John Fredrick Parker
Donor
I mean, he is still technically "right"... sort of like a car thief who tells you "I'm just saying, you park a Tesla in that neighborhood, you're never gonna see it again".
McGoverning
- Thread starter Yes
- Start date
DUDLEY DUDLEY! We are fans of the twice-named lady. That already makes it worth a read. And beating Loeb at something big - God he was genuinely one of the most evil humans in American public life in his time. Effortlessly, relentlessly, and personally violent, a known sexual predator with his own stepchildren and perhaps others, serial animal abuser, possibly (and I really want to emphasize the "possibly" there, the evidence is highly sketchy at best but sadly it would not be out of his grotesque character) even a murderer. Full of endless abuse and contempt for anyone close enough to know him, just in common conversation. Just scum. Ari Onassis wasn't one of the Little Sisters of the Poor but he sure looks like one next to the column of hellish filth in a Botany 500 suit that was William Loeb. I'll pick up a copy with my mid-month paycheck but already I like the ending.
John Fredrick Parker
Donor
@Yes An interesting thought crosses my mind, and it’s not one I think we’ve addressed - - but while I’m sure we could imagine, and are about to see, what a liberal Democratic Administration would do with all these newly organized bureaucracies, it’s a bit less clear what a Not So Liberal Administration would do with them (aside from the boring, simplistic, and very likely wrong answer of scrapping them).
So let’s say that McGovern governs for a bit, then sometime later the US gets a Generically Right Wing President, or maybe just a Corrupt Administration. Given the raw bureaucratic mechanics of how McGovern’s people do things like Industrial and Energy Policy, what kind of shenanigans could these kinds of mid-level departments get into if you very “different” sorts of people heading them? And what about the Department of Peace -- what would a “different” kind of administration even think to do with under-departments devoted to Arms Control, Human Rights (and/or Humanitarian Disasters), Food for Peace, Peacemaking, and International Development?
So let’s say that McGovern governs for a bit, then sometime later the US gets a Generically Right Wing President, or maybe just a Corrupt Administration. Given the raw bureaucratic mechanics of how McGovern’s people do things like Industrial and Energy Policy, what kind of shenanigans could these kinds of mid-level departments get into if you very “different” sorts of people heading them? And what about the Department of Peace -- what would a “different” kind of administration even think to do with under-departments devoted to Arms Control, Human Rights (and/or Humanitarian Disasters), Food for Peace, Peacemaking, and International Development?
Imagine the CIA's fake vaccination campaign in Pakistan times a million, probably, as all the flowing funds and personal and all the foreign handshaking give the Department of Peace not only a cottage industry in producing covers but also I feel an institutional culture that would be less resistant to being suborned into the security state than you'd think. Like look to the origins of the CIA in the OSS and the Dulles brothers and everything, you have a bunch of eager young Yale guys really passionate about foreign affairs and public service who would have otherwise been embassy staff in the State Department, ready to move fast and break things. In the DNA of the CIA there's a lot of academia and a lot of like old school WASP noblesse oblige, as in the end of the day like half of espionage is just non-public diplomacy and like half of diplomacy is public espionage. Likewise I think its very possible to see like the dark punished Department of Peace have a lot of the same vibes.
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Of course, this is assuming that McGovern wouldn't just install safeguards or so on. I doubt that he would be ignorant that such administrations could be abused. After all, he's a president of the Cold War era and one who got elected because of weird election shannigans (understatement I know). So he's likely gonna had safeguards, ethics committee and some forms of accountability.
One more on my Schmidt kick.
US Secretary of Energy James Earl Carter and Secretary of Defense Cyrus Vance begin two days of discussion
in Bonn with West German chancellor Helmut Schmidt and foreign minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher regarding
two controversial issues: the proposed multibillion-dollar construction deal between West German engineering
firms and Brazil for several nuclear power reactors with technology for a complete fuel cycle, and West German
interest in fielding a Luftwaffe squadron of Pershing II missiles (under American "dual-key" control) in the northern
Rhineland under terms of the Comprehensive Arms Reduction Treaty (CART) - Soviet officials have argued that
the proposal violates the spirit of the comprehensive agreement
Yes it does look like the Bundeskanzler's left index finger is blue. I suspect that's a quirk of how the film was developed.
US Secretary of Energy James Earl Carter and Secretary of Defense Cyrus Vance begin two days of discussion
in Bonn with West German chancellor Helmut Schmidt and foreign minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher regarding
two controversial issues: the proposed multibillion-dollar construction deal between West German engineering
firms and Brazil for several nuclear power reactors with technology for a complete fuel cycle, and West German
interest in fielding a Luftwaffe squadron of Pershing II missiles (under American "dual-key" control) in the northern
Rhineland under terms of the Comprehensive Arms Reduction Treaty (CART) - Soviet officials have argued that
the proposal violates the spirit of the comprehensive agreement
Yes it does look like the Bundeskanzler's left index finger is blue. I suspect that's a quirk of how the film was developed.
One more on my Schmidt kick.
US Secretary of Energy James Earl Carter and Secretary of Defense Cyrus Vance begin two days of discussion
in Bonn with West German chancellor Helmut Schmidt and foreign minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher regarding
two controversial issues: the proposed multibillion-dollar construction deal between West German engineering
firms and Brazil for several nuclear power reactors with technology for a complete fuel cycle, and West German
interest in fielding a Luftwaffe squadron of Pershing II missiles (under American "dual-key" control) in the northern
Rhineland under terms of the Comprehensive Arms Reduction Treaty (CART) - Soviet officials have argued that
the proposal violates the spirit of the comprehensive agreement
Yes it does look like the Bundeskanzler's left index finger is blue. I suspect that's a quirk of how the film was developed.
But why is Schmidt pushing the McGoverners on multiple fronts? Make the bad Schnauze stop! Simply, it's a means for Schmidt to get the things that he really wants
- A Brazilian deal that's not as all encompassing as the German firms (or the Geisel government in Brazil) would like but that's substantially, grudgingly more liberal than the Americans would really like
- Because with Volkswagen plants in-country and other growing commercial interests, Bonn is interested in (1) a substantial industrial/technical relationship with an early-liberalizing Brazil and (2) through things like nuclear power and synthfuel (in Brazil's case mostly cane sugar-derived ethanol) for domestic consumption, Bonn would like Brazil to mature fast as a non- (even anti-)OPEC oil exporter
- Substantive US commitments to a more robust, integrated, and effective conventional defense of Western Europe (also nuclear, but especially conventional) which is what Bonn would prefer or, failing that, the fallback option of a "German key" on dual-key P2s that can hit targets in the western USSR to deter the Soviets from getting ... exuberant popping off tacnukes on West German soil
- Jointly with more US commitment to conventional defense, talking London and Paris (per the previous posted chapter) into a more integrated, communal sense of their own nuclear deterrents' role ensuring European security if the Americans ever get truly fickle about that subject
John Fredrick Parker
Donor
I just realized something, @Yes -- you're gonna have to give us a retconned version of McGovern's Cabinet, since changing your mind about HEW being split TTL. Who heads said department here, and where do Andrew Young and Terry Sanford end up? Also, in what order were the Departments of Energy, Peace, and Veterans added to the government TTL?
