Dave Neese’s Provocations: A brief history of sleaze
When it comes to political scandal, the Democratic variety typically involves muscle, the Republican variety guile.
Democratic scandals, generally speaking, are easy to follow. They mostly involve grabbing the money and stuffing it in one’s pocket — as the Bidens did in Ukraine and China.
It’s simple. In this example, gobs of money go from A, Ukraine’s Burisma Holdings and the Bank of China, into B, the pocket of Joe Biden’s son.
Republican scandals, in contrast, tend to involve convoluted schemes to get the money from A to B, not just grabbing it and stuffing it in a pocket. Take, for example, the infamous Credit Mobilier scandal of long ago.
That Republican-dominated scandal, 1872-73, involved a massive public works project, the construction of the Transcontinental Railroad.
Union Pacific Railroad bigshots set up a fake company, Credit Mobilier, as a supposed subcontractor to siphon off public funds appropriated for the project.
The scandal became the historic hallmark of Ulysses S. Grant’s presidency, although the old Civil War hero was not implicated in the monkeyshines himself.
In a complex series of maneuvers, Credit Mobilier submitted inflated bills for construction work to the government and meanwhile sneaked discounted stock into the hands of influential people in the Swamp. (Yes, the Swamp, even back then.)
Another big Republican-dominated case was the infamous Tea Pot Dome Scandal, early 1920s. Also a complex caper, it involved secret leases to two big oil companies allowing them exclusive access to government oil reserves in Wyoming.
The scandal forever tarred the presidency of Warren Harding.
He personally also had no direct involvement in the shenanigans that came to define his era, although some of his cronies did, including his Secretary of the Interior, who landed in the slammer.
A more recent scandal, Watergate, involved — again — Republicans.
But this one was more along the lines of a Democratic scandal in its goal and techniques.
That is, it involved power, not riches, and muscle, not guile. It was an attempt to get dirt on Democrats by breaking into the Democratic National Committee offices in the Watergate complex.
The GOP’s operatives bungled the job. They got caught. This scandal also came to define the presidency of Richard M. Nixon. He was not involved in the burglary planning, but he was involved
in the ensuing coverup. He resigned with an impeachment posse in hot pursuit.
Watergate was — atypically for Republicans — a scandal motivated by hunger for political power rather than for dollars. Democrats, in contrast, typically have been motivated by a determination to secure or strengthen their hold on public offices.
When Democratic scandals haven’t been focused on political power, however, they’ve involved money-grubbing capers. These capers — unlike Republicans’ intricate malfeasances — often have had all the finesse of a smash-and-grab theft of a jewelry store window. (See, e.g., the case of Tony Mack, the technically nonpartisan but actually Democratic mayor of Trenton, N.J.)
History abounds with examples
of other dubious dominions such as those of never-convicted Jersey City Mayor Frank “I am the Law” Hague and Chicago’s Mayor Richard Daley, plus countless mayors who were collared, including Providence’s Buddy Cianci, East Cleveland’s Emmanuel Onunwor and New Orleans’ Ray Nagin.
Apart from Hizzoner Mr. Mack in Trenton, New Jersey’s city halls have filled whole penitentiary wings themselves, providing such mayoral inmates as Newark’s Hugh Addonizio, Ken Gibson and Sharpe James; Jersey City’s Gerald McCann and Thomas Whelan; Atlantic City’s Richard S. Jackson, Michael Matthews and William Somers (he an outlier Republican) and Camden’s Angelo Errichetti and Milton Milan — that being but a partial list.
Many Democratic pols preferred unsubtle modi operandi to the intricate financial machinations favored by Republicans. Republicans, seemingly, have been more inclined to abide by the facetious advice that if you’re gonna steal, steal a large enough sum that it won’t be an embarrassment if you get caught.
Yet, Democrats, through their urban, one-party political duchies, are largely the ones who honed the public-contract kickback into something of an art form of politics.
Taking their cue from the Republicans’ Credit Mobilier and Tea Pot Dome scandals, Democratic city political machines soon were converting public construction and supply contracts into streams of party and personal revenues, and doing so with the astonishing efficiency of a humming factory assembly line.
Hudson County, N.J., Democrats literally filled garbage cans to the brim with bundles of cash loot. And when Feds closed in on the operation, the Hudson Dems frantically tossed to one another — hot-potato style — a bulging suitcase crammed with $350,000 in bearer bonds. The last man caught holding the bag insisted he had no idea where the heck it had come from.
At one early point, a Democrat even enunciated a theology aimed at scrubbing sleazy transactions of any ethical or Eighth Commandment stain.
New York City Democratic boss George Washington Plunkitt, 1842-1924, famously expostulated that there’s such a thing as “honest graft,” which is to be, he said, distinguished from “dishonest graft.”
The latter, he explained, is when you grab money right out of the public till and put it right in your pocket. But when you, as a public official, have, say, inside info on a planned public project and move to make money on it — say, buy up property in a redevelopment area — well
now, that, sir, is “honest graft,” explained Plunkitt. It’s “profit of foresight,” he said.
