Heather Cox Richardson:

From CAFE and the Vox Media Podcast Network, this is Now & Then. I’m Heather Cox Richardson.

Joanne Freeman:

And I’m Joanne Freeman. This week, we have a topic that I have to say we had already decided to talk about. And then as we were literally talking about it for this episode, new news broke on this topic, which Heather brought to my attention.

Heather Cox Richardson:

One of the things that’s been happening in the last several weeks is more and more information is coming out about things that might or might not have happened in the Trump White House. And one of the stories that has broken over the last several weeks is the idea that under former President Trump, the Department of Justice, began to look into journalists to look for leaks, but they also had turned out, began to look into staffers of members of Congress. And in the process at least, began to sweep in information about Congress people themselves. The idea that the Department of Justice was investigating members of Congress, as well as members of the media is a really, really big story.

Joanne Freeman:

Particularly given that they’re investigating them for the political purposes of the people in power in the administration. So that is a huge story.

Heather Cox Richardson:

So what We wanted to talk about today was corruption. And by that we don’t mean the corruption of some fellow walking into a room with a suitcase full of $100,000.

Joanne Freeman:

Which is corrupt but that’s not we’re talking about.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Well, but that’s also very easy corruption in a sense, because we have laws against that.

Joanne Freeman:

True.

Heather Cox Richardson:

But what is interesting in this particular moment is the question of corruption of the body politic. When for example, a leader uses the machinery of government, not for the good of the people, but rather to enable his own faction, to stay in power. The idea of using the machinery of government in a way that is designed to benefit that particular party.

Joanne Freeman:

So it’s using basically an office of public trust, and I put the emphasis on trust, which in a democracy is what these power holders are, using them not for the public. Using them to benefit themselves in one way or another, whether that’s personally, whether that has to do in the realm of power. In one way or another, devoting the mechanics and structures of government to themselves.

Heather Cox Richardson:

And the reason that this matters is because of course, authoritarian governments do that routinely. That’s the whole point. A democracy is not supposed to do that, but in the course of talking about this material this week, what we discovered is there are not a lot of boundaries that determine what is okay and what is not. So we thought we’d take a look at some periods in American history in which leaders may or may not have pushed the boundaries and why those moments were problematic.

And interestingly enough, of course, we’ve come from a moment, we’ll talk more about this, where a president really pushed those boundaries. This has been a theme throughout American history. And one of the things as we talked that jumped out at me was the degree to which the people who framed the constitution were really, really, really worried about this. And perhaps that’s because they were concerned about monarchy.

Joanne Freeman:

Well, indeed it was partly because they were concerned about monarchy and they were also concerned about what happens when you don’t have a Monarch. So corruption, if you were looking for a buzzword in the founding period, corruption might be that word. It was the number one charge. If you want it to try and bring someone down, you either would accuse them of corruption or you would accuse them of being a monarchist. For many people, they were in the same camp. The assumption was that the old world was a place of corrupt politics. That particularly monarchies were grounded on corruption and the new government, the American government as a Republican form of government, supposedly was going to be more virtuous was supposedly going to be more grounded on the public than on some leader on top doing things for him or herself.

Now, if you are looking for the person who probably had the charge of corruption thrown at him most often in the founding period, that would be Alexander Hamilton. He was accused of that all the time. Thomas Jefferson liked to refer to Hamilton’s supporters as “the corrupt squadron.” So the assumption was that he had basically a league of people working under him, that he could send off to do his bidding in some way or another, and it was all under the guise of the Treasury Department. I’ll read here actually, a quote from a Republican describing the thing that they fought Hamilton was doing.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Can I just jump here and remind people that when we talk about Republicans in the founding period, we are not talking about either the Republican Party from the middle of the 19th century through about 1980 or current day Republicans. Weren’t these people officially known as I don’t know Jeffersonians?

Joanne Freeman:

Jeffersonian Republicans.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Or Democratic Republicans? Is that a name too?

Joanne Freeman:

Yes. Those are both used. I tend to prefer Jeffersonian Republican, because it’s really clear what that prefers to, whereas Democratic Republican leads people in all kinds of directions, but yes, thank you for that. But a Jeffersonian Republican who was angry at Hamilton and was trying actually years after Hamilton was in power, a couple of years after still to bring him down accuses Hamilton of by throwing into the hands of loan officers, collectors, supervisors, and other agents and officers for the collection of the public revenue, large annual sums of money beyond the annual amount of their expenditures under color of legal appropriations.

Thereby, he enables if so disposed any of these officers or agents to make occasional uses of the monies or collections in their hands for electioneering or other party purposes or of influencing and directing the public opinion. This person also says that this is a Hamiltonian system of executive influence with him at the top.

