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Wednesday, August 21, 1974
University Daily Kansan
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KANSAN
Editorials, columns and letters published on this page reflect only the opinions of the writers.
Watergate Year Reflects An Administration's Death
At this time last year, the University Daily Kansan's lead story was "President Nixon stoutly defended his actions in the Watergate scandal," as he declared "the case was" "water under the bridge" and he would not resign." The story went on to say that Nixon voiced confidence in Vice President Agnew's integrity.
Since then, Agnew padded no contest to charges of tax evasion, the House Judiciary sent three articles of impeachment to the House, Nixon made the startling disclosure that he did, indeed, have paid taxes for years before coverup, he resigned and Gerald Ford assumed the presidency.
Today's lead story is Ford's choice for vice president
Earlier in his political career, Nixon said he was through with public life and told the press that they wouldn't have him "to kick
around anymore." But the press did.
Throughout the summer, newspapers called for him to resign and others demanded his impeachment. Editorial cartoonists had a field day. Cartoonists' caricatures of the man become so grotesque he was hardly recognizable. He was analyzed. His days in the presidency were scrutinized. There has been speculation about his place in history.
On the chance that the Kansan might not have the opportunity to kick Richard Nixon around some more—the back to school edition's editorial page has taken one last glimpse at the man, his last day in office and what the columnists say about him now.
—Jeffrey Stinson Associate Editor
Nixon Should Resign Himself to Court Trip
By CLARK MOLLENHOFF
WASHINGTON - Despite President Ford's hope that Richard Nixon will find personal peace, Nixon will not be beyond fear of criminal prosecution until the last Watergate-connected litigation is concluded.
Suggestions for congressional action to spare Nixon the anguish of criminal prosecution are doomed to failure. An overwhelming majority of House members would agree that a breathing a sigh of relief after being spared from making a decision on impeachment and don't want to face the flammable issue of amnesty for the discredited former president, in whether Nixon will be prosecuted will be whether Special Prosecutor Leon Jaworski.
If Nixon is charged or convicted, only Ford can pardon him. In his vice-presidential confirmation hearings, Ford said that Nixon would not stand for it. The American people would not stand for it.
As a private citizen Nixon knows that he must respond to subpoenas in both civil and criminal litigation arising out of his admitted mistakes and deceptions during his presidency. The United States Supreme Court has rules 8 to 0 that executive法官 cannot be held to cover relevant evidence before criminal crimes are ruled on, others even, while he was, President.
President Ford now controls House tapes and documents, and he is unlikely to risk marring a Mr. Clean image by either bidding or destroying the White House tapes.
There are serious constitutional questions involved in special legislation that might grant Nixon immunity from prosecution for past violations of the law. It would probably be easier to prove former presidents immune from prosecution for crimes committed in office, and that approach would certainly raise the most serious public policy questions at a time when the nation has faced the dramatic incidents of presidential crimes.
To get around these constitutional questions, it has been suggested that a joint resolution be passed to show "the sense of Congress" against prosecution of Nixon. Such a resolution would not be binding upon Nixon, but instead would constitute the special prosecutor that Congress believed Nixon had been sufficiently punished for his two years of obstruction of
justice and deception of Congress and the American people.
Although there are a handful of congressmen and senators who believe that this approach should be taken and that it would be an effective deterrent to criminal prosecution, it is unlikely that they would make any determined effort to press the issue in the face of strong opinions to the contrary.
Advocates of amnesty for Nixon know they would face the hard questions: Why is Nixon entitled to favored treatment under the criminal laws when his subordinates are being convicted and imprisoned for their role in the same crimes?
Even if congressional-immunity advocates overcome the powerful arguments against immunity from prosecution for past crimes, there is no logic under which Nixon could be granted immunity from deportation and she should falsely testify in future litigation.
Of course, Nixon has constitutional rights and can use the Fifth Amendment in his own way.
But the proud former President would find that more degrading than any of the challenges facing the United States week as president of the United States. Clyde Musselman, a former Nixon official, is a columnist for *The New York Times*.
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Nixon Survived Political Ins, Outs
Kansan Editor
By ERIC MEYER
In 1952, Thomas E. Dewey and other top Eisenhower advisers bluntly told him to get off the ticket because of his bombing.
In 1948, his closest friends thought he signed his own
novel, and a warrant came to took up Whittaker's
charges, sharking him.
In 1962, he incredibly lost his bid for the California governorship.
"As I leave you, I want you to know—just how much you're going to be missing," he said after his California defeat. "You won't have Nixon to kick around any more, because, gentlemen, this is my last press conference."
