Watergate, S.J.
Three Jesuits and the downfall of a president
John McLaughlin and Richard Nixon
The
Eastern Point Retreat House in Gloucester, Mass., in the 1970s was
ordinary in its accommodations, but striking for its setting—situated at
the ocean’s edge, where a narrow path reached out to an enormous rock,
which rugged souls could mount while a soft or angry sea crashed around
and beneath them. It was a good place for Jesuits to pray and to ponder
God’s grace, evil and American politics.
By the spring of 1973, the break-in at the
Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate office
complex in Washington, D.C., had become a sensation but not yet an
obsession. It made headlines beginning in January, after President
Richard M. Nixon had been re-elected by a landslide. The Watergate
burglars, who had been arrested on June 17, 1972, were found guilty; the
president’s top aides, H. R. Haldeman and John D. Ehrlichman, and
Attorney General Richard Kleindienst resigned; and General Alexander M.
Haig Jr. was appointed White House chief of staff.
A young New York Province Jesuit scholastic
on retreat at Gloucester at the time, Frank Herrmann, was walking along
the ocean shore, when an older Jesuit came touring by on a bike, saw Mr.
Herrmann, stopped and introduced himself as Bob Drinan. Mr. Herrmann
was impressed; most famous people simply assume you know who they are.
When the conversation turned to President Nixon, Father Robert Drinan
was quick to reply, “We’re going to get that bastard.”
In truth, Father Drinan was not yet ready to
move for impeachment; and, as the controversy progressed, Father
Drinan, who had learned that he was on President Nixon’s “enemies list,”
described the impeachment in an interview with the The National
Catholic Reporter as “a way to clear the air” and said he “hoped the
president could be vindicated.” But Father Drinan also saw himself as a
“moral architect,” a voice for those silent citizens who lacked the
inclination or the nerve to speak out against a government’s abuse of
power.
As dean of Boston College Law School, he had
been active in the civil rights movement; and as the Vietnam War
progressed, he saw it as both unjust and immoral. A trip to South
Vietnam in 1969 with a study group of eight religious and civic leaders,
focusing on human rights and the treatment of prisoners, “galvanized”
him, he told The New Republic, to work for honest government. Vietnam,
he found, was torturing its dissidents, and in the United States a State
Department official had lied to him about it. His response was to run
for Congress in 1970.
On the night of July 26, 1973, Father Drinan
sat late at his desk, which was covered with press clippings. Some were
from a series of articles by Seymour Hersh in The New York Times,
including a report that the Pentagon admitted to 3,360 secret bombing
raids on Cambodia in 1969 and 1970 and that it had destroyed the records
to cover up the missions. He dictated a two-page memo to his staff
explaining that his conscience called him to file a resolution to
impeach the president. Yes, there were other reasons, including the
plumbers’ invasion of Watergate. But for Father Drinan the illegal
secret bombing of Cambodia was the reason he would stand before the
House of Representatives on July 31 and say: “Mr. Speaker, with great
reluctance I have come to the conclusion that the House of
Representatives should initiate impeachment proceedings against the
president.” He was particularly proud that he could make that historic
speech, the first call for impeachment, on the feast of St. Ignatius
Loyola.
“Morally, Drinan had a good case,” wrote
House majority leader Thomas P. O’Neill, known as Tip, in his memoirs,
“but politically, he damn near blew it.” The House was not ready to back
impeachment, and Mr. O’Neill had to strike a deal with the minority
leader, Gerald Ford, to keep Father Drinan’s resolution from coming up
for a vote.
The View From 56th Street
America’s first editorial on
the subject of the growing Watergate scandal, on Sept. 9, 1972,
summarized events since the arrest of the five Watergate burglars on
June 17 and warned that if no one were indicted, many citizens would
conclude that politics had blocked the prosecution. In the following
issue, the magazine’s “Washington Front” correspondent, Edward Glynn,
S.J., compared the Watergate affair to a spicy stew that had been
sitting on the back burner all summer. By May 5, 1973, the editorial
board was hitting hard. This is not mere “bungling malfeasance,” but a
“sinister strategy overseen by some highly placed administration men
whose faces, at this writing, are still in the shadows.” The White House
has been “shielding those faces from the light.”