Also, small question -- what has Donald Rumsfeld been doing? Because unlike his OTL protege, he’s hardly a nobody in the party, not exactly; and if he can just remain noticeable to GOP bigwigs, I wonder if he could get a position in the next republican administration (maybe not quite as big of one as Sec of Defense, but… well, I’ll leave it at that for now).
Also, small question -- what has Donald Rumsfeld been doing? Because unlike his OTL protege, he’s hardly a nobody in the party, not exactly; and if he can just remain noticeable to GOP bigwigs, I wonder if he could get a position in the next republican administration (maybe not quite as big of one as Sec of Defense, but… well, I’ll leave it at that for now).
I have a HEW secretary in mind - won't be a familiar name for a lot of readers, someone chosen because they'd be good at running an executive branch department rather than because they're already an elected Democratic pol, and not someone excessively tied to the Kennedy/Johnson crowd. As for where Andy Young and Terry Sanford end up we'll see a bit of that later as we go along.
As for the new departments, that's an easy one. Peace first, narrowly - simply a matter of what bills passed through the then-new 93rd Congress first - then Veterans shortly after, both in time to set up departments and confirm senior staff around the start of the administration. Energy doesn't come along until January '75 for two reasons, (1) because an omnibus energy bill made of various smaller/more specialized bills that got hung up in advance of the midterms gets passed as soon as the 94th Congress meets, which contains the enabling language, and (2) so that the McGovern administration's desired first SecEng can finish his term as Governor of Georgia.
One thing Rummy will always do is hustle, usually several at once. He's still smarming his way through the top-tier GOP rolodex (because if anyone could make "smarm" a verb it's Rummy) to keep current, while he mulls whether there are any opportunities ahead to get back into Congress in '76 - oughta be a massacre, he figures, because c'mon! McGovern ?!? Really?!? - or whether he should remain laser focused on climbing the corporate ladder. He does have some handy friends in pharmaceuticals, and there's always the military-industrial complex to consider.
As for The Acolyte (h/t the Filoniverse), they were already partnered up before Nixon's second term, so Rummy's buddy is likely to stick even more like glue to Rumsfeld because he has not been afforded the opportunities to branch out and make an independent name that OTL's Ford administration offered, so you stick remora-like with your patron until the right opportunity finally arises. Always two there are...
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Just logging back in after a long absence to say I'm still a big fan! Reading every word off in the astral plane. Actually, what inspired me was that I just met my girlfriend's father, who made his name as a (relative) youngster by winning this settlement for the Cuban Watergateers. He's angry the White House Plumbers won't be including him in the miniseries. I told him about McGoverning, and he requests Ryan Reynolds be cast to tell his pivotal story when you sell the TV rights.
McGoverning Bonus Content: Fearsome Opponent - John Doar, Dick Nixon, and Prosecuting a (Former) President
"John Doar believes in everything Dick Nixon does not. And John Doar is a fearsome opponent."
- Jimmy Breslin, How the Good Guys Finally Won: Notes From an Impeachment Summer, p. 107
IOTL John Doar speaks with Liz Holzman during recess of a House Judiciary Committee hearing)
We have some ground to cover. A variety of things, including another special short series (starting hopefully tomorrow) of bonus content adding depth and texture to the McGovern administration and its works (and beyond that? Maybe even narrative ....)
But first, I wanted to dust off the awning and get the lights back on with something that was sorta promised during the last round of bonus content. That is, at least a brief look at the legal strategies and contextual practicalities involved - the historical context of this alternate timeline, the McGNU (the McGoverning Narrative Universe, patent pending) - when you try actually to prosecute recently-ex-president Richard Milhous Nixon. What shapes the terrain on which that happens? What approaches does the ultimate hellhound on your trail - John freakin' Doar himself - take in that process? How does that then resolve into The Dick Himself pleading to a single obstruction count? How can we think about some of the possible implications of that down the line?
That sounds like quite a lot, in and of itself, especially since we've had big chunks of two published chapters come at that through the most human of lenses. But I'll try to be brief-by-my-standards and focus on the nuts and bolts - this is the picking-apart-the-play-by-play version for that content.
Shaping the Terrain
What does this all look like, where does it fit in, in the context of TTL's 1973-74 in the USA? What distinguishes it from the familiar plot arc of Watergate IOTL and its different consequences?
I'll bullet some key points here.
True to both his Wisconsin Idea roots and his relentlessly strategic legal mind, John Doar wants to accomplish three things in his pursuit not just of the Nixon machine but the express, specific criminality of Richard Nixon himself.
The Big Spider in the Corner of the Room
That phrase I've borrowed from no less than Harold Wilson, and will come around in its own time (not in this post, though.) But it befits a consideration of where Dick Nixon sits in relation to this very specifically conspiratorial criminal enterprise that thrived in his West Wing and the CREEP basements until it sailed too close to the Brookings Institution.
Any effort, helmed at the top by the era's most meticulous American lawyer - yes, that same John Doar - to run down the total structure of Nixonian nefariousness comes up against the practicality for investigators and litigators that its architecture is really an interwoven series of criminal conspiracies. While that's a nice literary/journalistic explanation, for the investigators and litigators it has very specific statutory and prosecutorial/courtroom implications when you have to document and prove up conspiracy.
Federal conspiracy law, in its modern form - indeed the conception of "conspiracy" as a legal definition of the type of criminal conduct we understand it to be rather than much older common-law notions that would look to us more like malicious prosecution - really came together in the crucible of the Civil War, introduced by the federal statute against seditious conspiracy passed by Congress in close proximity to the Battle of Shiloh. That carried forward through other statutes that shaped up some of conspiracy's modern contours, which then were further refined between roughly the Reconstruction era and the New Deal through revisions of federal statute and especially case law up to SCOTUS level.
There are a few highly specific flavors of federal conspiracy statute, that deal with conspiracies to commit very specific kinds of illegal conduct. But the broad based federal conspiracy statute, codified since the 1940s as 18 U.S.C. 371, has some important characteristics.
