Tag: Watergate

Jan. 6 Committee To Hold Public Hearings

The Daily Escape:

Sunset, Seal Rock, OR – May 2022 photo by Mitch Schreiber

The House Select Committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol will hold six public hearings starting on June 9 and running for two weeks. TPM reports that some sessions will be aired during prime time, and others during the day. The televised hearings aim to give us a more complete story of what happened the day of the Capitol riot and what led up to it. They should dominate the national conversation right up to November’s midterm elections.

Six hearings. The Senate Watergate committee held 51 public hearings, over six months. And they began hearings within a year of the June 1972 arrests for the Watergate burglary. The Senate created the committee in February of that year; the hearings began in May. President Nixon resigned on Aug. 8, 1974.

Are these hearings similar to Watergate? Margret Sullivan in the WaPo doesn’t think so:

“The nation that came together to force a corrupt president from office and send many of his co-conspirator aides to prison is a nation that no longer exists.”

She goes on to say that the Select Committee’s June hearings won’t be all that visible:

“I’m willing to believe that the hearings will be dramatic. They might even change some people’s minds. But the amount of public attention they get will be minuscule compared with what happened when the folksy Sen. Sam Ervin (D-NC) presided over the Senate Watergate Committee.”

Martin Longman compares today with Watergate: (brackets by Wrongo)

“…more than two years elapsed between the discovery of the [Watergate] break-in and Nixon’s fall from grace. It has now been almost a year and a half since the failed coup attempt of January 6, 2021. We’re a bit behind schedule because the televised Watergate hearings began a mere 11 months after the initial arrests were made.”

Another difference was that in 1972, people went to the polls less than five months after the Watergate burglary was discovered. And Nixon was reelected in a landslide over George McGovern. This time around, it’s 18 months after the Jan. 6 event, and we still haven’t had national elections.

When people went back to the polls in November 1974 after Nixon had been run out of office, the Democrats netted four US Senate seats and 49 seats in the House. This time around, before they vote, people should have a very clear idea of what led up to Jan. 6, as well as what happened on the fateful day.

We need to remember that Watergate showed us that evidence of criminality wasn’t enough to turn the public decisively against a presidential contender. The criminality must be proven and demonstrated in a high-profile way in order to overcome the more general political considerations of the electorate.

Nixon’s lies were eventually exposed and the Republicans paid a hefty price. But only after the public Watergate hearings.

This means that there’s a lot of pressure on the Jan. 6 Committee. And their job is harder because most Americans no longer watch television. It’s likely that a small percentage of voters will watch the hearings, while a substantially higher percentage will see the most explosive parts in viral clips on the internet.

Finally, our political environment has changed for the worse in the past 48 years. While most Republicans defended Nixon at the start of the Watergate investigations, they accepted the legitimacy of the investigatory committee, and ultimately, turned against Nixon when the facts were clear.

This time, Republicans are attacking the committee as illegitimate and partisan. That means the evidence won’t be broadly accepted in their Party. In 1974, there came a time when Republicans would no longer defend Nixon.

If the current Select Committee does its job well, accusations that it is partisan will not be meaningful either to Independents, or to 10%-20% of Republicans who see the Jan. 6 coup attempt for what it was.

The stakes are high: The crimes of Jan. 6 are more serious than the Watergate crimes. An effort to overturn an election is more serious than an effort to cheat during an election. And most importantly, Trump, unlike Nixon, could run for president again (Nixon had already been elected twice).

While the Committee will eventually publish a report laying out their findings, they should immediately recommend that the DOJ pursue criminal cases and provide the DOJ with all relevant evidence.

As with Watergate, indictments should be doing the talking about the Jan. 6 crimes. In January, AG Merrick Garland said that the department “remains committed to holding all Jan. 6 perpetrators, at any level, accountable under law.” Remember that the DOJ has a policy of not bringing indictments prior to an election, so time is of the essence for America’s phantom AG.

It’s critical to act now. The American people need a clear picture of what happened and who is responsible.

That will give us a stark choice in the mid-term elections.

