Watergate

Political Fear Stalks Law, Education, Journalism, Migration

March 28, 2025 by Llewellyn King Leave a Comment

Something new has entered American consciousness: fear of the state.

Not since the Red Scares (the first one followed the Russian Revolution and World War I, and the second followed World War II and the outbreak of the Cold War) has the state taken such an active role in political intervention.

The state under Donald Trump has a special interest in political speech and action, singling out lawyers and law firms, universities and student activists, and journalists and their employers. It is certain that the undocumented live in fear night and day.

Fear of the state has entered the political process.

Presidents before Trump had their enemies. Nixon was famous for his “list,” which was mostly journalists. His political paranoia was always there, and it finally brought him down with the Watergate scandal.

Even John Kennedy, who had a soft spot for the Fourth Estate, took umbrage at the New York Herald Tribune and had that newspaper banned for a while from the White House.

Lyndon Johnson played games with and manipulated Congress to reward his allies and punish his enemies. With reporters, it was an endless reward-and-punishment game, mainly achieved with information given or withheld.

The Trump administration is relentless in its desire to root out what it sees as state enemies or those who disagree with it. It includes the judicial system and all its components: judges, law firms and advocates for those whom it has disapproved. If an individual lawyer so much as defends an opponent of the administration, that individual will be “investigated,” which, in this climate, is a euphemism for persecuted.

If you are investigated, you face the full force of the state and its agencies. If you can find a lawyer of stature to defend you, you will be buried in debt, probably out of work, and ruined without the “investigation” turning up any impropriety.

One mighty law firm, Paul, Weiss, faced with losing huge government contracts, bowed to Trump. It was a bad day for judicial independence.

The courts and individual judges are under attack, threatened with impeachment, even as the state seeks to evade their rulings.

Others are under threat and practice law cautiously when contentious matters arise. The price is known: Offend and be punished by loss of government work, by fear of investigation, and by public humiliation by derision and accusation.

The boot of the state is poised above the neck of the universities.

If they allow free speech that doesn’t accord with the administration’s definition of that constitutional right, the boot will descend, as it did on Columbia.

Shamefully, Columbia caved to try to salvage $400 million in research funds. Speech on that campus is now circumscribed. Worse, the state is likely emboldened by its success.

Linda McMahon, the education secretary, has promised that with or without a Department of Education, the administration will go after the universities and what they allow and what they teach, if it is antisemitic, as defined by the state, or if they are practicing diversity, equality and inclusion, a Trump irritant.

One notes that another university, Georgetown, is standing up to the pressure. Bravo!

At the White House, press secretary Karoline Leavitt has decided to usurp the White House Correspondents’ Association and determine who will cover the president in the reporters’ pool — critical reporting in the Oval Office and on Air Force One.

Traveling with the president is essential. That is how a reporter gets to know the chief executive up close and personal. A pool report from a MAGA blogger doesn’t cut it.

Trump has threatened to sue media outlets. If they are small and poor, as most new ones are, they can’t withstand the cost of defending themselves. ABC, which is owned by Disney, caved to Trump even though its employees longed for the case to be settled in court. Corporate interests dictated accommodation with the state.

Accommodate what they have, and they will. Watch what happens with Trump’s $20 billion lawsuit against CBS’ “60 Minutes. The truth is obvious; the result may be a tip of the hat to Trump.

Nowhere is fear more redolent, the state more pernicious and ruthless than in the deportation of immigrants without due process, without charges and without evidence. ICE says you are guilty, and you go. Men wearing masks double you over, handcuff you behind your back and take you away, maybe to a prison in El Salvador.

Fear has arrived in America and can be felt in the marbled halls of the giant law firms, in newsrooms and executive offices, all the way to the crying children who see a parent dragged off by men in black, wearing balaclavas, presumably for the purpose of extra intimidation.

How the Ghost of Watergate Haunts This Election

May 8, 2016 by Llewellyn King 1 Comment

By Llewellyn King

There is a line of reasoning in political circles which says that Barack Obama created the phenomenon of Donald Trump.

I aver that Donald Trump is a creation of the post-Watergate media. Collectively we have made running for office so absolutely awful, so fraught for families and careers that only two types of office seekers have the fortitude for public life: the grotesques, who are outside of the norms of the political culture, and the shopworn.

Both are on display as we trudge toward November wondering how in a country of so much talent so little of it has been on the ballot in this primary season.

The rot, I submit, began with Watergate when publishers and editors came to believe that the mission of the media was not only to scrutinize the policy views of elected officials but also to rip down the bedroom door, peer into the piggy bank and examine every word in print or on tape that a candidate has uttered since high school, whether in jest or earnest.

We confused personal rectitude — or rectitude according to the norms of public morality of the day — with sagacity, statesmanship and talent to lead. In the days before Watergate, Jack Kennedy could do with impunity what got Bill Clinton impeached.

Now that Watergate is 44 years behind us, its legacies are many, but two stand out. The first is that journalists in large numbers were suddenly attracted to covering politics in a way that fewer had been previously. The late Arnaud de Borchgrave, who covered 18 wars, noted disapprovingly that young journalists nowadays aspire to cover politics when they used to aspire to be foreign correspondents.