18 U.S.C. 371 has, as the 1L profs say, two prongs.
Let's take a quick side route through a legal issue/approach where Dick Nixon's lawyers may feel they have some ground on which to stand fending off prosecution, and explore how John Doar would approach that - kind of a masterclass in how the practice of law, in its real-world application, is so often about your angle of approach to the fact pattern.
Congress created the Logan Act in the late 1790s, an early product of the federal legislature. Let's take a look at the key provision of the act, only ever lightly amended:
Well then. If we wanted, say, to look at the relationship of each of Madame Chennault, Richard Allen, and H.R. Haldeman with what's known for two reasons (her centrality to it, and Dick Nixon's desire to distance himself from it) as the Chennault affair, how does apply-law-to-facts stack up there? We've got (1) no authority from the US, (2) directly "commences or carries on intercourse with any foreign government or any officer or agent thereof," (3) related to friction between Washington and Saigon over the Paris Talks which certainly could count as a "controversy", and (4) that sought to "defeat the measures of the United States" by monkey-wrenching the Johnson administration's efforts to make the Paris Talks work. It's like the Logan Act waited *checks historical number line* 169 years from its January 1799 enactment to the 1968 shenanigans for just this very exact case to come along.
Well and good, you say. But what about The Dick? On one hand, one might try to muddy the waters about his relationship to the Haldeman->Allen->Chennault through line and call it overzealous subordinates. Second, in the autumn of 1968 Richard Nixon wasn't just some ordinary - or even relatively ordinary - US citizen, he was very specifically a former VPOTUS running as a serious contender for the presidency of the United States. Surely, for example, he should be able to say he would do some act or piece of foreign policy differently from LBJ without getting slapped with the Logan Act? What about his freedom of speech, here related to a small-d democratic airing of views necessary for the US electoral process to work as it should (and, because of that, verging on what the jurists call a "political question" that the courts are supposed to leave alone for politics itself to sort out) ?
I see what you're getting at, says John Doar as he polishes his glasses. In the matter of Dick Nixon, as so often that it seems ever-constant, it comes down to the how of it. Nixon could've given a speech at the Foreign Correspondents' Club or some big-city Chamber of Commerce where he went farther than his "secret plan to end the war" and said the US shouldn't abandon its allies and friends in Saigon. Some people, led by Lyndon, would call that dirty pool, a violation of "politics stops at the water's edge." But it would be in bounds, the democratic/free-speech right of a candidate to say so and persuade the public. Instead, The Dick squirreled his way through cutouts to Madame Chennault who went on a mission so not-secret that Theodore White Himself remarked on it in the same breath that he dismissed it as church-basement women's frippery rather than an underhanded conspiracy to violate the Logan Act by putting Nixon's imprimatur on the good lady's statements. Because Dick Nixon wanted to look like an upright citizen in the daylight and do the nut-cutting in the shadows, as always.
Then we get at the legal through line that runs you back to Nixon and, yep, if you had your hand up to say "it's conspiracy!" you get a star on your 1L Trapper Keeper, two stars if you also mention the statute on soliciting a federal crime which is another of those rhymes-with charges that riffs on conspiracy. Haldeman can fall on all the swords his square Teutonic jawline wants to, so long as there's any "there" there to Nixon's own involvement in discussions about what Madame Chennault would get up to, then Dick Nixon is liable for the foreseeable federal offense of violating the Logan Act which her acts arguably represent. Dude can have all the cut-outs he wants, the "two or more" reaches him by the commutative principle and Madame Chennault's whole big blazing None Dare Call It Patriotism show in front of Senate Foreign Relations just screws Nixon that much farther into the wall.
Someone Did The RICO?
In 1973-74, in any TL with a POD as relatively late to the fact pattern as 1972, the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act of 1970 is young law. Very young law, indeed: IOTL the first proper RICO prosecution was not pled up and carried out until 1979. It is then quite possible that an effort to pursue the Nixon crew on a RICO charge would be, as the legal community puts it, a case of first impression - previously uncharted territory. That always brings with it risks that the congenitally methodical Doar would prefer to avoid. At the same time we should take a brief look at the intersection of The RICO and The Dick, or at least the Nixon machine's nefarious machinery, to see why Doar might keep it in his back pocket nonetheless, in case Nixon entertained thoughts of a scorched-earth legal fight.
In order to Do The RICO Good, you need two elements (why am I reminded of the Minecraft videos my middle-schooler watches?)
Another interesting thing to note: one typical element of racketeering is ill-gotten gains. While that's most often financial, with things like the legal leverage gained through obstruction of justice there are non-pecuniary "gains" that courts will consider if there's a clear and well-pled evidence pattern. It would be interesting, then, to argue that the chief ill-gotten gain was in fact political power and leverage of a kind unequaled in Cold War America.
At the same time, John Doar is acutely aware that this is the most "political" sort of charge he can make against Dick Nixon and his crew. The accusation that the re-election campaign of a sitting POTUS, along with significant elements of the Executive Office of the President, were in fact an organized-crime enterprise, well, that cuts deep. It also has the potential to become a distraction from the ultimate goal of bringing Nixon to book. Also it has more power in its potential than its practicality - a sort of deterrent value where, if Nixon refuses to compromise on other more straightforward charges, he might end up faced with a RICO prosecution, one where, again, there are plenty of opportunities for frightened underlings (hi, John Dean!) to roll on the big boss.
Follow the Money
Why, out of all of this, do potential tax violations make Richard Nixon, America's War Badger, go pale? Because of what they mean in Nixon's own universe of self-definition.
As President McGovern said in an already-published chapter, like a lot of Depression-era folks, Dick Nixon grew up poor and pretending not to be. Even by the TTL end of his presidency he's not as wealthy as he'd really prefer to be. But he has privately made certain that he, and by extension his family (including his entrepreneurially-challenged brother), do as well for themselves as they can. And because a number of those economic advantages would get him in dutch with the law - tax cheating, illicit and often illegal political contributions, plus just general favors and freebies and backhanders from wealthy friends like Bebe Rebozo - Nixon was furiously concerned to keep them under cover and aggressively front his public image as an upright self-made man as he'd been doing since at least the Checkers Speech (about another one of those dark-grey-area backhanders that nearly got him into serious trouble with Eisenhower.) The self-made Orthogonian square, decent tribune of the lumpensuburbitariat, family man - all of that is what he wanted to project rather than the drunken wife-beating boor of medium talent and shady finances with significant mental and emotional health issues that lurked beneath. More than most anything else, Nixon didn't want that shroud of virtue ripped off in the public square. It was his Achilles heel.
