Once, the catchword for the crime-of-the-century was Watergate. So let’s call this one Showergate, because, well, damning evidence was found in a shower at the Mar-A-Lago estate.
I’m reminded of Watergate just now because exactly fifty years ago, in May of 1973, the Senate Watergate Committee, chaired by Democrat Sam Ervin, held two weeks of hearings. The televised proceedings of witnesses being questioned by senators and their staff engaged a large fraction of the American voting public. It also convinced that audience of President Richard M. Nixon’s guilt. Prior to the hearings only 31% thought that Nixon had committed any crime; after the hearings, 59% did.
To my chagrin, there has been almost no celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of this important set of hearings, but the indictment of former president Donald Trump provides reasons to recall them.
Primary among the reasons is the behavior of the Republicans during that period. On the Ervin committee there were three: Howard Baker, the “ranking” member; Connecticut Senator Lowell Weicker; and Ed Gurney, the first Republican elected to the Senate from Florida since the Civil War. Fred Thompson, later a senator himself, was the minority counsel. Of the senators, Baker was the most outraged by the behavior of men in the White House, and has been seen retrospectively as a scourge of Nixon. However, initially his famous question, ‘What did the president know, and when did he know it,’ was designed not to expose Nixon’s guilt but to see if there was any possibility of pinning the problems on lower-ranked people who might not have informed the president of their illegal activities. But Baker quickly became convinced of Nixon’s culpability.
To the contrary, Gurney’s constant position was to deny that Nixon had anything to do with crimes committed by his underlings, and to publicly refuse to concede that these were any real crimes. Over the years, Gurney has been excoriated for having refused to believe the truth when it was staring him in his face — but his stance on Watergate is the model for today’s Congressional Republicans in the wake of the indictment of former president Donald Trump.
It should be noted that in 1973, too, most Congressional Republicans were more in the Gurney camp than in the Baker camp. These included two future presidents. Minority leader of the House of Representatives Gerald Ford had used his power in 1972 to quash inquiries that would have led earlier to the exposure of White House crimes, and remained a staunch Nixon defender through the period when much evidence of White House and Nixon crimes were being discovered. Ford’s willful denial of Nixon’s criminality was among the reasons that Nixon chose him to replace the disgraced Spiro Agnew as vice-president.
George H.W. Bush, former congressman from Texas and former ambassador to the United Nations, was then chairman of the Republican National Committee, chosen because of his demonstrated fealty to Nixon. During this period, Bush turned himself inside out many times to deny wrongdoing by the Republican president, long past the moment when the magnitude of the crimes had become too obvious to be dismissed.
Senator Barry Goldwater, noted for his personal integrity, was quite aggrieved by Nixon’s behavior and that of the White House staff; yet he took the position for the longest time that Watergate was petty shenanigans and a political matter for which the president should not be held accountable except by voters at the polls.
Just as a reminder, forty different people were eventually convicted of crimes relating to Watergate.
In the year following the Ervin hearings, the majority of Republicans in the voting public, and even some in Congress, did turn on Nixon. Finally, it was this leaching away of political support among Republican senators — conveyed to Nixon by Goldwater in a meeting in the Oval Office in August 1974 — that convinced Nixon to resign before he was impeached, convicted and removed from office.
Will that pattern be followed again? Will Republicans ever decide that the evidence of Trump’s criminality is real and overwhelming? It is those Republicans’ moral and civic integrity that is at stake now.
Salisbury resident Tom Shachtman has written more than two dozen books and many television documentaries.
