Your Humble Blogger yields to no-one in my admiration for Jon Carroll (unless, of course, it is to someone who is already in the admiration-for-Jon-Carroll intersection, or approaching it, before I get there, and I can’t proceed safely until they are through) but in today’s column he passes along an idea that is incredibly popular and incredibly pernicious. It has been a problem for a long time, and the results are visible all over your front pages and home pages. He says, referring to investigations of illegality in the White House, “In both previous cases, it wasn't so much the initial act as the cover-up that prolonged the story. The lesson about the malign nature of cover-ups was much noted both times -- "if only he'd come clean right away," people murmured -- but that lesson has not been learned.”
Mr. Carroll does not, I hope, seriously believe that if Richard Nixon had, the day after the burglars were caught in the Watergate Hotel, announced that he had, through his advisors, sent them to wiretap the Democratic offices as part of an ongoing attempt to destroy his political opposition and rig the 1972 election, that everybody would have nodded, made a note of it, and allowed him to continue. I sure hope he doesn’t believe that if the aides at the time had announced that they were regularly asked to violate the law in order to help the political fortunes of the President and his Party, there would have been no scandal. What prolonged the story was not the cover-up, but the failure of the cover-up; the story was the not the cover-up, but the crimes that were covered up. The evidence available at the time was for the cover-up, though.
For President Clinton, on the other hand, it is somewhat easier to believe that his abuse of his position for sexual gratification was not and never would have been a major scandal, if he had not lied about it. I’m not sure. If Our Previous President had answered all the questions accurately, publicly, and specifically, he might not have been elected at all, and would (I think) have been tremendously weakened. On the other hand, it’s hard to believe he would have been impeached. If all the sex games encompassed a crime, and it’s far from clear to me that they did, it was certainly not an impeachable crime. On the other hand, in attempting to hide the scandal, Mr. Clinton either outright perjured himself or at the very least misled the plaintiff’s attorneys with technically accurate answers. There were also allegations, never proven, that he suborned the perjury of his associates, which is a very serious crime indeed. Here we have a situation where the serious crime (obstruction of justice) was piled on a crime that was much less so, and quite possibly was non-existent.
Now, in the case of the Plame affair, Mr. Libby is charged with crimes of covering up, essentially with obstructing the investigation. Had he announced the day after Bob Novak blew the cover that he, his boss, their associate in the White House, and at least tacitly the President of the United States had deliberately obtained that information and spread it around to influential and sympathetic journalists in order to discredit Joe Wilson, I don’t think the scandal would have ended there. Yes, if he had lied, if he had successfully covered up the scandal by taking the fall, well, then, it’s possible that it would be over. But the cover-up didn’t prolong the scandal. The failure of the cover-up did.
What I don’t know is what is at the heart of the cover-up. In President Nixon’s house, the heart was the “dirty tricks”, a frat-boy name for crimes committed to try to scotch the election. In President Clinton’s house, the heart was a pattern of unhappy ex-mistresses whose consent to sex was tainted by the power differential in the office. In Our Only President’s house, it’s ... I’m not sure. Either it’s indifference to law-breaking in the pursuit of what they consider National Security, to the extent of smearing people who challenge their blinkered views and appear (to them) to be untrustworthy or dishonest, or it’s a campaign to convince the Legislature and the American people of a view they know to be false, and a willingness to break the law to cover up the truth. In other words, did they really think Saddam Hussein and the Ba’athists posed any significant threat, now or in the near future, to American interests, domestic or foreign? If so, then as part of ignoring all the contrary evidence, they broke the law in the process of over-reaching. If not, if they believed Mr. Wilson was right, if they feared only that their lies would be exposed, then the cover-up for which Mr. Libby has been indicted is only covering up the crime of covering up, and the real crime at the heart of the matter is a war based not on mistakes but on lies.
So, if that really is the case, and the White House had announced on the day Bob Novak exposed Valerie Plame’s real job that they had fed that information around in order to prevent people from knowing that the whole case they had made for invasion was a deliberate lie, do you think the scandal would have blown over quickly, Gentle Reader? What has prolonged the scandal here; the crime or the cover-up?
chazak, chazak, v’nitchazek,
-Vardibidian.
Oh, disclaimer: Although it is now very clear what went on in the Nixon White House, my comments on the Clinton White House are opinion and not fact, and my statements on the current occupants thereof are speculation. Your Humble Blogger has seen no direct evidence that Our Only President was aware of the co-ordinated effort that is implied in the (untried) allegations against Mr. Libby. You know, it’s a blog.
It strikes me that your analysis applies reasonably well to the Iran-Contra scandal, also.
i had a list of irresistible wagging. i’ll add this one, making:
#1, “told you so” (when the outcome is only barely related to the original warning)
#2, “you shouldn’t have done that” (when “let’s do that” was the earlier feeling)
#3-a, the ever-popular and fashionable “the investigator should have let it go” (aka, “nothing to see, show’s over, move along”)
#3-b, “i would have gotten away with it, too, if it weren’t for these meddling federal prosecutors and that dog”
#4, “they should have just kept their mouths shut”
#5, “they should have just come clean”
i think we’ve talked about this here before, though. the regrettable position of the bushies, i mean. “if only they weren’t a paranoid, greedy bunch of incompetents, they wouldn’t have had to cover up their vicious intent to slander and deceive. poor dears.”