And John Doar knows this. He knows that guys like Nixon and, in a second-time-as-farce way, Ted Agnew need the big lie even more than they need actual power. He knows how to work with that, how to plow through the gory details with forensic accountants, turn up things both little and big that collectively erode the big lie because it's in the money where, with big-lie-ars, things usually get tawdry. Tawdry is a thing up with which the big lie cannot put, so it's an excellent way to squeeze the defendant, show them just what dragging it all through the courts will really mean. Then you can get down to the business of negotiating a plea.
The Solicitation That Didn't Bark
"Blow the safe. Blow it - I want it implemented on a thievery basis ..."
You'd think that would do it, right? You'd think that those words, in reference to a black-bag job conducted against the Brookings Institution, are the words every prosecutor would want to hear. Right?
In the high days of the Cold War, scarcely a year or two out from under J. Edgar Hoover, you'd be wrong. John Doar knows this, and would calmly explain.
First, despite the many reprehensible shenanigans of the national-security state in the days of America's KGB under J. Edgar or the War Against Longhairs, there were some things up to which the national-security state got which were clearly illegal, like CIA operations inside the US or the military spying on US citizens and domestic politics. At the same time, there was a whole raft of grey-area activity to do with wiretapping, black-bag jobs, and the like, where areas got very grey indeed and depended altogether too much on what judge - or lack thereof - you might be dealing with. While Congress slowly started to move towards reforming the whole procedural tangle (IOTL with things like the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, better known as FISA), you did not want to waste time and bog down trying to get Dick Nixon for soliciting federal crimes in re: Brookings. Besides, you've already got him on conspiracy there, where Tex Colson taking a few hundred too many bennies and freelancing the thing was, arguably, a foreseeable crime pursuant to a whole nest of conspiratorial ideas. (And it's this off-the-books stuff, like Watergate IOTL, where the Nixon crew really made trouble for themselves. If they'd gone through channels with the Fibbies or the like they could've spared themselves a great deal of grief. But Dick Nixon was taught by his long-suffering mother, as much as his abusive father, to hide the darkness, so he did and it cost him.)
Also, you don't go at solicitation of felonies because it hands Nixon a microphone. Here's a chance, like relying on the actual X-File rather than evidence gleaned from Senate Foreign Relations' hearings, for Nixon to "put the system on trial." More than that, to make Dick Nixon's favorite legal argument - if the president does it , it's not illegal - and drum up a whole political palaver over that. National security still plays in the TV ensconced dens of ranch-style houses across the nation. Don't give the guy that island to stand on when there are so many other ways to make him drown.
Immovable Milhous, Irresistible Doar
Speaking of: there's a specific criminal charge - besides the "defraud" prong of conspiracy - that lets someone like John Doar take Dick Nixon's favorite argument and turn it on its head. Nixon may want to advance an untrammeled chief executive (much like some of the loonier arguments made in the early post-9/11 Aughts), where if the president does it it's not illegal. Sure, whatever - the Impeachment Clause in Article II puts the lie to that directly. If a POTUS can commit high crimes or misdemeanors that would cause them to be removed from office, then the Nixon view doesn't fly.
And what would be one of the worst instances of that? Why, if a POTUS took such action as to prevent the very machinery of laws that make us a nation of laws not men from operating. This is much like what Doar had subtly done down South when he knew trying to nail murderous Klansmen for murder would just end up with nullification from a jury of their peers. Instead he nailed them for what they said out loud - civil rights violations. And the reason that those violations really mattered was because they proved the murderers in question neither saw nor treated their victims as fully-fledged human beings.
The reason, then, that a federal obstruction charge against Dick Nixon would matter so much was twofold
Let's look again at the black-ink law here. Like the principal federal conspiracy statute, the principal federal obstruction statute, 18 U.S.C. 1503, has two prongs. We can, however, dispense with the first one because it's entirely about various permutations of jury tampering. On to the second prong, which prohibits anything that "corruptly or by threats or force, or by threatening letter or communication, influences, obstructs, or impedes, or endeavors to influence, obstruct, or impede, the due administration of justice."
Let's grab that buried lede, "the due administration of justice." Impressively broad, for one thing. For a second thing, that's, like, the whole shooting match right there. "The due administration of justice" - the whole application of the rule of law to society. It suggests that Dick Nixon corruptly usurped and/or monkey-wrenched the workings of a nation of laws. That he acted not like an elected chief executive sworn to uphold and defend the Constitution against all enemies foreign and domestic, but instead like one part mob boss, one part king.
That makes this the specific charge that Doar, and the McGovern administration generally, most wants Nixon done for. Not just a statutory obstruction but a usurpation of the due administration of justice. All the way from the sabotage of the Paris Talks in '68 through so many other obstructions and illegalities that either were the stuff of the Nixon crew's corrupt approach to governance or fruit of the Chennault Affair's poisonous tree. If the McGoverners had to pick a favorite charge on which to get The Dick, this is a likely winner.
Which is why, when the slow grind of preparation to go to war over the money wears Dick Nixon down, it's obstruction that John Doar proposes as the sword on which Nixon will need to fall.
Caveat Emptor
Because he is as good at what he does as anyone has ever been, given time and grueling effort and consistent pressure, John Doar gets the courtroom outcome he sought. Richard Milhous Nixon pleads guilty to a charge that - per the views of his accusers - names him as guilty of sabotaging and usurping the rule of law to his own benefit. Also, he does so to avoid a raft of other charges that he (1) was personally venal and corrupt and (2) sat at the beating heart of a network of criminal conspiracies.
But life is never quite that simple.
Sure, that's what my side - the side that things The Good Guys Finally Won - thinks. Of course we do. This is justice - payback too, if we're honest - but a fundamental reassertion of the rule of law, of the principle that the presidency is an office not a man, of the corollary that no president is an emperor, of the capacity to defend the American experiment even from domestic opponents. That's exactly what we say.
What about the other side?
Sure there are plenty of middle-ground people in the, well, middle, who think it's probably good that the rule of law was upheld but wish all this upsetting news would go away and leave them to weekend getaways or Candid Camera, also that the price of steak would go back down. But then you get into the other side in this business. The Silent "Majority." The Orthogonian Legion. The weaponized lumpensuburbitariat. Hunter S. Thompson's "nation of two hundred million used-car salesmen." What do they think?
