Hijinks leave us thankful for Watergate
As a whey-faced TV news writer I was seized by the Watergate scandal, including it in my news script every night for months. I cannot claim any youthful wisdom drove this. Having been raised in a family whose politics ran from hard left to soft liberal, whose prosperity was based on journalism and politics, I was long sensitized to the horror that Nixon’s behaviour meant for both professions and for democracy itself.
What surprised me was how disbelieving were other journalists, political friends and the man in the street. It was a cynical era — Vietnam, the Pentagon Papers and assassinations and riots galore. Perhaps that’s why, by Christmas of 1972, five months after the break-in, Nixon looked safe, Woodward and Bernstein looked vulnerable and the scandal looked as if it might simply fade. Then chief burglar James McCord walked into Judge John Sirica’s chambers with a letter admitting that he and the other burglars had lied about their sponsor. The edifice of the coverup started to slowly crack and then collapse. That moment has yet to emerge in the Trump Russia scandal, but it feels nearer every day. I’m betting the FBI already has the snitch they will attempt to roll up well fenced.
In a Keystone Kops scene, the GOP House intelligence committee chair does a late-night sneak around the White House grounds. His refusal to tell his committee members, or the public, whom he met and what leaks he collected, then turning around and briefing Trump privately, will probably mark the beginning of the end of his career.
The news that son-in-law Jared Kushner had met with a former KGB agent, now an executive of a Russian state bank under U.S. sanctions. . . . The continuing revelations about Trump’s financial entanglements with not only Russian oligarchs, but crime bosses. . . .
Just like Watergate 45 years ago, after months of waffling, it is the Senate that has stepped up and begun a serious public investigation. Then it was senators Sam Ervin and Howard Baker who became national heroes for their relentlessness. Today’s heroes look like the committee leaders, Senators Warner and Burr, supported by John McCain for whom this likely final political battle may prove to be his finest hour in decades of public service.
It was Lenin, who allegedly said that an insistence on “telling truth is merely a bourgeois prejudice,” lauded the strategic value of lies. He was also purportedly the author of the timeless insult of naïve Soviet fellow travellers as “useful idiots.” Not surprisingly, Putin reveres Lenin openly. More surprising is that it is the president of the United States who appears to share Leninist values about truth-telling. Sadly, it is also increasingly clear he is merely the latest in a long line of American “useful idiots.”
From Armand Hammer’s lust for Soviet oil, in the ’20s, through to the gormless American investors in Russian bonds in this decade, Russian leaders have been able to blind western business and government leaders to the realities of their power. From Czarist times to today, all power flows from and to the state. Its rewards flow exclusively to those in its favour. Hardly ever are those so favoured foreign.
So what were Paul Manafort, Carter Page, Jared Kushner, Michael Flynn and others yet to be revealed thinking, in their visible political flirtation with Russian crime bosses, oligarchs, spies and Kremlin flunkies? Perhaps personal greed trumped, as it were, genuine interest in their candidate’s success. Perhaps they thought it would remain secret?
Did Flynn — a former director of National Intelligence, who had received the daily intercepts of hundreds of surveillance probes, of Russian and most other important nations’ political and business leaders — forget that every call to the Russian ambassador would be minutely assessed by U.S. intelligence in real time. Did he really think his several payments from Russian state-sponsored organizations would not be discovered?
If, as seems likely to emerge, former deputy attorney general Sally Yates eventually testifies that this intelligence was reported to the Trump transition team, what in God’s name were they thinking in naming him to one of the most sensitive security posts in the U.S. government?
But then one recalls Watergate and the similarly buffoonish behaviour by seasoned and savvy professional political operatives. None of them were the proudly ignorant amateurs who staff the senior roles in the Trump administration today.
We can say thank goodness that today everyone can look at these shenanigans through a Watergate lens. We know where to look for deception, we can more easily figure out what really took place and by whom, and how to force their treacheries into the light. And we know how it will end. Robin V. Sears, a principal at Earnscliffe Strategy Group and a Broadbent Institute leadership fellow, was an NDP strategist for 20 years.