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Today's
Stories
August 9, 2004
Gary Leupp
Why
Iraqi Christians are Moving to Syria
August 7 /
8, 2004
James Petras
The
Anatomy of "Terror Experts": Meet the Mandarins of
Abu Ghraib
Fred Gardner
Run
Ricky Run: Football, Pot and Pain
Justin Delacour
Anti-Chavez Pollsters Panic: Fix Numbers; Reinvent Venezuela
Brian Cloughley
Persecuted by All; Supported by None: Who Would Be A Kurd?
Joshua Frank
The
Outsider: a Talk with Ralph Nader
Iain A. Boal
On "Shame": Warmed-Over Orientalism and Racist Projection
Chris Floyd
All About Eve: Open Season on Women in DC and Rome
Andrew Fenton
Fighting for Democracy and Justice in Haiti
Aseem Shrivastava
Saga of an Anguished Afghan
Neil Corbett
See Cuba: Sometimes a Cigar is Just a Cigar, Mr. Bush
Carol Miller
/ Forrest Hill
Rigged Convention; Divided Party: How David Cobb Won with Only
12% of the Vote
Tarek Milleron
Breaking the Principled Voter
Donald Macintyre
The
Battle of Najaf
Ron Jacobs
Spirits of The Dead: Why I Love My Petty Bourgeois Tendencies
Mickey Z.
Kid
Gavilan's Grave: Propaganda Scores a TKO
Poets' Basement
Adler, Ford and Albert
Sex,
Drugs & the Blues!
Serpents in the Garden
CounterPunch's
Sizzling New Book on Culture and Sex is Now Available
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August 6, 2004
Joshua Frank
David
Cobb's Soft Charade: the Greens and the Politics of Mendacity
Derek Seidman
An
Interview with Stan Goff
Mike Whitney
The
Arbitrary Imprisonment of Jose Padilla
William S. Lind
Corruption in the Marine Corps
David Price
In
the Shadow of Hiroshima and Nagasaki
August 5, 2004
Mike Ferner
The Kerry Show: When Peace is Off
Message
Bruce Anderson
Two
Rejections
Robert Fisk
The Tale of Saddam's Cameraman
Todd Chretien
Florida
Comes to California: the Democrats' Plot Against Nader
Peter Linebaugh
Doing Time for Political Crime:
Paul and Silas, Bound in Jail
Hot Stories
Alexander Cockburn
Behold,
the Head of a Neo-Con!
Subcomandante
Marcos
The
Death Train of the WTO
Norman Finkelstein
Hitchens
as Model Apostate
Steve Niva
Israel's
Assassination Policy: the Trigger for Suicide Bombings?
Dardagan,
Slobodo and Williams
CounterPunch Exclusive:
20,000 Wounded Iraqi Civilians
Steve
J.B.
Prison Bitch
Sheldon
Rampton and John Stauber
True Lies: the Use of Propaganda
in the Iraq War
Wendell
Berry
Small Destructions Add Up
CounterPunch
Wire
WMD: Who Said What When
Cindy
Corrie
A Mother's Day Talk: the Daughter
I Can't Hear From
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
Click
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August
9, 2004
The
Day Nixon Was Gone
In
Memory of Deep Throat
By
RON JACOBS
Little had changed overnight. The war
continued in Vietnam. Another southern Vietnamese town had been
taken over by the popular forces over the weekend. I left work
at 2 in the morning on August 8, 1974 and headed home to sleep.
After waking around 10 the same morning, I hitchhiked into Washington,
DC. Something big was in the air. The Congressional committees
involved in deciding whether or not to impeach Richard Nixon
had been meeting all summer. The noose was tightening around
the son of a bitch. Word on the street was that Nixon was going
to quit. Maybe today, August 8, 1974. His last supporters in
Congress were jumping the proverbial ship like the rats that
they were. The radio playing on the last ride I caught-from
College Park into Georgetown-was playing Bob Dylan's song, "It's
All Over Now, Baby Blue."
All summer much of the nation
had been riveted to the various congressional hearings devoted
to uncovering Nixon's crimes. The theatre had been excellent
and it looked like the ending was going to be better than anything
Hollywood could dream up. It looked like Nixon was going down.
Of course, there was an underlying fear that he would declare
martial law for the "good of the country" and not go
anywhere, but that sentiment was held mostly by leftists. It's
not that they didn't have good reason for such fears, given the
counterintelligence program that had been conducted against them-a
program that intensified under Nixon. But, one hoped that even
Nixon had enough respect for his situation to realize when it
was time to say goodbye.