During the spring and summer, America’s
editorial writers continued Father Glynn’s use of metaphor: a “giant
cyclorama that grows ever more crowded” (5/5), “a huge darksome bird of
prey hovering over the heads of us all” (the column Of Many Things,
5/12), the “fiery poisoned shirt that Hercules could neither endure nor
tear off” (8/18) and both a web and an iceberg (6/15/74). A steady theme
was “the fundamental danger is a pattern of power exercised in high
places of total disregard of law,” characterized by an absolute
righteousness that then covers up the truth through “public scorn and
contempt heaped on distinguished newspapers” (5/12/73).
As if in anticipation of Father Drinan’s speech in Congress, a two-page editorial in America
on July 21 took the form of a homily delivered in the White House.
“God’s word is a two-edged sword,” it begins, and the role of religion
in society is twofold: “to canonize and to criticize, to support society
but also to judge it.” The editors believed that Watergate represented a
new kind of political corruption: “American politics has known before
men who abused positions of power for private gain. The Watergate
conspiracy betrayed the public trust in more deadly fashion. It stole
our birthright.”
Enter John McLaughlin, S.J.
Both Robert Drinan and John McLaughlin were members of the New England Province of the Society of Jesus, wrote for America
and, at different stages, opposed elements of the Vietnam War. They ran
for Congress in the same year—Father Drinan for the House from Boston
and Father McLaughlin for the Senate from Rhode Island. Having lost his
Senate race as a Republican, Father McLaughlin went to the Nixon White
House as a speechwriter. If anyone believed that all Jesuits, having
been molded from the same spiritual clay, shared the same mind-set or
lifestyle, Drinan versus McLaughlin was a rich case study.
Born in Providence, R.I., in 1927, John
McLaughlin entered the Society of Jesus after graduating from LaSalle
Academy and, after completing the ordinary Jesuit course of studies at
that time, was ordained in 1947. At Boston College he earned master’s
degrees in English and philosophy. He then taught high school, earned a
doctorate in communications at Columbia University and became an editor
at America in the late 1960s, where he published an article
criticizing the bombing strategy in Vietnam. He also gave lectures on
sexual morality. When he left America, the editor in chief,
Donald Campion, S.J., declined to tell The New York Times why, though he
described him as a man “who has a way with words in a baroque way—you
don’t know quite what they mean, but they sort of stun you.”
Patrick Buchanan, then a White House
adviser, brought Father McLaughlin to the White House as an assistant
speechwriter and “resident Jesuit,” a priestly advocate for the Nixon
administration. He took an apartment in the Watergate Hotel, gave his
blessing to the 1972 Christmas bombing of Hanoi, defended the
president’s obscenities on the tapes as “emotional drainage” and told
CBS News that Mr. Nixon was “the greatest moral leader in the last third
of this century.” When the president insisted that there would be no
more tapes released to anyone, Father McLaughlin explained that
according to a theological analysis of the transcripts, they were
neither amoral nor immoral and that the president had acquitted himself
with honor during these discussions. He described Senator Hugh Scott’s
concern about the tapes as “erroneous, unjust” and containing elements
of hypocrisy. To Father McLaughlin, Representative Peter Rodino, who led
the House Judiciary Committee’s investigation of the Nixon White House,
was a “crude political tactician.”
Father McLaughlin was a Republican attack
dog, picking up where former Vice President Spiro Agnew, who had
resigned on Oct. 10, 1973, amid a bribery scandal, had left off. On Oct.
20, in what became known as the Saturday Night Massacre, President
Nixon fired the Watergate special prosecutor Archibald Cox; and Attorney
General Elliot Richardson and Deputy Attorney General William
Ruckelshaus resigned in protest. Three days later, 44 Watergate-related
bills were introduced in Congress, including 22 that called for an
impeachment investigation.
Against this background Father McLaughlin
defended the president in a series of radio and television talk show
appearances in the Boston area. In one 53-minute radio encounter, he
argued that the special prosecutor had “provoked his firing” by
rejecting a reasonable compromise when Mr. Nixon refused to release
tapes that were “private.” He compared the investigation to the Spanish
Inquisition and said all the charges of “abuse of power” and
maladministration were vague and weak and that, while Mr. Nixon had made
mistakes, all presidents had made mistakes and pursuing all these
charges would weaken future presidents.
Father McLaughlin’s basic argument, often
repeated, was that Mr. Nixon had not committed a crime, and impeachment
required a crime. Father Drinan, a member of the House Judiciary
Committee that would address the impeachment case, had studied that
question and concluded, with the committee, that no crime was required
for impeachment.
The display of two battling Jesuits
challenged the Washington press. Father Drinan had decided that when
Father McLaughlin barked, he would not bite back; but the Los Angeles
Times national correspondent Jack Nelson simulated a debate by bringing
together two separate interviews in “Two Jesuits at Odds Over Nixon”
(10/10/74). Father McLaughlin compared the House Judiciary Committee to
the novel Lord of the Flies and charged Father Drinan with a “rape of justice” and with having characterized Mr. Nixon’s policies as “Hitlerite genocide.”
Father Drinan replied, “Never said it,” and
blew up at Mr. Nelson: “If [ Father McLaughlin] had any goddamn sense of
decency, he would not misinterpret my position.... But don’t quote me
on that, I don’t want to have anything to do with this. I only talked to
you [Mr. Nelson] because I thought you wanted to talk about
impeachment.”
Responding to questions about lifestyle,
Father Drinan refused to say why he wore the Roman collar, although he
had previously told the press that he had only one suit or that he wore
it to get attention. He lived in one room in the Jesuit community at
Georgetown University, with a bathroom down the hall, and turned in half
his salary to the Society of Jesus for the room. Father McLaughlin said
his Watergate suite was less luxurious than many Jesuit rooms, did not
want to “trade off the collar” and would not disclose his salary,
reported to be $30,000 a year—the equivalent of more than $150,000 in
2014.
The Brothers Haig
The forced resignations of John
Ehrlichman and H. R. Haldeman in April 1973 threw President Nixon into a
state of depression. Withdrawing even from his wife, he retreated to
his haven in Key Biscayne, Fla., where at Mr. Haldeman’s insistence he
summoned General Haig to assume the role of chief of staff. General Haig
was a decorated veteran of the wars in Korea and Vietnam and had earned
a master’s degree in international relations from Georgetown
University. He was formerly on the staff of Henry Kissinger, who
described him as “strong in crises, decisive in judgment, skillful in
bureaucratic infighting.” The top White House staff job was to stand in
the midst of the conflict and both keep order and protect the president.
Mr. Haig resisted, but he could not refuse his commander in chief.
As months passed, evidence mounted that the
president was taking less responsibility for his behavior. Mr. Haig had
witnessed this development. Mr. Nixon began calling his friends and
advisers at night, asking whether he should resign. His chief of staff
repeatedly said no. But once he became aware in July 1974 of the June
23, 1972, tape that made clear that the president had ordered the
cover-up of the Watergate break-in, his role changed, shifting from
protecting the president to managing the president’s resignation in a
way that would allow Mr. Nixon to come to the decision on his own. Mr.
Haig admonished Mr. Nixon’s visitors to give the president the facts
about the mounting opposition but not to suggest quitting. Mr. Nixon had
to resign “freely.”
Throughout, Mr. Haig’s off-scene supporter
and confidant was his younger brother, Frank Haig, S.J., a physicist who
had been president of Wheeling College from 1966 to 1972, and after his
brother served both President Gerald Ford and President Ronald Reagan,
was president of LeMoyne College in Syracuse, N.Y. (1981-89). Though he
had always been a Democrat, he called himself a Rockefeller Republican
to support his brother.
