Watergate Wallowing

I very much enjoyed the Dick Cavett special on Watergate. It runs many times on PBS channels the next few days and I suggest you grab a viewing while you can.

Reading as much as I have about Nixon and that scandal in particular, I've always been a bit uncomfy with the attempts to psychoanalyze the man. Too often, I see people try to draw direct lines between certain known facts of his childhood and certain actions he took as President of the United States…or on his way to becoming that. The connections simultaneously seem too pat and too strained, and I'm never quite sure of their relevancy. I just think people are too complicated to be completely explained that way.

Nevertheless, it's obvious that so much of the Watergate Horrors, as some called them, were rooted in Nixon's personality and paranoias. Even when he clearly had the '72 election in the proverbial bag, he and his men were still willing to cast ethics aside and even hijack campaign donations that might have gone to elect more Republicans, just to run up the score and extract some vengeance from anyone who'd ever opposed or faulted him. It was the "them or us" mindset that ultimately became self-destructive.

Years after Watergate, I worked on a TV show where the producer/showrunner had a seething hatred for The Network. Every third sentence out of his mouth was about how inept and treacherous The Network was and I found myself not only on staff but within a kind of "bunker mentality" founded on contempt for those outside the bunker.

Within this environment, if you somehow failed at your assignment, it was not acceptable to go to the producer and say, "Sorry, I couldn't do it." What you had to say, as everyone learned, was: "I had it working but then those assholes at The Network sabotaged me." That was not only acceptable but it endeared you to the producer. You were part of the team, having spilled blood in the war that he fought day and night on the show…and sometimes in his mind.

Not that the excuse was always wrong. The Network did have the ability to screw up its programs, usually by incompetence more than deliberate subversion…although there were instances of the latter. But The Network wasn't always at fault. We on the staff could botch things up ourselves quite nicely and did. And when you did, you blamed The Network because that was always believed and, of course, it was a bonding experience with your employer and it make him — the producer/showrunner — loathe The Network all the more.

I watched this for a few weeks with the nagging feeling I knew it from somewhere and then it hit me: The Talent Coordinator blaming The Network for not being able to book Charo was like the Nixon White House Aide blaming The Press for his inability to carry out some presidential order. (The Nixon by Nixon documentary on HBO includes an excerpt from the tapes with Nixon saying over and over, "The press is the enemy! The press is the enemy!") One of the reasons Nixon hated his enemies so was that he was always willing, maybe even eager to believe they were screwing him.

There's a quote from some famous general about how to key to success in battle is to neither overestimate nor underestimate your enemy. You can get killed making either mistake, though underestimating is usually the greater error. In the entire tale of Richard M. Nixon, I've seen only one moment when he seemed to buy into that. It was that moment in his farewell speech where he said goodbye to the White House staff before flying off to exile. He said…

Always remember that others may hate you but those who hate you don't win unless you hate them. And then you destroy yourself.

That sounds like an admission that he'd done just that but I wonder. With Nixon, you always had to wonder.