I got out of the car at Wisconsin
and M Streets and began walking towards the Mall. I wanted to
see what was up amongst the Yippies and others who had been hanging
around near the seat of power for the past few days in hopes
that they would have a resignation or impeachment to celebrate
soon. Plus, if the weather got too hot and muggy, I would be
near the Smithsonian buildings and their air conditioning. I
stopped at a small shop and bought some coffee in a styrofoam
cup, then headed on down the street. An hour or so later I was
looking at the Capitol Building. Tourists were milling around
along with various pro and anti-Nixon elements. Some rightwing
preacher was leading a small prayer session and the Yippies were
lighting up joints wrapped in American flag rolling papers.
The charges being considered
against Mr. Nixon were related to his actions involving the cover-up
and obstruction of justice in the matter of the break-in at the
Democratic National Committee's Watergate offices; the use of
various federal agencies including the FBI, the IRS, and the
Secret Service to spy on and otherwise violate the constitutional
rights of US citizens; and his failure to respect various subpoenas
and requests by the Congress for papers and tape recordings,
thereby subverting the constitution of the United States. Another
article that had been considered, but was dropped when the writers
realized  that they would not have enough votes to pass
it concerned the secret bombing of Cambodia that Nixon began
in 1969 and continued for over a year before the public knew.
One can assume this latter charge was too controversial for
most of the committee and Congress and was left off the articles
of impeachment for fear that it would diminish the case against
Nixon. More importantly, the charge regarding the secret bombing
was a question of foreign policy and not even the acrimonious
93rd Congress was willing to challenge the president on the Empire's
perceived need to be able to bomb when and where it wanted.
Rumor holds that one of the
staffers who had researched the Cambodian bombing article and
presumably lobbied hard for its inclusion in the final draft
of the Article of Impeachment was a young woman named Hilary
Clinton. Hard to believe in 2004, isn't it? What happened to
her principles? Lost in the wash of opportunism and politics-as-usual,
just like those of her husband's and so many others from that
time. On the other side of the spectrum, meanwhile, we are provided
with George Bush, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld, all of who
were around when Nixon was going down. Indeed, Cheney and Rumsfeld
were already in Washington. George was still out of the circle,
preferring drinking and other forms of partying to the serious
work of taking over the country. One assumes they learned an
important thing or two from watching their president twist slowly
in the wind. Lesson one, make certain that you don't get caught
and; two, if something is illegal; make it legal before you do
it. That way, there is nothing the law can get you on. After
all, the current administration ignores subpoenas, conducts secret
military operations and violates citizens' constitutional rights
with regularity and it's all legal. We can thank the foresight
of the Bush administration's predecessors and the perpetually
compliant Congress for this scenario.
What did Watergate (the affair,
not the building) mean? Was it really business as usual, with
the only difference being that Nixon and his men got caught?
Or was it something more fundamental to the system of government
our leaders like to trumpet to others around the world as being
better than any other? I think that the Weather Underground
actually had the best take on the whole slimy situation when
they wrote in their manifesto Prairie Fire-The Politics of
Revolutionary Anti-Imperialism:
"Watergate is a domestic
reflection of the empire in crisis. Every aspect of the prosecution
of the Watergate crisis itself remains in the hands of the ruling
class. The Watergate investigations observe gentlemanly limits:
they have never explored Nixon's deliberate aggression against
Black, Chicano, and Puerto Rican communities. Power in the US
is a white gentleman's club.
Yet the crisis runs away.
It has become the political expression of a process that began
in the 1960s-the defeat of the American myth of freedom and democracy."
However, most Americans didn't
share Weather's (or the rest of the Left's) cynicism about the
true nature of the US system, and were more likely to believe
that it was Nixon that was the problem, not the system itself.
Objectively, I would argue that history has proven otherwise,
but such an argument would still be a hard sell.
As I hung out in the shadow of the Capitol, with Abe Lincoln
sitting in massive marbleized judgment at the other end of the
Mall, I recalled an April a little more than a year before.
I was on the Mall along with perhaps 100,000 other folks demanding
the impeachment and trial of Mr. Nixon for the crimes with which
he was now going to be charged. After the first few speakers,
I had run with perhaps 10,000 others over to the Justice Department,
where we threw epithets at the building and the police surrounding
it before they chased us away with their clubs and their gas.
Now I was on my way to Lafayette Park across from the White
House to sit in on what amounted to a political deathwatch.
