged document that would damage President Kennedy (and the country) retrospectively. The nation had to be protected from its own infatuation with the Kennedys, who were disconcertingly popular as well as "established"--Bobby fit into neighborhood taverns surprisingly well. So E. Howard Hunt was sent to Chappaquiddick and Anthony Ulasewicz was given license to Don Giovanni all Mary Jo's friends seriatim, to work up horror by traducing her name posthumously, all in the cause of family sanctity and Ehrlichman pieties about the Washington cocktail culture. Haldeman suggested a 24-hour watch on Kennedy. His friends and acquaintances were spied on, his travels clocked. If he had gone to a psychiatrist, no doubt the doctor would have been burglarized. And there is the point: The operation created to bring down Kennedy careened on against lesser fry like Ellsberg and McGovern, long after there was any need of such pious treachery. Teddy was the symbol of all that had to be smashed; the methods used elsewhere were first legitimized against him.

The Watergate ethos, expressed in overlapping theories of grievance, was irreversible, despite the demise of Kennedy and the ease of the campaign against McGovern. What was being asserted was the vileness of the elite; and that is a continuing symbolic and philosophical issue, not just a matter of winning one campaign. The organizing energies of this effort moved in concurrent waves, reaching successive crests. There was the Mitchell movement, a brute affront to the establishment, meant to capture Wallace votes--a self-assurance quite at home with mediocrity, reaching its appropriate climax in the Carswell-Haynsworth nominations, Mitchell's Sequoia cruise with Nixon and the subsequent Presidential tantrum over snobs who hate all Southerners. There was the Haldeman-Ehrlichman war on demonstrators that reached a peak in the raid on Ellsberg's doctor and the strident 1970 campaign. And there was, finally, the scramble of Nixonites to outdo one another in undoing all Democratic candidates for 1972, a scramble from which Colson emerged as, briefly, supreme. While Mitchell was being shunted off to C.R.E.E.P., and Haldeman worried out through Porter and Strachan and Magruder over keeping him in his place there, Colson had Nixon's ear more and more at the Executive Office Building, speaking to him in mysteries--Colson's whole face narrowing and wrinkling out toward that whispering piranha-nibble of a grin. He had sat with Nixon on the night of disappointing election returns in 1970, after Nixon spoke publicly what he and Haldeman used to tell each other in private. The President did his own dirty work in 1970. He would have to be more "Presidential"--i.e., devious--in 1972. The open scorn of Haldeman would give way to Colson's sneak attacks. (In 1970 one of the few bright spots was the way Colson sabotaged the Tydings race with a planted falsehood in Life.)

Colson, Nixon's latest Chotiner, gave him what he has always needed--not only a Haldeman protectiveness but the ability to kick at one remove, protected by anonymity (or--if not that--by "deniability"). If he cannot be mean like Bobby, he can be mild as a Uriah Heep, crawling for everyone to see and kicking only on the side away from the viewer. The crawling, as a thing imposed on him, justifies whatever kicks he can get in. It is important to remember one key passage in Nixon's Six Crises, which occurs just after the worst kind of grievance had been visited upon him as a touring Vice-President in Peru. A man who spat on him was instantly jumped by a Secret Service agent: "He grabbed him by the arm and whirled him out of my path, but as I saw his legs go by, I at least had the satisfaction of planting a healthy kick on his shins. Nothing I did all day made me feel better."

The important thing is not that Nixon kicked the man--few of us could resent that temptation, I guess. Nor is it important that he remembered it, or let it slip into his ghostwriter's account of this episode. What is significant is that Nixon gloats over this sneaky little secret kick, years later, and wants us to know he is still gloating. If others did not have the grace to regret that rather undignified and petty vindictiveness, they would be too embarrassed to cackle over it. But not Nixon. He needs his thugs, his delayed kick back at an abusive world--just as Heep, after crawling to the top, must reveal at last how he hid his kicking, all along, inside his crawl. It was foolish for anyone to expect repentance over Watergate in Nixon's speeches. In his eyes, the world has a Watergate or two still coming to it.