History repeats

[Pete F.]

By Joshua Tait

A long thread on conservative intellectuals' responses to Richard Nixon and the Watergate scandal.

Movement intellectuals around the magazine National Review, who had gone a long way toward popularizing “conservatism” as a conscious and articulated political outlook, were never especially keen on Nixon.

William F. Buckley voted for Nixon in 1960. The magazine’s publisher, William Rusher, a key conservative activist, wrote in Barry Goldwater, the candidate he helped to draft for the 1964 presidential election.
Rusher thought Nixon’s ’60 defeat was essential to the emergence of conservatism. Had Nixon won, then Eisenhower-Nixon Republicanism would have predominated the early 1960s. No Goldwater run, no conservative takeover of the GOP.

After LBJ’s landslide defeat of Goldwater in 1964, some conservative intellectuals, including Buckley, decided that the right needed some wins and Nixon would be their best bet.

Pat Buchanan, a Nixon aide and conservative, was a key conduit in making conservatives feel listened to by Nixon and for papering over some public disagreements.

By the end of the first Nixon term, conservative intellectuals were divided. In ‘69 and ‘70, Nixon seemed to tack to a hard conservative line, but after the ‘70 midterms, he moved to the center.
Conservative intellectuals were in a bind. Did they support Nixon, the president – in power and the rightmost option in the election – or retreat to opposition and find a true conservative alternative, maybe Reagan.

Rusher wanted Reagan.
He compared conservative support for Reagan unfavorably with conservative criticism of the Eisenhower years writing that “modern American conservatism largely organized itself during, and in explicit opposition to, the Eisenhower administration.”

During the election, National Review offered qualified support for Nixon. The letters the magazine received divided evenly between readers asking why they weren’t supporting Nixon more and why they were supporting Nixon at all.

Early in Nixon’s second term, James Burnham, a driving force within NR and a conservative philosopher, turned massively against Nixon. According to Rusher, Burnham thought the administration was the most “outrageously secretive and Byzantine in American history.”
Burnham quashed Rusher’s attempts to criticize the threat that he thought the press’s legal immunity for publishing leaked documents posed to national security.
Rusher noted the irony of the growing liberal worry of the imperial presidency, since it echoed arguments that conservatives had made for the previous three decades.

In June 1973, NR’s “Washington Editor,” George F. Will wrote about Watergate in his WaPo column. He asked what the conservative position on burglary could possibly be.

He argued that: “Reflective conservatives know they must act with special severity against miscreants whose political activism represents a perversion of conservatism in the name of – but contrary to – the essential conservative values.”

Liberals excused leftist violence, conservatives supported McCarthy. Nixon struck at “what conservatives cherish most: the institutions and procedures that guarantee limited government and prevent ordered liberty from degenerating into the licentious abuse of unchecked power.”

Will’s criticism of Nixon and esp. VP Spiro Agnew (a conservative favorite) got him in trouble with the NR editors. Buckley and the other editors tried several times to rein in Will’s “gleeful” commentary since he was attached to NR's masthead.

Will responded that WFB did not realize that “when NR’s role as an opinion journal conflicts with its role as an instrument of a political movement (and, increasingly, as the instrument of a candidate), the second role is given priority.”

Will regarded “the fate of this administration as nothing short of a national tragedy.”: He had “no desire to adopt an ideological sense of justice, ie judging an act by the political views of the person committing the act..."

Rusher told Buckley that those at NR thought of Will as their Washington Editor, but he thought of NR as a magazine he freelanced for. Rusher thought Will a good writer with important connections to Irving Kristol's set, but a hassle to deal with.

Into August, 1973, Will’s columns in the Washington Post constituted the most robust conservative criticism of Watergate.

Rusher fumed that Will was taking them to war with Nixon the way LBJ did with Vietnam: “without the benefit of an official declaration by those empowered to do the official declaring.”

Finally, in October in response to the Saturday Night Massacre, NR editorialized that Nixon had to shape up by the new year or the magazine would call for his resignation or impeachment.

The reader letters NR received in response were 85% pro-Nixon. The readers raged that NR was going leftwing commie pinko and that the “Kennedy tramp” Will would lead to cancelled subscriptions.

The pro-Nixon letters made familiar arguments:
-Nixon is the greatest president of the century
- Nixon has issues, but anyone liberals hate that much is good.
- Removing a president due to media pressure will damage the country
- Will’s hatred for Nixon invalidates his comments

In March, 1974 NR reemphasized, belatedly, its criticism of Nixon, Watergate, and the coverup.

Within the magazine, William Rusher, Jeffrey Hart and others continued their campaign against Will. Rusher wrote repeatedly to Buckley about Will.
Most baldly, he wrote: By Will’s “consistent shilling for established liberal positions, NR is not only being used (and misused, and abused) to further liberal objectives, but... is being deprived of what it badly needs: a competent Washington correspondent who will state the conservative position…”

Some of this was professional jealousy. Several of the editors were in direct competition with Will as “minor spokesmen for the conservative position” and in 1974 Will was on a wave of favorable publicity as someone who could write for readers of NR and WaPo.

Another editor at NR wrote to Buckley to say that another part of the animus against Will was that he affronted conservatives by being “prematurely right” about Watergate and breaking with and criticizing the president from a conservative perspective early.

So what’s the point? Conservative intellectuals struggle with proximity to power: it warps them. Rusher opposed Nixon on ideological terms, but supported him late into the Watergate scandal because he was attacked by the left.

When the chips were down, Rusher rallied around Nixon because Nixon was challenged from the left.

Conservative critics of right-wing politicians always get tarred as liberals. Not just Will, but even NR itself was chastised for moving left.
Consumers of conservative media are deeply partisan. The readers of NR overwhelmingly supported Nixon well into 1974 (at least those who wrote in and angry readers are more likely to write in)

They saw themselves in Nixon: bullied & alienated by the liberal establishment.