Kitabı oku: «The Case for Impeachment», sayfa 4

A WARNING FOR TRUMP

Johnson’s acquittal may have pleased his wife, but it resolved none of the momentous issues debated at the trial. Johnson narrowly escaped removal, but a healthy majority of senators still had voted for his conviction. Although the Johnson precedent did not define the grounds for impeachment or disinfect the process from policy and politics, it showed how an impeachment and trial could benefit the nation. After his impeachment, Johnson tamed his invective and moderated his opposition to Republican Reconstruction. He served out quietly his last nine months in office without renewing his conflicts with Congress.²⁷

To this day, impeachment remains subject only to the judgments of Congress. Too liberal use of impeachment could diminish the standing of Congress or unleash a chain reaction of uncontrolled partisan warfare. But too much restraint threatens to allow corruption and abuse to fester in the most powerful office in the world.

Andrew Johnson’s New York Times obituary contains a warning for Donald Trump. The Times observed that “Undoubtedly the greatest misfortune that ever befell Andrew Johnson was the assassination of President Lincoln.” Johnson’s fatal flaw, it said, was that “he was always headstrong and ‘sure he was right’ even in his errors.” The chapters to come will intimately acquaint you with Trump’s arrogance and errors. Don’t be fooled by the shifting decisions, policies, and pronouncements of a fast-moving presidency. May this be your guide to Trump’s many vulnerabilities to the ultimate sanction of restraint on a president, and your foundation for building a case for his impeachment.²⁸

CHAPTER 2
The Resignation of Richard Nixon: A Warning to Donald Trump

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This is the operative statement. The others are inoperative.

—Richard Nixon press secretary Ron Ziegler, April 17, 1973

You’re saying it’s a falsehood. And they’re giving—Sean Spicer, our press secretary—gave alternative facts.

—Donald Trump senior advisor Kellyanne Conway, January 22, 2017

In a retrospective on the Nixon scandals forty years after the Watergate break-in, Woodward and Bernstein conceded that “Nixon was far worse than we thought.” Even early in his presidency, Donald Trump exhibits the same tendencies that led Nixon to violate the most basic standards of morality and threaten the foundations of our democracy. Both Nixon and Trump exhibited a determination to never quit, to win at all costs, to attack and never back down, and to flout conventional rules and restraints. But as ambitious and headstrong as they were, they also shared a compulsion to deflect blame, and they were riddled with insecurities. They exploited the resentments of white working class Americans and split the world into enemies and loyalists. In the first month of his presidency, Trump talked more about “enemies” than any other president in history. Neither man allowed the law, the truth, the free press, or the potential for collateral damage to others to impede their personal agendas. They cared little about ideology but very much about adulation and power. They had little use for checks and balances and stretched the reach of presidential authority to its outer limits. They obsessed over secrecy and thirsted for control without dissent.

The establishments in New York and Washington and at the elite universities viewed the two men with distaste throughout their long careers. In turn, these professed populists scorned a cultural elite of mainstream journalists, Hollywood celebrities, revered politicians, and Ivy League professors. When first elected president, Nixon had commanded his aides, “No one in Ivy League schools to be hired for a year—we need balance—trustworthy ones are the dumb ones.” But “trustworthy” to whose benefit? Certainly not to the American people, who’ve put their welfare in the hands of that government meant to represent their—and not its own—best interests. So far, with few exceptions, Donald Trump has avoided Ivy League professors for cabinet or top staff positions in his administration.¹

Long after he resigned the presidency, Richard Nixon confessed to an intense admiration of Donald Trump. To the magnate in 1987, he wrote: “Whenever you decide to run for office you will be a winner!” Trump proclaimed that he would hang Nixon’s “amazing” letter in the Oval Office.²

In 1974, two years after winning a landslide reelection victory, Nixon avoided near certain impeachment and removal by becoming the only American president to resign the office. Nixon’s story is the cautionary tale for Donald Trump.