At Lafayette Park the major
media outlets were setting up their equipment trucks. Dan Rather
had a choice seat in the park underneath a big tent full of monitors
and other equipment. He was not broadcasting as far as I could
tell, but joking with the techies. I recalled his exchange with
Nixon at a press conference not too many months before:
Rather: Mr. President,
you have lambasted the television networks pretty well. Could
I ask you, at the risk of reopening an obvious wound, you say
after you have put on a lot of heat that you don't blame anyone.
I find that a little puzzling. What is it about the television
coverage of you in these past weeks and months that has so aroused
your anger?
Nixon: Don't get the impression
that you arouse my anger. (Laughter)
Rather: I'm afraid, sir, that
I have that impression. (Laughter)
Nixon: You see, one can only
be angry with those he respects.
This exchange was but one of
many between Rather and Nixon. It had ratcheted up my respect
for Mr. Rather and the mainstream press in general. Too bad
that respect is almost gone today.
As the afternoon wore on and
the heat index rose both in terms of temperature and in anticipation
of the upcoming announcement, the park in front of the White
House took on a bit of a picnic feeling. I had my Italian hero
sandwich and beer. The Yippies were passing out sandwiches made
from food they had dumpster-dived and other citizens were sharing
sodas, wine, and food. There were some Nixon supporters in the
crowd who attempted to make their presence known despite the
ridicule they were subjected to. As night settled in, most of
them drifted away to share their sorrows with more sympathetic
souls.
As the moment approached there
was a feeling of apprehension and exhilaration in the air. I
was still afraid that Nixon was going to pull a fast one and
declare not that he was resigning, but that he was declaring
martial law. Than, a few minutes before 9 PM, Dan Rather intoned
words that went something like, "Ladies and gentleman, the
president of the United States..."
Nixon went on for a minute
or two. I joined the crowd around a man who held a transistor
radio broadcasting the speech in the air, waiting for the magic
words: "Therefore, I shall resign the Presidency effective
at noon tomorrow. Vice President Ford will be sworn in as President
at that hour in this office." A cheer ran through the crowd.
Someone near me popped a cork on the champagne bottle they had
purchased just for this moment. Nixon was gone!
The next morning I sat in my
parents' house back in Maryland. The nation was nursing its
Nixon hangover and the television stations were showing the man
and his family on the White House lawn getting ready to board
a helicopter. My mom's friend and neighbor-an Irish-American
woman whose IRA father had escaped from Ireland in the wake of
the Easter Rising in 1916-came in the door without donuts and
coffee. She looked at me and smiled. "Got rid of the bastard,
eh, Ron?" She said in her best South Boston accent. My
mom looked at us both high-fiving each other and said, "It's
a sad day for America."
Nowadays, high school history
books tell students that the Watergate episode and Nixon's resignation
prove that the US way of government works. Personally, I think
that the real indicator of how (and for whom) the system works
is Gerald Ford's pardon of the man the following month.
Ron Jacobs is author of The
Way the Wind Blew: a history of the Weather Underground,
which is just republished by Verso. Jacobs' essay on Big Bill
Broonzy is featured in CounterPunch's new collection on music,
art and sex, Serpents
in the Garden. He can be reached at: rjacobs@zoo.uvm.edu
Weekend
Edition Features for July 31 / August 1, 2004
Alexander Cockburn
Kerry:
He's the (Any) One
Merlin Chowkwanyun
Five Questions with Noam Chomsky: "The Savage Extreme of
a Narrow Policy Spectrum"
David Lindorff
The Shame of the DNC
John Chuckman
The
Disturbing Words of John Edwards
Brian Cloughley
All Slam and No Dunk; All Blame and No Responsibility
Christopher Brauchli
"Being Poor is a State of Mind": the Frowning Face
of Compassionate Conservatism
Fred Gardner
A World of Pain
Michael Donnelly
How Big Pharma Bilks the Elderly
David Nally
Genocide in Darfur?
Joshua Frank
Forest Battles Escalate in Oregon
Sam Bahour
Colin Powell and My Grandmother
Diane Farsetta
The IMF and the Indonesian Elections: The Invisible Hand in the
Voting Booth
Harold Gould
Was Iraq a Mutual Charade?
Van Bergen / Stephens
Election 9/11: Surreal Political Theater
Lee Sustar
A New Model for the Labor Movement?
Ron Jacobs
The Lost Art of Hitchhiking
M. Junaid Alam
An Interview with Palestinian-American Rapper, The Iron Sheik
Poets Basement
Albert, Ford, Krieger, St. Clair
Website of
the Weekend
Cross Cultural Poetics
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