With that fiery attack on the nation's press corps, Richard Milhous Nixon wrote his own political oblivity. Nothing remained for him to do but to fade into the woodwork of his New York law office.
Yet, six years later, Richard Nixon, the durable politician, was elected President in what biographer Ralph de Toledano called "the most incredible comeback in American presidential history."
NIXON'S first PRESIDENTIAL campaign came when his personal fortunes and those of the Republican party were pathetically low. The Republicans had suffered staggering losses in the 1958 mid-term elections and President Dwight Eisenhower had refused to use the office of his office to bolster the party's waning strength.
Combined with an economic decline in 1960, these factors spelled certain disaster for any Republican candidate. Neverthelead, Richard Nixon had managed to become the front runner. By January, 1960, he had a commanding 6 per cent lead over his probable challenger, Sen. John Kennedy. D-Mass.
Nixon's first mistake was meeting with Nelson Rockefeller, governor of New York and Nixon's chief rival in the race for vice-president, to avert pandemonium at the convention by drafting a promise party platform. On the contrary, Nixon's meeting actually caused pandemonium. Party regulars thought he had double-crossed them. Conservatives called it a betrayal, but neither side knew what to do.
But Nikon's campaign was doomed to misfortune. Nikon's "solitary, uncertain impulses," Toldoan said, "without a campaign manager to control or circumvent them to grave decisions that may have cost him the election."
ANOTHER MISTAKE WAS NISON's fight for a strong civil rights plank in the party platform. Nixon hoped the proposal would steal the black vote, and it did. But it also cost him the support of the Southern white majority. If Nixon had not spoken out for civil rights, he probably would have carried the South and won the election.
The selection of Henry Cabot Lodge as his running mate was another of Nixon's costly mistakes. On the campaign trail, he became a vocal critic.
Nixon again exercised poor judgment when he accepted an invitation to debate Kenned on national television
"Kennedy has everything to gain," Nixon said, "and very little to lose."
But Nixon was afraid that refusing to debate would look like hesitancy to confront his opponent. So he accepted. ON TELEVISION, NIXON'S academic style of debate lacked the empathetic charisma of Kennedy's.
"in the age of television," wrote Harper's Magazine, debater Nixon is geared to the big hall, not the living room.
Tedolano said, "Nixon's classic style of debate did not impress an audience seeking drama instead of logic."
Fearing that he might "hit Kennedy too hard," Nixon
defensive in the debates and was ill at ease with his
position.
"If Nixon were to win," wrote historian Theodore White, "he had only to move forward from the Eisenhower base of peace and prosperity. To urge it forward, he need only have been strong and offered vision. Instead, he tangled in words, locked himself on a dark path for ten years and retaliating when he should be leading."
Television audiences seem to have an animal-like instinct to detect uneasiness in a person. Nixon's natural tendency to profusely perspire, his ghostly pallor from a recent illness, his coarse beard and his dislike for the defensive clearly signaled weakness to the television audiences.
The effects of the televised debates were devastating,
“WHEN THEY BEGAN,” White said, “Nixon was the probable winner and Kennedy upheld the uphill battle. When they were over, their positions were reversed.”
As Toledo observed, "Americans had decided they liked Kennedy better. His youth was an asset, his style enthroned them, his wealth offered them glamor. The issues were for the politicians."
The election results uplift Toledan and White's assertions. Kennedy beat Nixon 303,219 in election notes.
Although once defeated, Nixon had abandoned his political career. Next on his agenda was a return to his
"When everything is on the line, you go with the veteran. I happen to fit the need of the times."
-Nixon
home state of California to attempt to unseat Gov. Edmund "Pat" Brown, a Democrat.
"Nixon ran," Stephen Hess and Richard Broderen satiled a large part to provide himself with an excuse to continue the war.
The election surprised everyone: Brown won.
Several factors assured Brown's victory. First, Nixon had vehemently attacked the John Birch Society, a strong conservative organization, particularly in California.
Brown also capitalized on Nixon's long absence from California and on Nixon's future presidential aspirations, but he did not.
THE CUBAN MISSILE CRISIS, which occurred during the campaign, also started a nationwide pre-Kennedy bombing attack.
After the loss in 1962, White reported Nixon was "politically dead." He was in public disfavor and was totally stranded in New York, without a political base or staff.
Richard Nixon may have been in his political grave, but he longed for resurrection. Overcoming his defeats and re-entering the political world would be a long, arduous task, but as reporter Hugh Hushield said, Nixon "plainly was enaptured with a great, growing ambition to return to official Washington."
FEW PEOPLE SAW anything but political tragedy inikon's 1926 defeat, but Telodomea to the邮 way. Nikon's victory in 1944 elected a feared democrat.
