Trustworthy Scout
I turned eighteen September of 1974; a new college freshman at Denison University. But I was politically “aware” long before my enrollment in the Political Science Department up “on the hill” in Granville. I grew up in an aware household (maybe what we’d now call “woke”). In 1968 Dad ran a television station in Dayton, one sister was in college at Miami University, the other in high school in suburban Kettering. And Mom was always politically involved. The Civil Rights movement was powerful in racially-divided Dayton, and the Vietnam War was close to home. Both sisters had friends bound for the War, and both actively opposed US involvement.
I learned, and listened, and tried to understand how our government could be committing such a tragic mistake. In 1968 I was an eleven year-old Boy Scout, with all of the patriotism Scouting imbued. It took a while for me to make sense of how the Johnson administration, directly descended from John Kennedy, could be so wrong. One of my remaining heroes from Kennedy’s era was his brother, Bobby, the Senator from New York. Bobby was against the Vietnam War (though late coming to the view). He represented “transition” for me – the way I could oppose the Johnson War, and still be a “Trustworthy, Loyal” Scout.
Political Immersion
There are memories that are seared in your mind – car wrecks, natural disasters, major surgeries. One memory of my eleventh year was waking up in my room to the radio alarm clock. It clicked onto the 7:00 am news – Bobby Kennedy was shot. He was attacked in Los Angeles after his primary win cleared the way to the Democratic nomination. I remember: lying in bed, my face in the pillow; another disaster after the death of Martin Luther King, another chink in the armor of America’s invulnerability, another hero lost.
The next few days were ceremonies, speeches and the long train procession. In the end Johnson’s man earned the nomination, and lost the Presidency by a whisker in November. I remember the announcement at Van Buren Junior High on Wednesday morning after the election, the raucous cheers throughout the school that Nixon was the next President of the United States. I felt like one of the very few with my head down on my desk. In Kettering, I was.
Over the next six years I became fascinated with politics. I studied a lot, I worked on political campaigns, I was an “activist” within the system. And the two years of the “Watergate Era” I was immersed in the hearings, and the Court proceedings, and the day-to-day lies. Vietnam got all tangled with Nixon’s politics and his ruthless determination to keep the White House. From Junior High in Kettering through High School in Wyoming near Cincinnati, I knew all about it. I suffered through Nixon’s second victory, then demanded accountability for his breaking the law.
A few weeks before I left for Denison, Nixon resigned. I won’t lie; I hoisted a glass of champagne, even as a seventeen year-old. My friends joined me in celebration.
Pardon the “King”
Then, only a few weeks later, Nixon was pardoned for “any and all offenses committed” during his Presidency. The newly ascended Gerald Ford proclaimed, “…Our long national nightmare is over”. I was angry, storming at my 1962 black and white “portable” TV. Justice denied. But over the decades after, I “mellowed” in my view. Maybe Ford was right, maybe the nation needed to move on from the Watergate debacle. Maybe the vision of a former President of the United States at the defense table was more than Americans should bear.
In 2001, the Kennedy Library Foundation, run by the family, gave Gerald Ford their “Profile in Courage” award. They lauded Ford for his political courage. He pardoned Nixon, an action that might well have cost him reelection in 1976. (The Award was also given to John L Lewis in the same year.) In 2001 that might have made sense. But now, in 2022, it’s clear that precedent shouldn’t apply.
Roger Stone
It is no coincidence that Trump’s oldest political advisor is Roger Stone, just a young political operative when he got caught up in the Watergate prosecutions. Stone believed that whatever Nixon did, it was OK. The ends – keeping Nixon in office – were worth any means, illegal or not. Or as Nixon himself said a few years after resigning office, “If the President does it, that means that it’s not illegal”. Ford (unintentionally) allowed Stone, and others like him, to believe that Nixon leaving office was all “political”, with nothing to do with “right or wrong” or the sanctity of the law.
And so they brought that attitude to Donald Trump, who already had no problem skirting the law. It began as soon as Trump came down the golden escalator, and it continued throughout his Presidency. It should be no surprise that a man with that view was impeached twice, and now faces at least four criminal investigations.
And it wasn’t just Trump and Stone. It was Manafort, another Nixon acolyte, and Steve Bannon whose whole political raison d’etre is his ends justify any means. And there was Seven Miller who brought his own natural hatred from his upbringing to the table, and all of the others drawn to the no-holds-barred Trump positions. Their precedent – winners are never accountable. And if the win is the Presidency, then the protection is forever – look at Nixon.
Vulnerability
America made the mistake once. We gave a former President invulnerability. And the price we paid, that we are paying, is that forty-two years later an elected President had no reason to believe he could ever be held accountable.
Trump is a long national nightmare, much longer than the two short years of Watergate. We are now starting the seventh year as almost every newscast starts with “Trump”. I would like nothing better than to be done with him. But this is not the time to say, “There’s nothing to see here, move along, move along”. We have suffered through the nightmare, now we must see to it that our future, the next election or the next generation, has to learn the same damn lesson again.
Donald Trump must be tried – for election fraud, for insurrection, for flaunting our national secrets. The clear case must be laid before the jury and the American people; so that we all see what he did, and what was wrong. Hopefully he will be found guilty to “seal the deal”; but either way, he needs to be “in the dock”. Otherwise the lesson taught puts our Nation in mortal danger. Our democracy is vulnerable. If there is no accountability then the Bannon’s and Stone’s of the world are right. They almost succeeded on January 6th. And the next time their operatives might end our Constitution.