So the millions that Hunter Biden made in China and Ukraine, thanks to his dad’s position as Vice President, arguably would be “honest graft,” by Boss Plunkitt’s lights. “Profit of foresight.”
As would also the tens of millions of dollars that the Bill and Hillary Clinton Foundation extracted from foreign donors when she was Secretary of State and was in a position to do them official favors — or not to do them official favors, as their generosity or lack of it may have dictated.
The same further applies to the millions of dollars the two Clintons banked to the bursting point in speech fees from big businesses subject to burdensome government regulation — or, just maybe, entitled to a little relief here and there, a minor revision of wording deep in the text of some obscure, verbose regulation, page 847, section 93, paragraph W, line 17, delete “shall,” insert “may,” etc.
Plunkitt summed up the
Democratic Party ethos in these famous words: “I seen my opportunities and I took ‘em.”
Democratic bosses throughout much of America’s colorful history have had a mutually beneficial, wink-and-nod relationship with the big city rackets bosses. The latter helped out the former with political muscle and bribes. The former helped out the later by overlooking their activities outside the law, or at least by not scrutinizing them too fastidiously.
A classic case was William O’Dwyer, New York City mayor 1945-1949, recently written about in Smithsonian magazine (“The Suspect in City Hall,” by David Samuels).
O’Dwyer co-existed cozily alongside vice, gambling, labor union racketeering and assorted other chicanery on a colossal scale. And his political allies in Washington, evinced little concern regarding the great, massive stench of corruption hovering over Gotham.
When a crusading Brooklyn DA, Miles McDonald, did indicate curiosity about O’Dwyer’s relationship with the racketeers, President Harry Truman, hastily appointed O’Dwyer ambassador to Mexico, conveniently placing the mayor beyond the jurisdiction of a nosey
Brooklyn grand jury. (The ambassador could be recalled only by the President, and Truman declined to do so.)
Truman, although widely reckoned personally an honest man himself, had his own dubious ties to a sleazy political boss who presided over an alliance of political corruption and criminal rackets — Kansas City’s T.J. Pendergast, a/k/a “T.J. Pendergraft.” Truman had come up through the Pendergraft organization ranks.
The media have long reined in their curiosity when it comes to raising or pursuing questions about Democratic politicians’ accommodations with unsavory elements. Maybe this is only to be expected, given that poll after poll has demonstrated that we inkstained wretches (or VDT drudges), tend to favor the Democratic Party ourselves and to do so by lopsided margins.
There is a sort of reflexive, Pavlovian assumption among us journalists that any Republican of substantial financial means is, ipso facto, guilty of having acquired his wealth in an underhanded manner. And if not the Republican himself, then his recent or even distant forbears.
We journalistic schleppers,
with our modest levels of remuneration, tend to believe that all wealth is ill-gotten gain, and that the Republican Party is a gentleman’s club representing such. (This is, of course, not a wholly inaccurate impression.)
In contrast, when it comes to Democrats of substantial financial means, we journalists tend to view them as Robin Hood rogues who merely redistributed the wealth and while doing so helped themselves to a nice portion of the booty.
The shadowy provenance of the Kennedy fortune, for example, is more widely regarded with a sly wink than with a wagging finger or a disapproving scowl.
The fascinating fact that President Lyndon Johnson spent his entire adult life in politics yet retired a multimillionaire with holdings including a business empire of federally bestowed broadcast licenses never much interested the “working press,” which mostly left the sordid details to historians like Robert Caro to record.
How much interest would Watergate have aroused among the Fourth Estate had it featured the manipulations of, say, a JFK or an LBJ instead of an RMN?
Did Bob Woodward
ever experience qualms about his confidential source, “Deep Throat,” now known to have been an FBI bureaucrat with an ax to grind, having been passed over by Nixon as FBI director?
If Woodward ever had any qualms, he never bothered to share them with readers.
And what would the Washington Post’s legendary editor, Ben Bradlee, have made of matters had his reporters brought him the lowdown on, say, some Democratic pol handled with media kid gloves, say, a cosseted Kennedy instead of a Swamp-reviled Nixon?
Would Bradlee — or the sainted Post publisher Katherine Graham — then have been keen to pursue the truth wherever it led, including right into the Oval Office?
There’s reason to wonder, recalling that Bradlee
was a pal of JFK. As Newsweek’s correspondent during Kennedy’s presidency, Bradlee knew of JFK’s reckless dalliances, which included a romp with the mistress of a major Mafia boss. Yet by his own account Bradlee turned a blind eye to what would have been momentous, tsunamic news.
In light of such history, is it any surprise that the media are eager to string up the Swampscorned President Trump on flimsy, lesser charges, while overlooking the millions of dollars the ne’erdo-well, addiction-afflicted Hunter Biden, with his spotty business record, reaped from Ukrainian Burismo Holdings and the Bank of China, thanks to arrangements likely made with his father’s acquiescence if not connivance, but in either case made right under his father’s nose?