I turned eighteen September of 1974; a new college freshman at Denison University.\u00a0\u00a0But I was politically \u201caware\u201d long before my enrollment in the Political Science Department up \u201con the hill\u201d in Granville.\u00a0\u00a0I grew up in an aware household (maybe what we\u2019d now call \u201cwoke\u201d). 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.\u00a0 And Mom was always politically involved.\u00a0The Civil Rights movement was powerful in racially-divided Dayton, and the Vietnam War was close to home.\u00a0\u00a0Both sisters had friends bound for the War, and both actively opposed US involvement.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I learned, and listened, and tried to understand how our government could be committing such a tragic mistake.\u00a0\u00a0In 1968 I was an eleven year-old Boy Scout, with all of the patriotism Scouting imbued.\u00a0\u00a0It 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\u2019s era was his brother, Bobby, the Senator from New York.\u00a0\u00a0Bobby was against the Vietnam War (though late coming to the view).\u00a0\u00a0He represented \u201ctransition\u201d for me \u2013 the way I could oppose the Johnson War, and still be a \u201cTrustworthy, Loyal\u201d Scout.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
There are memories that are seared in your mind \u2013 car wrecks, natural disasters, major surgeries.\u00a0\u00a0One memory of my eleventh year was waking up in my room to the radio alarm clock.\u00a0\u00a0It clicked onto the 7:00 am news \u2013 Bobby Kennedy was shot. He was attacked in Los Angeles after his primary win cleared the way to the Democratic nomination.\u00a0\u00a0I 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\u2019s invulnerability, another hero lost.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The next few days were ceremonies, speeches and the long train procession.\u00a0\u00a0In the end Johnson\u2019s man earned the nomination, and lost the Presidency by a whisker in November.\u00a0\u00a0I 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.\u00a0\u00a0I felt like one of the very few with my head down on my desk.\u00a0\u00a0In Kettering, I was.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Over the next six years I became fascinated with politics. I studied a lot, I worked on political campaigns, I was an \u201cactivist\u201d within the system. And the two years of the \u201cWatergate Era\u201d I was immersed in the hearings, and the Court proceedings, and the day-to-day lies. Vietnam got all tangled with Nixon\u2019s 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\u2019s second victory, then demanded accountability for his breaking the law.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A few weeks before I left for Denison, Nixon resigned. I won\u2019t lie; I hoisted a glass of champagne, even as a seventeen year-old. My friends joined me in celebration.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Then, only a few weeks later, Nixon was pardoned for \u201cany and all offenses committed\u201d during his Presidency.\u00a0\u00a0The newly ascended Gerald Ford proclaimed, \u201c\u2026Our long national nightmare is over\u201d.\u00a0\u00a0I was angry, storming at my 1962 black and white “portable” TV. \u00a0Justice denied.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0But over the decades after, I \u201cmellowed\u201d in my view.\u00a0\u00a0Maybe Ford was right, maybe the nation needed to move on from the Watergate debacle.\u00a0\u00a0Maybe the vision of a former President of the United States at the defense table was more than Americans should bear.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In 2001, the Kennedy Library Foundation, run by the family, gave Gerald Ford their “Profile in Courage” award.\u00a0\u00a0They lauded Ford for his political courage. He pardoned Nixon, an action that might well have cost him reelection in 1976.\u00a0\u00a0(The Award was also given to John L Lewis in the same year.) In 2001 that might have made sense.\u00a0\u00a0But now, in 2022, it’s clear that precedent shouldn\u2019t apply.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It is no coincidence that Trump\u2019s oldest political advisor is Roger Stone, just a young political operative when he got caught up in the Watergate prosecutions.\u00a0\u00a0Stone believed that whatever Nixon did, it was OK.\u00a0\u00a0The ends \u2013 keeping Nixon in office \u2013 were worth any means, illegal or not.\u00a0\u00a0Or as Nixon himself said a few years after resigning office, \u201cIf the President does it, that means that it\u2019s not illegal\u201d.\u00a0\u00a0Ford (unintentionally) allowed Stone, and others like him, to believe that Nixon leaving office was all \u201cpolitical\u201d, with nothing to do with \u201cright or wrong\u201d or the sanctity of the law.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And so they brought that attitude to Donald Trump, who already had no problem skirting the law.\u00a0\u00a0It began as soon as Trump came down the golden escalator, and it continued throughout his Presidency.\u00a0\u00a0It should be no surprise that a man with that view was impeached twice, and now faces at least four criminal investigations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And it wasn\u2019t just Trump and Stone. It was Manafort, another Nixon acolyte, and Steve Bannon whose whole political raison d\u2019etre 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 \u2013 winners are never accountable. And if the win is the Presidency, then the protection is forever \u2013 look at Nixon. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Trump is a long national nightmare, much longer than the two short years of Watergate.\u00a0\u00a0We are now starting the\u00a0\u00a0seventh year as almost every newscast starts with \u201cTrump\u201d.\u00a0\u00a0I would like nothing better than to be done with him.\u00a0\u00a0But this is not the time to say, \u201cThere\u2019s nothing to see here, move along, move along\u201d.\u00a0\u00a0We 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Donald Trump must be tried \u2013 for election fraud, for insurrection, for flaunting our national secrets.\u00a0\u00a0The clear case must be laid before the jury and the American people; so that we all see what he did, and what was wrong.\u00a0\u00a0Hopefully he will be found guilty to \u201cseal the deal\u201d; but either way, he needs to be \u201cin the dock\u201d.\u00a0\u00a0Otherwise the lesson taught puts our Nation in mortal danger.\u00a0\u00a0Our democracy is vulnerable. If there is no accountability then the Bannon\u2019s and Stone\u2019s of the world are right. They almost succeeded on January 6th. And the next time their operatives might end our Constitution.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"