Even in these days of restrained budgets, Capitol Hill, and to a lesser extent the White House, is flooded with journalists, from the national media to the smallest newsletter. Politics is big news and that is good for business. As the incredibly successful Politico editors like to say, “flood the zone.”

But Congress is a deliberative body and moves slowly, so the news maw is fed with gossip. When the secrets of the budget are not clear or hard to get at, there is always the personal conduct of those working on the budget. If a member of Congress goes out to lunch with someone, anyone, a family member, it will be reported somewhere.

Being in public life is now like being on trial day in and day out without knowing what evidence the prosecution has or when it will bring it forward. In fact, being in public life has become God awful and no talented person ought to want to do it.

No wonder no one holding public office wants to stray from the talking points. A few stray words can bring you down, unless you are so outlandish that you have nothing say but stray words in lieu of coherent ones, like Donald Trump.

Watergate washed away unwritten rules under which what political figures did after hours was not fair game. I once saved a cabinet member from a situation with two “ladies” who did not have his best interests at stake. Everyone knew why a certain congressman liked to travel to Mexico — and it was not for tacos. Publicly, it was debated whether the statesman Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan drank too much and no less a person than that public scold, George Will, defended the New York senator by concluding that the great man drank just enough.

Olin “Tiger” Teague, a revered chairman of the House Science Committee, served drinks to his guests at 11 a.m. — and if you wanted an audience, you enjoyed a glass of bourbon with the Texas congressman. Today, you are lucky to get a plastic bottle of water during a Capitol Hill visit.

A Capitol Hill secretary of my acquaintance was proud of the number of congressmen she had bedded, including some in leadership.

The post-Watergate, unwritten rules of scrutiny, which imply that in private conduct there are clues to public greatness, rather than bringing a new morality to politics, only frightened off the talented, the effective and the patriotic and created a space for the outrageous and the shopworn. Look to Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton and wonder no longer how we got that unappetizing choice to lead the nation. — For InsideSources Photo Credit: Pete Sousa

The Ben Bradlee I Knew and the Creation of ‘Style’

October 23, 2014 by White House Chronicle Leave a Comment

Ben Bradlee, who has died at the age of 93, did not so much edit The Washington Post as lead it.

Where other editors of the times would rewrite headlines, cajole reporters and senior editors, and try to put their imprint on everything that they could in the newspaper, that was not Bradlee’s way. His way was to hire the best and leave them to it.

Bradlee often left the building before the first edition “came up,” but it was still his Washington Post: a big, successful, hugely influential newspaper with the imprimatur of one man.

Bradlee looked, as some wag said, like an international jewel thief; someone you would expect to see in one of those movies set in the south of France that showed off the beauty of the Mediterranean and beauties in bikinis while the hero planned a great jewel heist.

I worked for Bradlee for four years and we all, to some degree, venerated our leader. He had real charisma; we not only wanted to please him, but also we wanted to be liked by him.

Bradlee was accessible without losing authority; he was all over the newsroom, calling people by their first names and sometimes by their nicknames, without surrendering any of the power of his office. He was an editor who worked more like a movie director rather than the traditionally detached editors I had known in New York and London.

The irritation at the paper — and there always is some — was not so much that Bradlee was a different kind of editor, but that he had a habit, in his endless search for talent, of hiring new people and forgetting, or not knowing, the amazing talent already on the payroll. The Post was a magnate for gifted journalists, but once hired, there were only so many plum jobs for them to do. People who expected great things of their time at the paper were frustrated when relegated to a suburban bureau, or obliged to write obituaries for obscure people.

Yet we knew we were putting out a very good paper and, in some ways, the best paper in the United States. This lead to a faux rivalry with The New York Times. Unlike today, very few copies of The Times were sold in Washington, and even fewer Washington Posts were sold in New York.

Much has been made of Bradlee’s fortitude, along with that of the publisher, Katherine Graham, in standing strong throughout the Watergate investigation that led to President Nixon's registration. But there was another monumental achievement in the swashbuckling Bradlee years: the creation of the Style section of the newspaper.

When Style first appeared, sweeping away the old women’s pages, it went off like a bomb in Washington. It was vibrant, rude and brought a kind of writing, most notably by Nicholas von Hoffman, which had never been seen in a major newspaper: pungent, acerbic, and choking on invective. Soon it was imitated in every paper in America.

The man who created Style was David Laventhol, who came down from New York to fashion something new in journalism. Laventhol was a newspaper mechanic without equal, but Bradlee was the genius who hired him.

When I worked at The Post, I interacted a lot with Bradlee; partly because we enjoyed it, and partly because it was the nature of the work. I knew a lot about newspaper production in the days of hot type and he affected not to. That gave Bradlee the opportunity to exercise one of his most winning traits: disarming candor. “I don’t know what’s going on here,” he said one frantic election night in the composing room.

But when it came to big decisions, Bradlee knew his own mind to the exclusion of the rest of the staff. The nerve center of a newspaper is its editorial conferences — usually, there are two every day. The first conference is to plan the paper; the second is a reality check on what is new, and how the day is shaping up.

At these conferences, Bradlee would listen from behind his desk. But when he disagreed with the nine assistant managing editors, and others who needed to be there, he would put his feet on the desk, utter an expletive and cut through fuzzy conversation like a scimitar into soft tissue. As we might say nowadays, he had street smarts. They were invaluable to his editorship and to his charm. — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate