Recent reads

The Founding Finaglers : AND OTHER SCOUNDRELS : in a Fascinating History of Corruption in America from Jamestown to Teapot Dome, by Nathan Miller.

An enlightening if somewhat depressing survey of various ways in which many of the much-admired explorers, settlers, military heroes and statesmen of U.S. history have sought to enrich or advantage themselves in ethically dubious ways. It was somewhat surprising to see the name of George Washington, that stalwart of incorruptibility, listed among the smugglers and embezzlers of the prerevolutionary British colonies and the early American republic. As it turns out, all that Miller really has on Washington is that he may have been a trifle too assertive in trying to cash in on some western land grants. This pales into insignificance beside the massive swindles of the Yazoo land-grant scandal, the criminally callous profiteering of the Civil War period, the open government-for-sale corruption of the 1870s, the Machiavellian financial manipulations of railroad financiers, and the firmly entrenched systematic graft of the big-city political machines like Tammany Hall. Miller provides detailed narratives of all these and more, with footnotes to document the source of each accusation.

I couldn't help but notice that the scale of the corruption seems to expand relentlessly throughout the chronological course of the book. It would seem that improved communications, by enabling entities with political and economic power to act more efficiently and on a larger scale, have simply expanded the opportunities for crooks to take advantage of the rest of the human race. In an epilogue, Miller addresses the Watergate scandal, which was fresh in the public consciousness when the book appeared in 1976.

Watergate cracked the crust of public complacency that had grown over the issue of corruption, yet it was a complete break with old-style shenanigans. For one thing, the traditional motivations of political skulduggery were missing.... Loyalty to the President, rather than personal enrichment, was the lodestar of the men involved in corrupting the electoral process. Unhampered by constitutional limitations and untroubled by moral constraints, they believed that what was good for Richard Nixon was good for the nation. John Ehrlichman best summed up their views when he said : "The President is the government."

Watergate also legitimized paranoia....

Yet the ground that produced Watergate had been plowed and planted long before the rubber-gloved White house plumbers were caught in the offices of the Democratic National Committee. The affair was the logical consequence of what Arthur Schlesinger has dubbed "the imperial presidency". He contends that over the past thirty-five years or so [in 1976], since Franklin Roosevelt's time, the Presidency has usurped control over the making of foreign policy at the expense of Congress, the judiciary, the press, and public opinion, which had previously exercised some restraing on the successive occupants of the White House. The belief was that only the President could deal effectively with crisis -- no matter what the crisis. Not unexpectedly, Presidential claims of infallibility in the making of war and peace were carried over into the domestic sector. What Nixon did, according to Schlesinger, was to carry the imperial Presidency to its ultimate end -- "a revolutionary challenge to the separation of powers."

From this flowed the "enemies list", the use of the [CIA], the [FBI] and the [IRS] for illegal purposes, the intimidation fo the press and the invocation of national security and the police state to cloak criminal actions. In the end it wouldn't even play in Peoria. As Richard Nixon was hustled out of the Oval Office, his hand-picked successor attempted to exorcise Nixon's baleful spirit from American public life and to imply that Watergate was a momentary aberration by earnestly proclaiming that "our long national nightmare is over."

But is it?