In my Ron Paul Curriculum course on American literature, everything I teach from from 1915 to the present is based on movies. This is where American literature has had its greatest impact, both domestic and foreign.
I watched the 1976 movie, All the President's Men, a few days ago. I had seen it before, but I needed to see it again. I regard it as one of the great movies of all time. It is virtually flawless as literature: the telling of a story.
One of the things that you learn when you watch the movie, if you're paying attention, is this. Everything turned on one peculiar fact: two of the burglars' notebooks that had two pieces of information: H H at W H, and Howard Hunt. The initial hint that something was peculiar came from these two scraps of information. If the burglars had not been carrying this, Richard Nixon would have left the presidency in an honorable way. Somebody other than Gerald Ford would have ended the Vietnam War.
In other words, the best laid plans of mice and men sometimes go awry. "There's many a slip twixt the cup and the lip." A tiny detail leads to a great unraveling. Somebody utters the two crucial words governing the greatest discoveries in history: "That's odd."
Bob Woodward began the investigation. He had only been a reporter at the Washington Post for nine months. He was not a skilled investigator yet. He was not a skilled writer yet. He later became both. He became one of the most influential journalists in the second half of the 20th century. But in 1976, he was a nobody.
CONSCIENCE AND THE NEED TO CONFESS
As you watch the movie, you discover this: almost everybody stonewalled the two reporters. The two could not get anywhere. Finally, a handful of people talked. They were governed by their consciences, and they emotionally had to confess. They had to tell what they had been told not to tell. In retrospect, if about three of them had kept their mouths shut, the two reporters would never have been able to get any traction for the story.
The other major aspect of the movie also had to do with conscience -- lack thereof. The perpetrators at the very top inside the White House were devoid of consciences with respect to the misuse of political power. A lot of them were lawyers. All of them were college educated. All of them appeared to be conservative. Nixon was the main one, and he became the representative of an entire generation of politicians.
The only comparable American figure was Lyndon Johnson, who decided not to run in March 1968 because of opposition within the Democratic Party: first Eugene McCarthy and then Robert Kennedy. Johnson's decision not to run made it possible for Nixon to win by just barely defeating the hapless Hubert Humphrey. America had back-to-back true believers in political power, and we had back-to-back failures whose careers never survived their own actions.
I also choose for the students to watch the low-budget movie, Born Again (1978). It is online for free. This is also a movie about conscience. Nixon's senior counsel Charles Colson was not bothered by his conscience until he faced an indictment. Then, because he had converted to Christianity, he finally got a conscience. He pleaded guilty to something which otherwise he would never have pleaded guilty to, and which probably could not have been proven in court. He was sent to prison. That led to his personal liberation. Because he went to prison, he was disbarred as a lawyer. After he got out, he became a major advocate of prison reform. The reforms he recommended were generally well-needed. We have not seen these reforms implemented, but at least there was somebody who articulated what needed to be done. He thought the prison system has been unsuccessful. He preferred restitution to victims. (So did the prisoners I dealt with inside a maximum security prison. I don't think there was one of them who would not have accepted economic restitution to his victims rather than spend another 10 years in prison.)
I came very close to being sucked into that disaster. Dwight Chapin and I went to Boys State together in 1958. He became Nixon's scheduling secretary. In 1971, I contacted him about the possibility of getting a job with Nixon, and he wrote back and told me that I probably could. I did not follow up on this. He also hired Bob Segretti, a very smart lawyer he had known at the University of Southern California. Segretti became the master of the dirty tricks campaign in 1971. He appears in the movie. As he told Bernstein at the time, he might go to jail, and he might be disbarred. He was correct on both counts.
I don't think I would have been part of the dirty tricks campaign, although I think I would have been good at it. I hope that my conscience would have saved me from that mistake. The tricks were not just clever tricks. They involved the theft of official stationary. They used outright slander. I was never tested on the job to find out. But I can understand that somebody who was in that environment, and who was surrounded by bright young men who had lost their power of moral judgment, would be easily lured into a personal disaster. Peer pressure is a very real thing in people's lives. This is why the company we keep is important.
If we are to believe the account of Woodward and Bernstein, one woman was crucial. She was the young wife of the man who had been in charge of CREeP, the Committee to Re-elect the President. She was convinced that something was seriously wrong morally with the whole operation. She laid down the law. She said if he didn't quit, she would leave him. He quit. Then he talked.
The entire edifice of the Nixon administration was pulled down by a couple of obscure reporters who had two obscure references regarding E. Howard Hunt, and then they got some cooperation from a handful of informants.
None of this was inevitable. None of this was even likely.
TURF WAR AND LIBERTY
The famous informant was "Deep Throat." No one knew who he was until 2005. He was the number-two man at the FBI. This senior bureaucrat was upset at the way that the Nixon administration was using the FBI for political purposes. He had been trained by J. Edgar Hoover, and if ever there was a man who wanted to use politicians, rather than be used by politicians, it was Hoover, who was the most successful bureaucrat in American history.
The entire Watergate incident in American history was a matter of failed conscience, the misuse of political power, and a turf war battle that led to the exposure of the conspiracy. Once again, a turf war between government agencies was the basis of liberty for millions of Americans. Freedom of the press helped, of course. But without a crucial turf war, Nixon would have beaten the system.
Pitting one bureaucracy against another is one of the best ways to gain liberty. We should not expect liberty to be handed down by politicians. Much as we hate bureaucracy, bureaucracy is fundamental to the maintenance of liberty. That is because there is always more than one bureaucracy inside any government. If you can find a way to maintain your liberty by persuading one bureaucracy to resist the extension of power by another bureaucracy in your life, you at least have a running shot at securing some degree of liberty. Competing bureaucracies were about the only way that people could gain a small degree of liberty inside the Soviet Union.
"FOLLOW THE MONEY"
That phrase came out of the movie. It does not appear in the book. Deep Throat did not say this to Woodward and Bernstein. The phrase was inserted into the script by screenwriter William Goldman.
This is another example of the phrase "Life imitates art." "Follow the money" has become a catchphrase in the English language. Following the money is one of the best ways for an investigator to find out where the real power lies in any organization. The second link in the chain of many events is the distribution of funds. But the confession of faith is the first link. And a confession of guilt can break it.
That's what I tell the students about the Watergate crisis.
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