WATERGATE: A CANCER ON THE PRESIDENCY

In 1972, Richard Nixon brilliantly orchestrated his reelection campaign, but he still feared that leaks of such illegal acts as a covert bombing war in Cambodia and the wiretapping of reporters and administration officials could sink his reelection and even lead to his impeachment. In 1971, he established in the White House a covert unit known as the Plumbers to plug leaks. Members of the unit doubled as dirty tricks specialists who would conduct the Watergate break-in and the burglary of the office of the psychiatrist of Daniel Ellsberg, the man who had leaked the Defense Department’s secret history of the Vietnam War known as the “Pentagon Papers.” “You can’t let the Jew steal that stuff and get away with it,” Nixon told his chief of staff, H. R. “Bob” Haldeman. “People don’t trust these Eastern establishment people. He’s Harvard. He’s a Jew. You know, and he’s an arrogant intellectual.”³

In his campaign, Nixon set a model for Donald Trump by targeting the forgotten Americans: the so-called “Silent Majority, of white voters of modest means and education, ignored and scorned by Washington’s elite.” This Silent Majority of Americans believed that “as individuals they have lost control of a complicated and impersonal society which oppresses them with high taxes, spiraling inflation and enforced integration while rewarding the very poor and very rich.” Nixon would woo the Silent Majority with the “old values of patriotism, hard work, morality, and respect for law and order.”⁴

As for minorities, Nixon said that the administration would “pay attention” to blacks, “keep some around [to] avoid Goldwater problem.” Earlier he had said, “I have the greatest affection for them, but I know they ain’t gonna make it for five hundred years.” As for Jews, they “won’t get many, but don’t write them off.” Nixon advised that they should quietly woo Jewish and black support by meeting with leaders, but should “avoid speaking publicly to groups.”⁵

This strategy worked so well that, by mid-1972, the polls showed Nixon some twenty points ahead of the presumptive Democratic nominee, South Dakota senator George McGovern.

Why then did Nixon or his top aides launch the break-in of the Democratic Party headquarters at the Watergate Building in June 1972? This foolishly bungled caper that the Washington Post labeled “Mission Incredible” could only upset Nixon’s glide to reelection. The answer lies in a trait that Nixon and Trump share: a need for total control, combined with minimal self-awareness. Nixon still feared that somehow his enemies—the Kennedys, the press, the professors—would snatch from his hands the final victory he had worked so hard to earn. No loose end could be left unattended.⁶

What Nixon’s press secretary Ron Ziegler dismissed as a “third-rate burglary attempt” would prove to be so much more. This was the hole in the dike that even Nixon’s Plumbers could not plug. Eventually the dike would collapse and a flood of revelations about Nixon’s corruption would wash away his presidency.

A month after the break-in, Nixon lectured his aide John Ehrlichman on what he had supposedly learned from his crusade as a young congressman that helped convict the alleged Communist spy Alger Hiss of perjury: “If you cover up, you’re going to get caught. And if you lie you’re going to be guilty of perjury. Now basically that was the whole story of the Hiss case. It is not the issue that will harm you; it is the cover-up that is damaging.”⁷

Nixon’s words to Ehrlichman may have been delivered with breezy assurance, but he was frantically working to cover up a trail that led from the break-in to the leadership of his administration and campaign. He relied on deception posing as candor and on preemptive sallies against anyone in the press who dared to dig into the story. In a press conference filled with lies, Nixon falsely claimed that he had personally investigated the matter and settled all concerns over Watergate. He said “categorically” that a White House investigation indicates “that no one in the White House staff, no one in this administration, presently employed, was involved in this very bizarre incident.” Nixon added, “What really hurts is if you try to cover it up.”⁸

When reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein began investigating the break-in and other dirty tricks for the Washington Post, Nixon trotted out Ziegler to assail the press, just as Donald Trump would do more than four decades later. Ziegler was a former Disneyland skipper and guide for its popular jungle cruise with no political experience other than with the Nixon team. In 1969, at the age of twenty-nine he became the youngest presidential press secretary in history. Nixon could always count on Ziegler to get out the administration’s message of the day.