They think, mostly, that this is a witch hunt and a sham. Obstruction? What do they mean, obstruction? Why is that important? There's nothing Dick Nixon ever did that wasn't just a Real Man looking out for Real Murka the best he knew how, the way he had to because They are always battering at the gates ready to tear it all down, ready surely - because everyone assumes that in some way everyone else is like them - to slaughter the Silent Majority to a man before the Silent Majority can do unto the Longhairs and Slurs. Dick Nixon barred that door with his sheer imperial bulk and with him gone, with him brought low by Alien Elites, the world is a darker and more frightening place. What about this whole prosecution wasn't a political act? After all, isn't everything ultimately emotive, and vindictive, and tribal?
The Wisconsin Idea that lives in John Doar's very chromosomes believes in a nation that can learn better and ultimately be better, where being in the right involves considered and uplifted moral judgment, empathy, devotion to principles devoid of bigotry and wrath, intended for the betterment of all humanity. But that may be asking a lot of the country Hunter S. Thompson sees out his window past the keyboard of his Selectric.
One thing I'll say here is this, for us to sit with before we go from this place. Here, in the world where George McGovern won, a Nixon pardon is not a historical turning point where America failed to turn. Here, pardoning Dick Nixon is a cause.
- Jimmy Breslin, How the Good Guys Finally Won: Notes From an Impeachment Summer, p. 107
IOTL John Doar speaks with Liz Holzman during recess of a House Judiciary Committee hearing)
We have some ground to cover. A variety of things, including another special short series (starting hopefully tomorrow) of bonus content adding depth and texture to the McGovern administration and its works (and beyond that? Maybe even narrative ....)
But first, I wanted to dust off the awning and get the lights back on with something that was sorta promised during the last round of bonus content. That is, at least a brief look at the legal strategies and contextual practicalities involved - the historical context of this alternate timeline, the McGNU (the McGoverning Narrative Universe, patent pending) - when you try actually to prosecute recently-ex-president Richard Milhous Nixon. What shapes the terrain on which that happens? What approaches does the ultimate hellhound on your trail - John freakin' Doar himself - take in that process? How does that then resolve into The Dick Himself pleading to a single obstruction count? How can we think about some of the possible implications of that down the line?
That sounds like quite a lot, in and of itself, especially since we've had big chunks of two published chapters come at that through the most human of lenses. But I'll try to be brief-by-my-standards and focus on the nuts and bolts - this is the picking-apart-the-play-by-play version for that content.
Shaping the Terrain
What does this all look like, where does it fit in, in the context of TTL's 1973-74 in the USA? What distinguishes it from the familiar plot arc of Watergate IOTL and its different consequences?
I'll bullet some key points here.
- For a certain proportion of middle-opinion middle Americans, this feels like a story that already has an end. President does bad stuff. One of that president's badder lackeys gets caught. Shenanigans ensue. Congress investigates. All this blows up in that president's face. Then, voters kick that president to the curb in the November presidential election: they vote him out because he was bad, even taking a flyer on a new guy who has some weird of ideas but seems to have integrity at least. (These same minds either whistle right past the Wallace option, or voted for it and don't feel they need to explain themselves.) President accepts electoral defeat, House of Representatives impeaches him on the way out the door to appropriately stain his record - case closed. Beyond that lie dragons, and a lot of suburbanites who fervently hoped the Seventies would be a whole lot quieter than the Sixties feel ... unsettled about taking the guy who was recently the Leader of the Free World to court. Feels shabby. Leads to questions about the fundamental fitness of American culture and institutions that they would rather not ask.
- For a lot of other Americans, the "Brookingsgate" of the McGNU is a lot more classically partisanthan OTL's Watergate saga ultimately became.
- For some folks, quite a few folks, located politically from the middle leftwards, an important reason to vote for George McGovern was to bring in a reformer with integrity who'd throw the book at an authoritarian crook like Dick Nixon.
- For a number of folks on the New Right (hi, Senator Goldwater!) and among the Wallace-adjacent, they're ready to call a plague down on both sides because they loathe The Goddamn Hippie-Hugger but also Dick Nixon was always a shifty lying weasel who didn't really believe in The Right Things (on that front the Wallace folk always underestimated the sheer depth and versatility of Nixon's personal bigotry) and could never be trusted, so they want it to go badly for both sides which they hope would validate their own views in time for 1976.
- For a lot of the lumpensuburbitariat, Nixon's very own buzzcut Silent Majority, this is Liberal Elites (who include ((Hollywood types)) and ((New York lawyers)) which are the Silent Majority's favorite anti-semitic euphemisms) and pinko commie [RACIAL SLURS, VARIOUS] [LGBTQ+ SLURS, VARIOUS] who just want to ruin the Greatest Living Emperor of the Common Decent Murkan for their nefarious purposes and maybe a military coup would sort things out.
- Then, also, the new McGovern administration has to figure out how to investigate and litigate this moderately-sprawling criminal conspiracy (more on that word shortly) without having the juicy, juicy news of all that wash over, and wash out, McGovernment's efforts to, y'know, govern, and govern in occasionally bold new ways no less.
- On that, at least, McGovernment has an advantage a lot of conventional-wisdom folk wouldn't have credited before McGovernment actually staffed up and went to work - that it's blessed with a variety of really high quality personnel. Which is where the new Solicitor General of the United States, now supreme commander of the legal effort to de-louse the Executive Branch by bringing the CREEP crowd to justice - one John Doar - comes in.
True to both his Wisconsin Idea roots and his relentlessly strategic legal mind, John Doar wants to accomplish three things in his pursuit not just of the Nixon machine but the express, specific criminality of Richard Nixon himself.
- As he always worked to do even in the bright shining evil of the bleeding early-Sixties South, Doar seeks to drain the case of partisan rancor, redefine it as a measured, specific, empirical process of applying not just "the law" in general but some very specific laws that underpin the United States' status as "a nation of laws, not men," laws that that spell out Nixon's sins against the very concept of a nation of laws and prescribe relevant punishment.
- Like any good litigator, Doar wants to build a tight, simple argument - indeed several from which to choose - in key pleadings and a chain of evidence, both, from which a judge/jury can pick a clear, clean, obvious application of law to fact that (1) holds in Doar's favor and (2) will withstand scrutiny from appellate courts.
- Out of that collection of arguments about specific ways in which Dick Nixon has broken the law, Doar also wants to build a snare - an inescapable structure of possibilities where Nixon's best outcome is to pick some specific charge and plead guilty in return for (1) some measure of a deal on punishment and (2) an end to the whole sorry business, because he's otherwise screwed every way he (Nixon) turns.
The Big Spider in the Corner of the Room
That phrase I've borrowed from no less than Harold Wilson, and will come around in its own time (not in this post, though.) But it befits a consideration of where Dick Nixon sits in relation to this very specifically conspiratorial criminal enterprise that thrived in his West Wing and the CREEP basements until it sailed too close to the Brookings Institution.