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Monday Wake Up Call – May 6, 2019

The Daily Escape:

Torres del Paine NP, Chile – 2016 photo by Andrea Pozzi

After our granddaughter’s graduation in PA (summa cum laude), we had a few wines and beers, and talk turned to politics and the mess America is in now. Son-in-law Miles, (dad of next week’s grad) asked a very good question. “Is now really the worst of times? What about when Martin Luther King was assassinated?”

Wrongo immediately flashed back to JFK’s assassination. He was a DC college student when JFK died. But his focus wasn’t on the loss of a president, or what that meant to the country. His focus was on what the loss of JFK meant personally.

That changed in 1968 with the assassinations of MLK and RFK. Wrongo was in the Army, stationed in Germany when Dr. King was killed. There was great tension in the enlisted men’s barracks. For a few days, it took a lot of effort in our small, isolated unit to keep anger from boiling over into outright fighting between the races.

By the time we lost RFK, it was clear that the Vietnam War would drag on, killing many of Wrongo’s friends. But, Wrongo’s job was to defend America from the Russians, with nuclear weapons if necessary.

It was difficult to see how or when Vietnam would end. It was hard to imagine Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger, or Robert McNamara doing much to stop young Americans from dying in Asia.

The year 1968 also included the Tet Offensive. Mark Bowen in his book, Hue 1968, says:

“For decades….the mainstream press and, for that matter, most of the American public, believed their leaders, political and military. Tet was the first of many blows to that faith in coming years, Americans would never again be so trusting.” (p. 507)

When Americans finally saw the Pentagon Papers in 1971, they learned that America’s leaders had been systematically lying about the scope and progress of the war for years, in spite of their doubts that the effort could succeed. The assassinations, Vietnam, and Watergate changed us forever.

Our leaders failed us, it was clearly the worst of times. We were in worse shape in 1968 than we are in 2019. Back then, it felt like the country was coming apart at the seams, society’s fabric was pulling apart. Then, May 4th 1970 brought the killings of college kids at Kent State, which was probably the lowest point in our history, at least during Wrongo’s life time.

Last week, we acknowledged the 49th anniversary of America’s military killing American students on US soil. We vaguely remember the Neil Young song “Ohio” with its opening lyrics:

“Tin soldiers and Nixon coming, we’re finally on our own…”

That’s why the decade from 1960-1970 was the worst of times. We got through it, but we have never been the same.

In 1968, we saw that change can arrive suddenly, fundamentally, and violently, even in America. Bob Woodward spoke at Kent State last week, on Saturday, May 4th. He offered some brand-new information about Nixon’s reaction to the student shootings: (emphasis by Wrongo)

“In a conversation with his chief of staff H.R. Haldeman in September 1971, Nixon suggested shooting prisoners at New York’s Attica Prison riot in a reference to the Kent State tragedy. “You know what stops them? Kill a few,” Nixon says on a tape of the conversation.”

Woodward continued:

“We now know what really was on Nixon’s mind as he reflected…on Kent State after 17 months….Kent State and the protest movement was an incubator for Richard Nixon and his illegal wars.”

Woodward meant that what was coming was a war on the news media, creation of the “Plumbers” unit to track down leaks, and attempts to obstruct justice with the Watergate cover-up.

Many of us see 2020 shaping up as another 1968. Some see Nixon reincarnated in Trump.

We haven’t faced this particular set of circumstances before, so we can’t know just how it will go. Will it be worse than the 1960s, or just another terrible American decade? Is it the best of times, or the worst of times?

Are we willing to fight to preserve what we have anymore?

Wake up America, you have to fight for what America means to us. Constitutional liberties are under attack. The right to vote is being undermined. Extreme Nationalism has been emboldened.

To help you wake up, listen once again to “Ohio” by Neil Young in a new solo performance from October, 2018. He’s added some documentary footage and a strong anti-gun message:

You may not know that Chrissie Hynde, the future lead singer of The Pretenders was a Kent State student, and was on the scene at the time.

Those who read the Wrongologist in email can view the video here.

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