Ten days before the election he accused the now iconic Woodward and Bernstein of “shabby journalism,’’ “character assassination,” and “a vicious abuse of the journalistic process.” He charged their employer, the Post, with a “political effort” to “discredit this administration and individuals within it.” Earlier, Bernstein had told Nixon campaign manager John Mitchell, his former attorney general, that the Post would be publishing a story linking the Watergate burglary to a secret slush fund that Mitchell controlled. Mitchell responded with an unmistakable threat: “All that crap, you’re putting in the paper? It’s been denied. Jesus, Katie Graham [the Post’s publisher] is gonna get her tit caught in a big fat wringer if that’s published.”⁹

Nixon and Ziegler had set the precedent for Donald Trump and his aides when confronted with news reports of repeated contacts between Trump’s campaign staff and Russian officials. Deny. Lie. Threaten. And blame the messengers in the press, not the message itself, for the scandal.

In 1973, the reelected president could not stanch the flood of revelations that poured out in the spring of 1973, indicating that high officials of the Nixon administration and CREEP had directed the break-in and pressured the defendants to remain silent. On March 21, White House counsel John Dean warned Nixon that “We have a cancer within—close to the presidency, that’s growing.” A month later, Nixon’s lies had become so tangled that Ron Ziegler had to declare all of the president’s prior statements on Watergate “inoperative.” “The Nixon Administration has developed a new language,” commented Time magazine, “a kind of Nix-speak. Government officials are entitled to make flat statements one day, and the next day reverse field with the simple phrase, ‘I misspoke myself.’ ” Surrogates would later find themselves caught in the same trap of struggling to explain away Trump-speak, often in the form of Trump-tweets.¹⁰

THE COVER-UP EXPOSED

By summer of 1973, as part of a deal with the Democratic Senate for his confirmation, Attorney General Elliot Richardson had appointed law professor Archibald Cox as a special prosecutor. This came as a stinging affront to Nixon, who had told his advisor Henry Kissinger six months earlier that “the professors are the enemy. Write that on a blackboard 100 times and never forget it.” Worse still, Cox was from the Ivy League flagship of Harvard.¹¹

With Democrats in control of the House and the Senate, a special Senate Watergate Committee headed by veteran Democratic senator Sam Ervin of North Carolina had begun holding spectacular televised hearings. The committee’s investigation uncovered an iceberg of illegal and illicit activities that Nixon had desperately sought to keep hidden. The Watergate break-in, it suddenly became clear, was only the tip.

Not long after, in July 1973, Alexander P. Butterfield, an obscure former White House aide, launched a bombshell: the president had tape-recorded all conversations held in his White House offices. During a yearlong struggle over access to the tapes, Vice President Agnew became the first vice president since John C. Calhoun to resign the office. Investigators had found that as governor of Maryland, Agnew had accepted bribes and kickbacks from contractors doing business with the state. In December 1973, with the approval of both houses of Congress, Nixon appointed House Minority Leader Gerald Ford of Michigan, America’s first unelected vice president.¹²

Even before the release of the tapes, though, another turn of events had already wounded Nixon beyond recovery. On Saturday evening October 20, 1973, in what would go down in history as the “Saturday Night Massacre,” President Nixon ordered Attorney General Elliot Richardson to fire Cox; Richardson refused to obey what he believed to be an illegal order and resigned. Deputy Attorney General William D. Ruckelshaus also refused to carry out what he too believed was an illegal order and he resigned. Solicitor General Robert H. Bork then complied with the president’s order and became the acting attorney general.

A Time magazine cover story called the massacre “one of the gravest constitutional crises,” in presidential history. It spurred outrage in Congress across the aisles and for the first time, polls showed that a plurality of the American people favored the president’s impeachment. On November 15, 1973, federal District Judge Gerhard A. Gesell ruled that, absent a showing of gross misconduct as required in the regulation establishing the special prosecutor’s office, the dismissal of Cox was illegal. Two days later at a nationally televised press conference an increasingly desperate Nixon pleaded, “I’m not a crook. I’ve earned everything I’ve got.”¹³

The firing proved to be of no avail to Nixon, though. Nixon ordered his compliant Acting Attorney General Robert Bork to replace Cox with Texas attorney Leon Jaworski—a former “Democrat for Nixon.” Although neither a law professor nor an Ivy Leaguer, Jaworski wasn’t dumb, corrupt, or compromised. He continued to investigate faithfully the Watergate scandal and pursue the tapes.