Any effort, helmed at the top by the era's most meticulous American lawyer - yes, that same John Doar - to run down the total structure of Nixonian nefariousness comes up against the practicality for investigators and litigators that its architecture is really an interwoven series of criminal conspiracies. While that's a nice literary/journalistic explanation, for the investigators and litigators it has very specific statutory and prosecutorial/courtroom implications when you have to document and prove up conspiracy.
Federal conspiracy law, in its modern form - indeed the conception of "conspiracy" as a legal definition of the type of criminal conduct we understand it to be rather than much older common-law notions that would look to us more like malicious prosecution - really came together in the crucible of the Civil War, introduced by the federal statute against seditious conspiracy passed by Congress in close proximity to the Battle of Shiloh. That carried forward through other statutes that shaped up some of conspiracy's modern contours, which then were further refined between roughly the Reconstruction era and the New Deal through revisions of federal statute and especially case law up to SCOTUS level.
There are a few highly specific flavors of federal conspiracy statute, that deal with conspiracies to commit very specific kinds of illegal conduct. But the broad based federal conspiracy statute, codified since the 1940s as 18 U.S.C. 371, has some important characteristics.
18 U.S.C. 371 has, as the 1L profs say, two prongs.
- The first deals with conspiracy to commit a federal crime of some sort (it's a federal law, so the conspiracy must relate to a federal crime or crimes.)
- The second offers the rather fascinating charge of "conspiracy to defraud the United States" by a variety of means in a variety of ways grouped together as any effort to impair, obstruct, or defeat lawful government functions. In the Nixon machine's case, the efforts to monkey-wrench both Congressional and DOJ special prosecutor investigations into that very machine's criminality would count as defrauding the United States in this subsection's sense.
- The two prongs offer, with separate charges under different sections of the same statute, a chance to prosecute the Nixon crew both for the bad deeds and for the cover-up thereof.
- Proving up and pleading both general conspiracy and the "conspiracy to defraud" charge also gets you 99% of the way to doing likewise on other charges, notably the federal aid-and-abet statute (ref. conspiracy to a federal crime) and federal obstruction of justice (ref. "conspiracy to defraud") which piles on more useful options for judge and jury to nail Nixon and the other big fish of the crew - it creates more negotiating tools for a plea bargain also.
- If we look at the legal mechanics of the conspiracy charge there are interesting nuggets also
- Conspiracy involves (1) an agreement (2) between two or more person, a fact pattern baked into the Nixon West Wing/CREEP's whole way of doing business, sometimes compartmentalized but more often with some figure or two (hi, Egil Krogh! hi, H.R. Haldeman!) who knows enough of what's what that they represent an actor in the conspiracy process who ties varied sub-conspiracies together
- Conspirators are also liable "for the foreseeable crimes of their fellows committed in furtherance of the common plot" (Federal Conspiracy Law: A Brief Overview. Congressional Research Service, 2020. p. 2 ff.) so any felony or other offense that reasonably represents "furtherance of the common plot" will blow back at the folks who first stirred up and laid out the notions (hi, Dick!)
- Also statements by any single conspirator can be used/are admissible as evidence against the rest - this is where Tex Colson's benzedrine-and-benzedrine-withdrawal-fueled monologuing really comes back to bite The Dick in the ass, along with a whole range of materials from the Oval Office tapes
- Each time a conspiracy gets tried, the conspirators are lumped in together, nervously shifting in their seats at the same defendants' table, constantly under the pressure that one or more of them may chicken out and roll on the others in return for a deal.
- There are a lot of interlaced conspiracies in the West Wing/CREEP tangle, so there are multiple opportunities to put some of the same defendants in that same pressure cooker over and over. That sort of thing wears down a defendant's resolve to the point where they just want it to be over.
Let's take a quick side route through a legal issue/approach where Dick Nixon's lawyers may feel they have some ground on which to stand fending off prosecution, and explore how John Doar would approach that - kind of a masterclass in how the practice of law, in its real-world application, is so often about your angle of approach to the fact pattern.
Congress created the Logan Act in the late 1790s, an early product of the federal legislature. Let's take a look at the key provision of the act, only ever lightly amended:
Any citizen of the United States, wherever he may be, who, without authority of the United States, directly or indirectly commences or carries on any correspondence or intercourse with any foreign government or any officer or agent thereof, in relation to any disputes or controversies with the United States, or to defeat the measures of the United States, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than three years, or both.
Well then. If we wanted, say, to look at the relationship of each of Madame Chennault, Richard Allen, and H.R. Haldeman with what's known for two reasons (her centrality to it, and Dick Nixon's desire to distance himself from it) as the Chennault affair, how does apply-law-to-facts stack up there? We've got (1) no authority from the US, (2) directly "commences or carries on intercourse with any foreign government or any officer or agent thereof," (3) related to friction between Washington and Saigon over the Paris Talks which certainly could count as a "controversy", and (4) that sought to "defeat the measures of the United States" by monkey-wrenching the Johnson administration's efforts to make the Paris Talks work. It's like the Logan Act waited *checks historical number line* 169 years from its January 1799 enactment to the 1968 shenanigans for just this very exact case to come along.
Well and good, you say. But what about The Dick? On one hand, one might try to muddy the waters about his relationship to the Haldeman->Allen->Chennault through line and call it overzealous subordinates. Second, in the autumn of 1968 Richard Nixon wasn't just some ordinary - or even relatively ordinary - US citizen, he was very specifically a former VPOTUS running as a serious contender for the presidency of the United States. Surely, for example, he should be able to say he would do some act or piece of foreign policy differently from LBJ without getting slapped with the Logan Act? What about his freedom of speech, here related to a small-d democratic airing of views necessary for the US electoral process to work as it should (and, because of that, verging on what the jurists call a "political question" that the courts are supposed to leave alone for politics itself to sort out) ?
I see what you're getting at, says John Doar as he polishes his glasses. In the matter of Dick Nixon, as so often that it seems ever-constant, it comes down to the how of it. Nixon could've given a speech at the Foreign Correspondents' Club or some big-city Chamber of Commerce where he went farther than his "secret plan to end the war" and said the US shouldn't abandon its allies and friends in Saigon. Some people, led by Lyndon, would call that dirty pool, a violation of "politics stops at the water's edge." But it would be in bounds, the democratic/free-speech right of a candidate to say so and persuade the public. Instead, The Dick squirreled his way through cutouts to Madame Chennault who went on a mission so not-secret that Theodore White Himself remarked on it in the same breath that he dismissed it as church-basement women's frippery rather than an underhanded conspiracy to violate the Logan Act by putting Nixon's imprimatur on the good lady's statements. Because Dick Nixon wanted to look like an upright citizen in the daylight and do the nut-cutting in the shadows, as always.