Toledano said that if Nixon had won the election, he would have been "boxed in" by California's immense internal problems and couldn't have sought the presidency.
If Nixon hadn't entered the race, he would have tried and failed to secure the 1964 Republic presidential nomination because of the strength of Sen. Barry Goldwater, R-Arizona, Toledan said.
That kind of defeat would have certainly ended Nixon's political career.
Realizing, however, that the Goldwater bandwagon couldn't be stopped, Nixon acted as a conciliatory, well-liked, hard-campaigning party man in 1964. He carefully planned his election activities to convince party regulars and potential campaign contributors that he hadn't really retired from politics.
"WHEN HE LEARNED that Goldwater's nomination and defeat were inevitable," Harper's magazine wrote, "Nixon readjusted his thinking toward the goal of the 1968 nomination. He would first be Goldwater's and then the entire party's loyal helper, loyal in the face of adversity in 1941 and tireless in his effort to achieve recovery."
Implementing his strategy, Nixon became the busiest of his party's campaigners. While stumping for candidates across the nation, he was also building up political due bills. Meanwhile, Goldwater's loss had re-established Nixon's popularity with the men who controlled the Republican party.
THE 1966 MID-TERM ELECTIONS marked a major comeback for the Republicans and a personal triumph for Richard Tolan. Toldoledan described Nixon's role in the 1966 elections as a "quarterback for a Republican party candidate" and indicated for whom Nixon campaigned had a 22 percent of being elected than those for whom he didn't campaign.
"It is hard," Toledano said, "to knock a player who raises the team average that much."
Nixon's major liability after 1962 was his lack of a political base. But the 1966 elections gave him three bases: Goldwater and the conservatives, to whom Nixon best loyal in the face of adversity; the Southern Republican Party, which simple recognition they craved to receive from national party leaders, and the political due bills he acquired.
In addition, the voters' short memories had freed Nixon of his loser's image. They linked him with Kennedy not as Kennedy's opponent but more as an "associate" of the late president. Nixon's disastrous last press conference showed him to be human, not impersonal like Thomas E. Dewey.
"if times were normal," Nixon said, "there would be a greater effort to find a new face—the rookie quarterback. But when everything is on the line you go with the letter to happen to lift the need of the times. I have the knowledge."
NIXON'S LAST TASK was to completely rid himself of the loser's stigma. To do so, he wove sweeping victories in the backdrop of his own glory.
Nixon's main opponent in the primaries was George Romney. Romney was forced into announcing early and, in facing the press and public alone, he faltered on the war issue.
State after state gave Nixon commanding plurality. At the convention, Nixon easily overcame mild opposition to his program.
The 1968 campaign was one of caution for Nixon. He made no brilliant statements, but he made no grave errors. He wouldn't debate his opponent, Vice President Hubert Humphrey.
NIXON'S PLATFORM WAS one of general appeal. The campaign revolved around a deliberate tempo designed to convey an image of confidence to the public. Nixon was after all, the front runner. And he refused to become desperate even when the Humphrey campaign posed a late threat.
Nixon's political organization was perhaps the best in memory. Where teamwork had been faulty in 1960, it was successful when he defeated Humphrey, 302-191, in the Electoral College and remained in the presidency until his resignation Aug. 9.
Bv C S GROOM
Gloom, Joy Follow Nixon Downfall
WASHINGTON - They were peeking tro... behind the curtains of the White House. Perhaps it was Tricia Nixon Ox or Jule White House aide. They were watching a crowd which had gathered outside the White House on Pennsylvania Avenue, watching out of the windows of the White House after the nikon had resigned from the presidency.
The crowd, those who wanted to be where-it was, grew. They started coming days before it would to happen. And after Nixon arrived, the crowd was more than 3,000 strong.
Watching the crowd was like watching Madame Defarge in Charles Dickens' "A Tale of Two Cities." Madame Defarge would sit at the executions during the storming of the Bastille, knitting her patterns of death.
In Lafayette Park, across the street from the White House, there were news trucks and reporters. There were photographers and cameramen who were flashing their lights persistently, attempting to record a piece of time, a piece of history.
A bus containing mainly young, black people passed by. As it passed, all the men in line exited. That excited the crowd, and almost, everyone cheered when the bus drove by.
The crowd danced in the street. The people sang: "Happy days are here again."
THE GDMICKS were there. There were the media, the exposure, so there were also the gimmicks of the crowd, the attempts for instant fame.
Cars went down Pennsylvania Avenue, slowly, passengers peering at the White House, looking at the crowd. A truck inscribed "Christ is the Answer" drove by to the crowd in the crowd who had been praying for Nikon, when standing silent, incredulous, still.
