‘What did the president know, and when did he know it?” It was the simple but devastating question that ended the Nixon presidency, asked in good faith by a then-Nixon loyalist, Sen. Howard Baker of Tennessee, in an effort to establish the president’s innocence.
When the witness, John Dean, responded that the president knew all about the bungled break-in, testimony later confirmed by audio tapes, Nixon was soon bargaining for a pardon and a free ride to San Clemente.
History never repeats itself, except when it does. Here we are 45 years later, possibly approaching the same issues with a leader who has crashed through every precedent to shape a presidency to his own liking.
By failing to reveal his taxes or divorce himself from a family real estate empire, and by boldly calling on the Russians to release the emails of his opponent, Donald Trump has lent legitimacy to the many investigations that now threaten his tenure in office.
In times of crisis, Washington becomes center stage. In the contemporary version of packing the family picnic to witness a public hanging, crowds of spectators arrive on Capitol Hill looking for the action.
Mundane congressional hearings become hot tickets; everyday members of Congress temporarily breathe the pure oxygen of media stardom. Down the street at the federal courthouse where Judge John Sirica once ruled, lines form for the handful of seats reserved for the public.
My brother, Dennis, was Sirica’s assistant during the Watergate trials and was charged with distributing seats. Scandal and crisis had made him the second-most-important federal official for the likes of David Brinkley and Walter Cronkite to know.
The commentators today call for a return to “normalcy,” but they don’t mean it. Scandals provide free programming for networks and give birth to superstars. One need not look further than the Woodward and Bernstein saga to see how stardom can quickly arrive, or in the case of Washington Post publisher Katherine Graham, sainthood.
I am speaking of people I admire and a celebrity system I hate. Still, celebrity is what brought Trump to this moment and place. Is the man, as the saying goes, to be hoisted with his own petard?
Nixon’s presidency ended in a clap of thunder, a classic denouement where all the pieces fit in the end.
If this presidency is fated to end, I doubt that the conclusion will be so neatly written. John Dean was a jack-in-the-box who jumped out with all the answers. No one today would confer on Michael Cohen that credibility. He is nothing but angles, the repentant sinner, the wise guy, the rejected protégé, the book seller.
The case he makes against his former boss is compelling, but then so were many of the lies he swore to while defending the president.
What Cohen has achieved, if that is the word for it, is to open new cracks in the president’s defense of clearly corrupt business practices. These are matters that can be checked for fact. Lying to banks and insurance companies to justify loans will put a person behind bars. “Fake news” is no defense.
No matter the outcome, Trump and his acolytes have put the word “truth” on the respirator.
If there is more than one truth in what has paraded before us in the last two years, then who is to be the Solomon of our time? The obvious candidate is Robert Mueller, the special prosecutor who restored the credibility of a wounded FBI, a rare figure who chose hand-to-hand combat in Vietnam over Ivy League student deferrals.
Whatever this man decides, most of us will be inclined to accept. It won’t be a clean ending or a win for anyone, I assume.
The jury will speak in 2020.