Who would be the Cox or Jaworski in an investigation of Donald Trump? Or the Ken Starr who later pursued Bill Clinton? Currently, the attorney general appoints a special prosecutor. But Trump has lost his security blanket in his loyalist Attorney General Jeff Sessions of Alabama. On March 2, 2017, Sessions recused himself from investigating the connections between Russia and the Trump team, after a Russia-related scandal of his own. Trump’s nominee for Deputy Attorney General, career prosecutor Rod Rosenstein, will take over the probe. Notably, in an Op Ed during the campaign co-authored with several other Trump backers, Sessions called for a special prosecutor to investigate Hillary Clinton.¹⁴

If a Special Prosecutor is appointed, even one seemingly sympathetic to the administration, the Jaworski example shows that she or he might respond in unpredictable ways. And members of Congress will be monitoring any investigation. Even the most self-assured of prosecutors may be loath to tangle with Senators Elizabeth Warren or John McCain.¹⁵

In fighting a subpoena to surrender the White House tapes to the Special Prosecutor, Nixon’s attorneys argued for an absolutist interpretation of presidential power, just as Trump would in defending his travel ban. The courts, his attorneys argued, cannot review a presidential decision based on his “executive privilege” to withhold “confidential conversations between a President and his close advisors.” The Supreme Court unanimously disagreed, pointing out that “Our system of government ‘requires that federal courts on occasion interpret the Constitution in a manner at variance with the construction given the document by another branch.’ ”¹⁶

The release of the tape recordings—clearly showing that Nixon obstructed justice in covering-up the break-in and through other violations of law—made the most cut and dry case for impeachment in the history of the presidency. The depth and breadth of the scandal astonished even fellow Republicans. “The dread word ‘Watergate,’ is not just the stupid, unprofitable, break-in attempt,” said Republican senator Ed Brooke. “It is perjury. Obstruction of justice. The solicitation and acceptance of hundreds of thousands of dollars in illegal campaign contributions. It is a pattern of arrogance, illegality and lies which ought to shock the conscience of every Republican.”¹⁷

In July 1974, members of both parties in the Judiciary Committee voted three articles of impeachment against the president. Two of the articles indicted the president for the crimes of obstructing justice and ignoring subpoenas issued by the House Judiciary Commission. Another article charged the gross abuse of presidential power, a likely ground for an impeachment of President Trump.

A week after the Committee’s vote, former GOP presidential nominee Barry Goldwater, Senate Minority Leader Hugh Scott, and House Minority Leader John Rhodes warned Nixon of an inevitable impeachment by the House and conviction by the Senate, where Republican support for acquittal had dwindled to a few diehards. Two days later, the ever-pragmatic Nixon resigned the presidency, the first and last president to do so. Ever the dissembler, Nixon said he resigned to put “the interest of America first” and although some of his judgments “were wrong, they were made in what I believed at the time to be the best interest of the Nation.”¹⁸

In his later years, Nixon seemed to have learned nothing from Watergate, but continued to believe that his problems resulted not from his own misdeeds, but from the failure of his cover-up. In 1987, during the Iran-Contra scandal, Nixon privately advised President Ronald Reagan: “Don’t ever comment on the Iran-Contra matter again. Have instructions issued to all White House staffers and Administration spokesman that they must never answer any question on or off the record about that issue in the future.”¹⁹

THE ‘UNWRITTEN’ ARTICLES OF IMPEACHMENT: TREASON AND A CRIME AGAINST HUMANITY

The House Judiciary Committee, caught up in the events of Watergate and lacking full information, did not impeach Nixon for arguably his two most serious crimes: treason and a crime against humanity. During his campaign for the presidency in 1968, Nixon claimed that he had a “secret plan” to end the War in Vietnam. But like Trump’s secret plan to defeat ISIS that he promoted in 2016, Nixon’s plan was political rhetoric lacking in substance. What Nixon really feared was a peace deal before Election Day that would steal his thunder and snatch away his last chance for political redemption. Defeat was not an option, and in preemptive response, Nixon illegally meddled in the peace process as a still-private citizen, thereby committing a serious and impeachable offense.