A "hero" in the crowd paraded through the streets with a six-foot mask of Nixon, walking with his arms held behind the mask, and V-shaped in imitation of the President.
He was standing on the White House side of Pennsylvania Avenue, and the crowd in Lafayette Park began to cross the street as he walked by. Many had to stop in the middle of the
There were other people in the crowd. Perhaps they still couldn't believe it. Maybe they were repulsed by the crowd. Some people would be shocked. Nikon had just resigned, he didn't want to, and his family had been strongly against it. What were the Nixons doing now? The crowd could see only the peaks and glances and the curtains of the White House windows.
NOW THE CROWD was chanting: "Jail to the Chief" and "Resignation's not enough, prosecution is the stuff" and "No ammestry for Nixon." Signed wavs: "deleted" and "Exorcise Nixon" and "Buy Ford" and "Boycott Granes."
FOUR BLOCKS AWAY there had been a different scene, a quiet scene at the Washington Post newspaper office. This was where Paltzer Prize-winning reporters Woodward and Carl Bernstein had prepared the Watergate back-in two years before.
avenue for cars passing by.
You're right, chief . . . this doesn't work either.
Then the police made a decisive move. Traffic had to be blocked off Pennsylvania Avenue. A blockade was made, and after that, the street—it looked like a street dance.
TIGHT SECURITY was held at the Post
TIGHZ SECURITY was held at the Post
no one was to be to unles he had a
jadab
Only a few reporters, including Kandy Stroud, the Washington correspondent from Women's Wear Daily, were allowed in the building to cover the activity at the Post newspaper offices when word of resignation was final.
The Style section was attending to business as usual; tomorrow's section was devoted to the President, presumably offering some relief from the rest of what tomorrow's paper would bring—then again, the newspaper卷纸paper brought relief to most Americans.
In the main newsroom, Woodward and Bernstein were attending to their beat, interrupted by trips to Metro Editor Harry Rosenfeld's office to watch the television. Believing was seeing Nixon at 9 p.m. on TV, and it wasn't time yet.
Because Stroud was there, Executive Editor Ben Bradleaze wanted everything toned down. "What are you doing? Look!" Bradlease said to Stroud. "We don't want anything written. We've barred all reporters today. This is not the place to be writing about. No notes! Please don't write a story. Now do I have to ask you to leave?" We brought you out. We we've 5,000 phone calls today. We keep it all very low key. We don't want to look as if we're gloating. Now please leave!"
The business of a large newspaper was at its peak. The first edition published in the trunk, by R.W. Bacon, 8 p.m. on 9 June, 1893.
CARTOONIST HERBLOCK, perhaps Nixon's Public Enemy No. 1, was in a foul mood, according to his secretary. Perhaps he would repeat a cartoon he had used in 1952, when it looked as if Nixon was on his way out of the vice presidential race because of supposed kickbacks in the campaign. Chiefs of Salesman' cartoon that used in 1982 days before the 'Checkers' speech put Nixon back in the race? Now it was 1974. Nixon was resigning and Herblock was in a foul mood. Was it impossible?
On the wall in the Style section was the front page of a special Post section created for the day-after-Nixon-would-resign, enlisting a host of his predecessors originally supposed to be ready by June 10. It actually wasn't ready until the night Nixon resigned. Obviously the Washington Post woul well prepared for the resignation. The rival paper, the conservative newspaper, only recently written its editorial endows impeachment of the President.
AT 9 P.M. almost all eyes at the Post were turned to the TV sets, the camera eye of a photographer taking a picture of the TV, perhaps for the first edition of the TV, and impatiently for the sentence, the phrase, the statement of resignation from the President.
It came . . . and a copy editor in the Style section who had been unrelenting in her criticisms of the President and the TV news made the first comment: "I can't believe it."
Katherine Graham, the publisher, walked into the newsroom immediately after the speech and spoke with Bradlea and several others. The look on her face was unforgettable. It seemed taur, grim, tense; she seemed emotionally drained. She entered the elevator alone, perhaps feeling the weight of a nation on her shoulders.
THE FIRST EDITION of the Washington Post was out early and on hand at restaurants and other sites shortly after 10.12.2014. The Nixon Years" section, a bold two-in-one, Resigns" picture and a rather blurry, bloody picture of Nixon dominating the front page.
Howard Simons, managing editor, summed up the day: "The real problem is we're all so busy today. Yes, it's very tragic and sad. We went by the White House last night and there were clumps of people standing around. I never thought that it would come to this. I never thought about it. We were just doing our job."
S. C. Grego, Arlington, Va., senior was in Washington Aug. 9, test day Nixon resigns, and write this account.