Now, the interesting thing about Hamilton is if you had asked him if corruption is important in government, he would say yes and handily, he did. At a dinner party, which Thomas Jefferson liked to describe very often for that precise fact. And as Jefferson tells that story, there was a meeting with John Adams and Thomas Jefferson and Hamilton, and they were discussing business of one kind or another and after the business was over and as Jefferson puts it, the cloth was removed from the table and they were just sitting around and talking, Adam said something along the lines of, “Remove the corruption from the British government and it would be the finest government on the face of the earth.”

Whenever Jefferson writes something down that Hamilton is saying that he thinks is particularly bad, he always has Hamilton pause before he says it. So in his notes, he’s like, “Hamilton paused and then said,” and what Hamilton said was, “No, no with the corruption, it’s the best government on the face of the earth.” Now what he meant was the behind the scenes wheeling and dealing and all of the things that in one way or another would entice people into engaging with the government, into complying with the government, in his mind, the stuff of real life politics.

So yes, he did think that a certain level of corruption was necessary when he thought about the government as a Founder capital F. He assumed that and particularly he discusses this in the Federalist essays. “Humankind are not virtuous angels. They are all going to do things for themselves in one way or another and the purpose of government is to channel their selfish passions into a public minded direction.” So he’s operating from a starting place of corruption that it’s good, and that if the government is strong enough, it can channel it.

Heather Cox Richardson:

So you actually used a really interesting phrase there. You said, it’s an executive system, as opposed to, as I say, just a suitcase full of cash. That’s a really important distinction because when, even when I hear you talk about Hamilton and corruption, I hear suitcases full of cash. But in fact, he is not putting Benjamin’s, although I guess they weren’t Benjamin [inaudible 00:08:23] in his pocket. He is…

Joanne Freeman:

They knew there…Franklin had a big ego.

Heather Cox Richardson:

That’s such a weird thought like he’s running around when I’m talking about this. But rather the idea that there are ways in which people who are in charge should be going ahead and using the apparatus of the government to get people to support the government. And in Hamilton’s case, it was all about the financial sector.

Joanne Freeman:

Absolutely. It’s important to note that he was constantly accused of personally benefiting from his office and by that people meant money, right? In some way or another, he’s personally getting money out of whatever it is he’s doing, which pretty conclusively you can say he wasn’t. But he did believe that one of the things he was doing was getting the rich and well born to engage in the government, to support the government and that, that was for the good of the government. So things like the Bank of the United States, which he created and supported, that was part of his argument for the bank. Like, “Yeah, I know it brings people in and there’s all kinds of stock trading and even there’s speculation out in the world and yeah, that might seem corrupt, but it’s bringing people to be engaged with this new government. So it actually is for the public good.”

So in his case, he draws a line between he himself personally benefiting from what he’s doing, or even the Federalists benefiting from what he’s doing. Although, you could very readily argue that that’s precisely what he’s doing, but in his mind, he’s doing things that will get people to engage with and support a brand new week government.

Heather Cox Richardson:

In that case, in that era, you certainly did need people with money to get on board, the new government. I mean, that was part of one of the ideas. That he wants people with money to get behind the government, because if they don’t and if they continue to side with England, for example, the whole thing’s going to hell in a hand basket.

Joanne Freeman:

Oh, absolutely. I mean, that’s one of the interesting things about studying the founding period is because everything is so new and unestablished, and untested. There are all kinds of things that go on in that period. Like we really need rich people to support the government that sound really fishy. And as we’re going to discuss further on in this episode, there are all kinds of ways in which some of what Hamilton talks about is readily branded corruption later, but in the founding period, there are some ambiguities. It’s a little amorphous because you are actually talking in a serious way as opposed to a partisan way about the survival of a new nation, of a Republic, which is an experimental form of government in that time.

Heather Cox Richardson:

I love this because Hamilton of course takes on financial interests. And again, one of the distinctions I really care about here is that we are not really talking about personal private profit. And yet we often talk about corruption in those terms, because it’s so much easier to wrap your head around. Instead of saying, “I don’t like the way you are using this system,” you say, “Hey, you took money.” And this is a really perfect transition to the next character we wanted to talk about. And that’s Ulysses S. Grant, President Grant who takes office in 1869. He’s elected in 1868, and most textbooks will tell you that Grant was hideously corrupt. This is a good moment to say that I’m not really going to talk about that, although someday I was thinking, Joanne, we should do an episode of all the pieces of American history we would like to debunk.

Joanne Freeman:

Oh, that would be so much fun.

Heather Cox Richardson:

I’ve actually read the records of the Crédit Mobilier trial.

Joanne Freeman:

Because you’re Heather Cox Richardson.

Heather Cox Richardson:

They’re really interesting. They’re actually really interesting.

Joanne Freeman:

I totally believe you.

Heather Cox Richardson:

But it’s very different than people think. But actually when people think about Grant and corruption, they think about the Crédit Mobilier scandal, which is a big financial scandal. Although it shouldn’t be. Don’t start me, but what people are really upset about Grant about is not the Crédit Mobilier scandal, which is quite late in the discovery of his alleged scandals. I think they turned to the credit or scandal because they can argue with some money scandal. Whereas what they really begin to go after Grant for is the misuse of voting and the misuse of elections in such a way that it’s going to benefit the Republican Party and not the nation. So we got Hamilton looking at finances and tying financial people who the government, and then you get Grant coming in and people saying, “No, no, no, no, you’re using voting wrong and you’re using patronage wrong.”