Then we get at the legal through line that runs you back to Nixon and, yep, if you had your hand up to say "it's conspiracy!" you get a star on your 1L Trapper Keeper, two stars if you also mention the statute on soliciting a federal crime which is another of those rhymes-with charges that riffs on conspiracy. Haldeman can fall on all the swords his square Teutonic jawline wants to, so long as there's any "there" there to Nixon's own involvement in discussions about what Madame Chennault would get up to, then Dick Nixon is liable for the foreseeable federal offense of violating the Logan Act which her acts arguably represent. Dude can have all the cut-outs he wants, the "two or more" reaches him by the commutative principle and Madame Chennault's whole big blazing None Dare Call It Patriotism show in front of Senate Foreign Relations just screws Nixon that much farther into the wall.
Someone Did The RICO?
In 1973-74, in any TL with a POD as relatively late to the fact pattern as 1972, the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act of 1970 is young law. Very young law, indeed: IOTL the first proper RICO prosecution was not pled up and carried out until 1979. It is then quite possible that an effort to pursue the Nixon crew on a RICO charge would be, as the legal community puts it, a case of first impression - previously uncharted territory. That always brings with it risks that the congenitally methodical Doar would prefer to avoid. At the same time we should take a brief look at the intersection of The RICO and The Dick, or at least the Nixon machine's nefarious machinery, to see why Doar might keep it in his back pocket nonetheless, in case Nixon entertained thoughts of a scorched-earth legal fight.
In order to Do The RICO Good, you need two elements (why am I reminded of the Minecraft videos my middle-schooler watches?)
- One or more predicate offenses - the actual "racketeering" part, preferably after the RICO Act of 1970 was enacted, though it can be connected back as far as ten years between a current/recent and a previous instance of racketeering
- A relationship between the defendants and the racket
- Federal fraud of any kind (hi, Segretti crew!) including mail and wire fraud
- Federal financial fraud more specifically (hi, milk money and other illegal campaign contributions!)
- Money laundering (some of the bags of funny money brush the sleeve of that)
- Obstruction of justice (this is a big one in the circumstances)
Another interesting thing to note: one typical element of racketeering is ill-gotten gains. While that's most often financial, with things like the legal leverage gained through obstruction of justice there are non-pecuniary "gains" that courts will consider if there's a clear and well-pled evidence pattern. It would be interesting, then, to argue that the chief ill-gotten gain was in fact political power and leverage of a kind unequaled in Cold War America.
At the same time, John Doar is acutely aware that this is the most "political" sort of charge he can make against Dick Nixon and his crew. The accusation that the re-election campaign of a sitting POTUS, along with significant elements of the Executive Office of the President, were in fact an organized-crime enterprise, well, that cuts deep. It also has the potential to become a distraction from the ultimate goal of bringing Nixon to book. Also it has more power in its potential than its practicality - a sort of deterrent value where, if Nixon refuses to compromise on other more straightforward charges, he might end up faced with a RICO prosecution, one where, again, there are plenty of opportunities for frightened underlings (hi, John Dean!) to roll on the big boss.
Follow the Money
Why, out of all of this, do potential tax violations make Richard Nixon, America's War Badger, go pale? Because of what they mean in Nixon's own universe of self-definition.
As President McGovern said in an already-published chapter, like a lot of Depression-era folks, Dick Nixon grew up poor and pretending not to be. Even by the TTL end of his presidency he's not as wealthy as he'd really prefer to be. But he has privately made certain that he, and by extension his family (including his entrepreneurially-challenged brother), do as well for themselves as they can. And because a number of those economic advantages would get him in dutch with the law - tax cheating, illicit and often illegal political contributions, plus just general favors and freebies and backhanders from wealthy friends like Bebe Rebozo - Nixon was furiously concerned to keep them under cover and aggressively front his public image as an upright self-made man as he'd been doing since at least the Checkers Speech (about another one of those dark-grey-area backhanders that nearly got him into serious trouble with Eisenhower.) The self-made Orthogonian square, decent tribune of the lumpensuburbitariat, family man - all of that is what he wanted to project rather than the drunken wife-beating boor of medium talent and shady finances with significant mental and emotional health issues that lurked beneath. More than most anything else, Nixon didn't want that shroud of virtue ripped off in the public square. It was his Achilles heel.
And John Doar knows this. He knows that guys like Nixon and, in a second-time-as-farce way, Ted Agnew need the big lie even more than they need actual power. He knows how to work with that, how to plow through the gory details with forensic accountants, turn up things both little and big that collectively erode the big lie because it's in the money where, with big-lie-ars, things usually get tawdry. Tawdry is a thing up with which the big lie cannot put, so it's an excellent way to squeeze the defendant, show them just what dragging it all through the courts will really mean. Then you can get down to the business of negotiating a plea.
The Solicitation That Didn't Bark
"Blow the safe. Blow it - I want it implemented on a thievery basis ..."
You'd think that would do it, right? You'd think that those words, in reference to a black-bag job conducted against the Brookings Institution, are the words every prosecutor would want to hear. Right?
In the high days of the Cold War, scarcely a year or two out from under J. Edgar Hoover, you'd be wrong. John Doar knows this, and would calmly explain.
First, despite the many reprehensible shenanigans of the national-security state in the days of America's KGB under J. Edgar or the War Against Longhairs, there were some things up to which the national-security state got which were clearly illegal, like CIA operations inside the US or the military spying on US citizens and domestic politics. At the same time, there was a whole raft of grey-area activity to do with wiretapping, black-bag jobs, and the like, where areas got very grey indeed and depended altogether too much on what judge - or lack thereof - you might be dealing with. While Congress slowly started to move towards reforming the whole procedural tangle (IOTL with things like the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, better known as FISA), you did not want to waste time and bog down trying to get Dick Nixon for soliciting federal crimes in re: Brookings. Besides, you've already got him on conspiracy there, where Tex Colson taking a few hundred too many bennies and freelancing the thing was, arguably, a foreseeable crime pursuant to a whole nest of conspiratorial ideas. (And it's this off-the-books stuff, like Watergate IOTL, where the Nixon crew really made trouble for themselves. If they'd gone through channels with the Fibbies or the like they could've spared themselves a great deal of grief. But Dick Nixon was taught by his long-suffering mother, as much as his abusive father, to hide the darkness, so he did and it cost him.)