Although peace in Vietnam may have been a long shot, Nixon had tried to sabotage negotiations, putting at risk for his own political ends the lives of many thousands of Americans and Asians. Nixon pressured the South Vietnamese government to stall the peace process and await a better deal under his presidency. Historian John A. Farrell said that Nixon’s “apparently criminal behavior” during the campaign “may be more reprehensible than anything Nixon did in Watergate,” because of “the human lives at stake and the decade of carnage that followed in Southeast Asia.”²⁰

President Lyndon B. Johnson, who had wiretapped Nixon’s telephone, knew of Nixon’s traitorous conduct. He overheard Nixon declare that “we’re going to say to Hanoi, ‘I [Nixon] can make a better deal than he [Johnson] has, because I’m fresh and new, and I don’t have to demand as much as he does in the light of past positions.’ ”In a conversation with Republican Senate Minority Leader Everett Dirksen, Johnson said, “This is treason … that they’re contacting a foreign power in the middle of a war.”²¹ Nixon had at worst committed treason and at best violated federal law. The Logan Act of 1799 forbids unauthorized citizens from contacting “any foreign government or any officer or agent thereof with intent to influence the measures or conduct of any foreign government.” Violation of the law is a felony, punishable by fines and imprisonment. For the first time since the Nixon era, talk of possible treason and violations of the obscure Logan Act have arisen again with new revelations of contacts between members of the Trump team and Russian officials.²²

The Judiciary Committee passed over another potential article charging Nixon with his worst offense, a “crime against humanity” for his illegal, secret war in Cambodia. The concept of a crime against humanity originated during the Nuremberg War trials of Nazi leaders in 1945–1946. As opposed to a specific war crime like torture, a crime against humanity is generally regarded as a widespread or systematic attack directed against any civilian population or an identifiable part of a population, with no exemption for heads of state. Nixon’s covert bombing of Cambodia falls within that rubric.²³

In 1965, the violence of America’s war in Vietnam spilled into neighboring Cambodia when President Johnson began a secret but limited bombing campaign against sanctuaries in Cambodia for the Army of North Vietnam and the Communist Vietcong guerillas. President Nixon escalated the raids into an intense carpet-bombing of Cambodia over four years. “There is no limitation on mileage and there is no limitation on budget,” he said. The U.S. dropped a greater tonnage of TNT on this small nation than on all its enemies during World War II.²⁴

The carpet-bombing that devastated Cambodia did nothing to help the American war effort, but it killed some 50,000 to 150,000 civilians, and tragically pushed many young men and women into the camp of the Khmer Rouge Communist guerrillas led by the French-educated Pol Pot. During its brief reign from 1975 to 1979, the Khmer Rouge directly or indirectly killed some 1.5 million Cambodians in a population of just 8 million.²⁵

Nixon’s bombing of Cambodia was illegal in both its conception and execution. He lacked authorization from Congress to bomb Cambodia and kept the operation secret, covering it up with lies. “It’s the best kept secret of the war!” Nixon told Senate hawk John Stennis of Mississippi in April 1970. Days later, Nixon lied to the American people at a press conference, saying that U.S. policy “has been to scrupulously respect the neutrality of the Cambodian people.” Once the bombing became public, Nixon draped himself in the justification of “national security,” even though he had earlier admitted that the cumulative impact of all his bombings in Southeast Asia was “zilch.”²⁶

One of the most consequential questions facing the Trump presidency is whether he will commit a crime against humanity by exacerbating climate change, and posing an existential threat to humanity. In 2016, the International Criminal Court announced that it would expand its focus to “crimes against the environment,” which would include catastrophic climate change.²⁷