According to Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein in The Final Days (1976),
Alexander Haig “detested” John McLaughlin, S.J., whose ideas on
morality were not going to save the president. According to Father Haig,
in a recent interview for this article, his brother had opposed
bringing Father McLaughlin in as a speechwriter, but later accepted him,
though in his estimation the Jesuit speechwriter was not what a good
Catholic priest should be, not a strong defender of both the faith and
the truth.
For a while, Mr. Haig was suspected of being
the unidentified source known as Deep Throat, who fed information to
investigative journalists at The Washington Post. But there was no way
Alexander Haig could have been Deep Throat, his brother said. He would
rather have quit. What should Mr. Nixon have done? The Haigs thought he
should have told the whole truth right away and the issue would have
died.
On Trial
On July 24, 1974, the U.S. Supreme
Court, at the request of the special prosecutor Leon Jaworski, decided 8
to 0 (Justice Rehnquist had recused himself) that executive privilege
did not apply to the White House tapes and ordered President Nixon to
surrender them all to Judge John Sirica, who had been hearing the
Watergate case since the arrest of the plumbers two years earlier. The
court asked Sirica to review the tapes and decide which should be
released to the special prosecutor’s office. Thus the public learned
that Mr. Nixon had said to his aides, “I want you all to stonewall it,
let [the burglars] plead the Fifth Amendment, cover up, or anything
else, it’ll save it—save the plan.” That evening the House Judiciary
Committee, which had been working on impeachment since the previous
December, began its deliberations in earnest.
Over the following several days, the
committee voted by wide margins to recommend impeachment on the first
three articles: obstruction of justice, abuse of power and refusal to
cooperate with the committee’s investigation. Father Drinan seldom spoke
during the hearings. He had already had his moment in the sun with his
original proposal; he was surrounded by 37 other lawyers who had a lot
to say, and he had a hard time getting recognized. The fourth article of
impeachment, on the bombing of Cambodia, was anti-climactic and was
rejected, although Father Drinan had to ask, “How could we impeach a
president for concealing a burglary but not for concealing a mass
bombing?” On Aug. 9, 1974, President Nixon resigned.
Exit John McLaughlin
Three months earlier, in May,
Richard Cleary, S.J., the provincial superior of the Jesuits in New
England, told the Boston press that he had called Father McLaughlin to
return to Boston for an eight-day retreat to reconsider his lifestyle
and his interpretations of moral laws, which some had misunderstood as
representing those of the Society of Jesus. Father McLaughlin dismissed
Father Cleary’s comments as coming from the “geopolitical center of
liberal thinking...Massachusetts, the only state out of step with the
rest of the country.” By the end of the month they had resolved their
differences. But in October The National Jesuit News reported that
Father Cleary had ordered Father McLaughlin to resign from the White
House. Father McLaughlin claimed he quit because President Ford wanted a
new staff. He promptly left the Society of Jesus, worked for several
years in radio and television talk shows, and still presides over a
long-running Sunday morning political panel called “The McLaughlin
Group.” He did not respond to several requests to be interviewed for
this article.
Frank Haig, S.J., asked recently what his
brother learned from the Watergate experience, described Alexander’s
impatience when diplomats from other countries as well as Americans
talked in terms of loyalty to the president or some national leader. “He
learned that being an American has nothing to do with race or color or
religion or origin or wealth. It is your devotion to the founding
principles: the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.”
America, in its end-of-the-year
editorial (12/28/74), said that “our national experience reflects the
dilemma behind the crisis of leadership throughout the world....The
temptation is to withdraw and seek compensation...in...prayer and
intimacy. Still, total preoccupation with a private life...becomes
unreal. The challenge, then...is to bring the insight and the courage
that arise from this personal center into the public struggle to redeem
the systems within which we live.”
Click here for America's coverage of Watergate as events unfolded between the summers of 1972 and 1974.
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