Also, you don't go at solicitation of felonies because it hands Nixon a microphone. Here's a chance, like relying on the actual X-File rather than evidence gleaned from Senate Foreign Relations' hearings, for Nixon to "put the system on trial." More than that, to make Dick Nixon's favorite legal argument - if the president does it , it's not illegal - and drum up a whole political palaver over that. National security still plays in the TV ensconced dens of ranch-style houses across the nation. Don't give the guy that island to stand on when there are so many other ways to make him drown.
Immovable Milhous, Irresistible Doar
Speaking of: there's a specific criminal charge - besides the "defraud" prong of conspiracy - that lets someone like John Doar take Dick Nixon's favorite argument and turn it on its head. Nixon may want to advance an untrammeled chief executive (much like some of the loonier arguments made in the early post-9/11 Aughts), where if the president does it it's not illegal. Sure, whatever - the Impeachment Clause in Article II puts the lie to that directly. If a POTUS can commit high crimes or misdemeanors that would cause them to be removed from office, then the Nixon view doesn't fly.
And what would be one of the worst instances of that? Why, if a POTUS took such action as to prevent the very machinery of laws that make us a nation of laws not men from operating. This is much like what Doar had subtly done down South when he knew trying to nail murderous Klansmen for murder would just end up with nullification from a jury of their peers. Instead he nailed them for what they said out loud - civil rights violations. And the reason that those violations really mattered was because they proved the murderers in question neither saw nor treated their victims as fully-fledged human beings.
The reason, then, that a federal obstruction charge against Dick Nixon would matter so much was twofold
- He did so much of that obstructing directly, either in private taped conversations with his West Wing henchmen or overt public acts like firing the special prosecutor and Attorney General
- Because each element of his often very public obstruction of justice showed that Dick Nixon believed he was
- above,
- outside, or
- personally in charge of the law
Let's look again at the black-ink law here. Like the principal federal conspiracy statute, the principal federal obstruction statute, 18 U.S.C. 1503, has two prongs. We can, however, dispense with the first one because it's entirely about various permutations of jury tampering. On to the second prong, which prohibits anything that "corruptly or by threats or force, or by threatening letter or communication, influences, obstructs, or impedes, or endeavors to influence, obstruct, or impede, the due administration of justice."
Let's grab that buried lede, "the due administration of justice." Impressively broad, for one thing. For a second thing, that's, like, the whole shooting match right there. "The due administration of justice" - the whole application of the rule of law to society. It suggests that Dick Nixon corruptly usurped and/or monkey-wrenched the workings of a nation of laws. That he acted not like an elected chief executive sworn to uphold and defend the Constitution against all enemies foreign and domestic, but instead like one part mob boss, one part king.
That makes this the specific charge that Doar, and the McGovern administration generally, most wants Nixon done for. Not just a statutory obstruction but a usurpation of the due administration of justice. All the way from the sabotage of the Paris Talks in '68 through so many other obstructions and illegalities that either were the stuff of the Nixon crew's corrupt approach to governance or fruit of the Chennault Affair's poisonous tree. If the McGoverners had to pick a favorite charge on which to get The Dick, this is a likely winner.
Which is why, when the slow grind of preparation to go to war over the money wears Dick Nixon down, it's obstruction that John Doar proposes as the sword on which Nixon will need to fall.
Caveat Emptor
Because he is as good at what he does as anyone has ever been, given time and grueling effort and consistent pressure, John Doar gets the courtroom outcome he sought. Richard Milhous Nixon pleads guilty to a charge that - per the views of his accusers - names him as guilty of sabotaging and usurping the rule of law to his own benefit. Also, he does so to avoid a raft of other charges that he (1) was personally venal and corrupt and (2) sat at the beating heart of a network of criminal conspiracies.
But life is never quite that simple.
Sure, that's what my side - the side that things The Good Guys Finally Won - thinks. Of course we do. This is justice - payback too, if we're honest - but a fundamental reassertion of the rule of law, of the principle that the presidency is an office not a man, of the corollary that no president is an emperor, of the capacity to defend the American experiment even from domestic opponents. That's exactly what we say.
What about the other side?
Sure there are plenty of middle-ground people in the, well, middle, who think it's probably good that the rule of law was upheld but wish all this upsetting news would go away and leave them to weekend getaways or Candid Camera, also that the price of steak would go back down. But then you get into the other side in this business. The Silent "Majority." The Orthogonian Legion. The weaponized lumpensuburbitariat. Hunter S. Thompson's "nation of two hundred million used-car salesmen." What do they think?
They think, mostly, that this is a witch hunt and a sham. Obstruction? What do they mean, obstruction? Why is that important? There's nothing Dick Nixon ever did that wasn't just a Real Man looking out for Real Murka the best he knew how, the way he had to because They are always battering at the gates ready to tear it all down, ready surely - because everyone assumes that in some way everyone else is like them - to slaughter the Silent Majority to a man before the Silent Majority can do unto the Longhairs and Slurs. Dick Nixon barred that door with his sheer imperial bulk and with him gone, with him brought low by Alien Elites, the world is a darker and more frightening place. What about this whole prosecution wasn't a political act? After all, isn't everything ultimately emotive, and vindictive, and tribal?
The Wisconsin Idea that lives in John Doar's very chromosomes believes in a nation that can learn better and ultimately be better, where being in the right involves considered and uplifted moral judgment, empathy, devotion to principles devoid of bigotry and wrath, intended for the betterment of all humanity. But that may be asking a lot of the country Hunter S. Thompson sees out his window past the keyboard of his Selectric.
One thing I'll say here is this, for us to sit with before we go from this place. Here, in the world where George McGovern won, a Nixon pardon is not a historical turning point where America failed to turn. Here, pardoning Dick Nixon is a cause.
‘Tis an eldritch season…
By day, Dick Nixon plays piano and is exasperated by the hijinks of his newly-grown daughters. By night, HE FIGHTS CRIME!!
You get the right jury, do a little grandstanding, and you could get yourself a Congressional seat from that
I feel like despite the almost STAVKA Deep Battle success of Doar and the gang in establishing the clear legal guilt of Nixon in particular and the executive office in general principle, there may have been just a tad too much disregard for the production of it all as an exercise of the state perpetuating itself and redefining itself. Even as important as it is as a legal principle obstruction is maybe just a bit too thin to hang "the trial of the old regime" on when you really could have made Dick the next Al Capone. And yeah that is what this was always going to have to be, when this is all part of burying the evils of Nixonism and Vietnam and healing a broken America under the radical new McGovernment understanding of the American state.
A certain Georgia amphibian is reconsidering his decision not to go to law school…