When he takes office, he’s coming in after Andrew Johnson and Andrew Johnson has deliberately inflamed racial animosities in the post-war years. He has called at one point for the hanging of Republican congressmen. There’ve been race riots, horrible race riots, and massacres on his watch. And by the time Grant takes office, the Ku Klux Klan is operating in, especially in South Carolina and in Georgia in the south, and they’re terrorizing their black neighbors and white neighbors as well. White people who are voting for the Republicans. So when Grant comes into office in ’69, he begins to try to put down the KKK and he begins to use the federal government to protect the rights of African-Americans.

So in March of 1870, he helps to push through the 15th amendment to the constitution, which guarantees that the right to vote will not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude. Shortly after that, Congress goes ahead under Grant’s, urging and begins to pass laws, to enable the army to protect voting rights in the south. So we get a number of acts known as the Enforcement Acts, and then that’s in May of 1870, and then in June of 1870, Congress under Grant goes ahead and establishes the Department of Justice. The Department of Justice is really designed to prosecute the Klansmen in the south.

And then in April of 1871, Grant gets the Ku Klux Klan Act, which gives more teeth to the federal government to go ahead and protect elections in the south. Again, to protect black voting primarily, but also white Republican voting in the south. And then in October of 1871, he suspended the writ of habeas Corpus in nine counties in South Carolina to try and stop the Klan terrorism that’s going on there that essentially permits the military to go ahead and arrest people, round them up. All of these things taken together immediately before the election of 1870 to give an opening for Democrats and for members of the Republican Party who are trying to dethrone, if you will and I use that word deliberately Grant to say that Grant is protecting the rights of African-Americans to vote by using the federal government solely to keep himself and the Republican Party in power.

They begin to argue that all of the tales that people in the North are hearing about the KKK and the South are lies. They’re fabrications, and that in fact, Grant is stirring up these ideas of race trouble, as they would say in the South solely to give the federal government the power to go in and to threaten Democratic voters in the South. People who would be voting against him. And so they look for example, at the fact that Department of Justice is rounding up members of the KKK, and they say that this is voter intimidation on the part of the federal government to go ahead and to keep the Republicans in power.

Joanne Freeman:

I want to add one quick thing here, and that is Heather, you just were talking about people claiming the things that are happening are lies and making claims that aren’t necessarily true. I just want to point out since we’re living in a moment of fake news. In this time period, it was much easier to make those sorts of claims because it was harder to spread news. So it actually was entirely conceivable that someone in the North would not know what was going on in the south and vice versa. I bring that up only because now here we are in an age of multi extreme hyper media, and that’s bringing about the same kinds of problems, which is what is actually true, which gets down to the heart of politics, which gets down to morality and corruption and any number of other things as well.

Heather Cox Richardson:

That’s a really good point because one of the reasons that these stories are as misleading as they are and consumed the way they are is because you start to get national news wires through the telegraphs. And of course, the people in the south reporting the news are all former Confederates. All the old journalists. So they’re saying, they look at a massacre where 73 African-Americans die and three white Americans die and they call it a Black riot and that’s how it gets written about in the newspapers. But it’s interesting that when people attack Grant on this, they do talk about how the South isn’t nearly as bad as it’s being portrayed, but what they go after him on is the idea of the corruption of the body politic. He is using black voting. He’s using the government to support the extension of the vote as a sign of his corruption of the country, which has the interesting echoes. Doesn’t it?

Joanne Freeman:

It really does. That’s why I just leaped in, because one really interesting echo is something that Charles Sumner said who was one of the people who believed precisely what these charges against Grant about manipulating voting. I want to read the quote because just think about the quote that I just read about the charges against Hamilton. Charles Sumner says, “Every office holder from highest to lowest, according to his influence becomes propagandists, fuel woman, whipper in. Members of the cabinet set the example, and perambulating the country instructing the people to vote for reelection.

Heads of bureaus do likewise, then their respective localities, officers of the customs, officers of the internal revenue, marshals with their deputies, postmasters each, and all inspired from the national Capitol, all calling for reelection.” And he calls it an organized power. It’s so similar in such striking ways to precisely what people were saying about Hamilton.

Heather Cox Richardson:

And one of their arguments is that Grant is turning himself into a dictator. That we have destroyed Republican government because the Democratic Party doesn’t stand a chance against this organized faction in control of the White House that is pushing the idea of the expansion of the suffrage and who in this particular era, before we get the rise of civil service in 1883 is able to put into federal offices members of their own political party. The Democrats argue very effectively and sweep in a lot of Republicans for the idea that Grant is using voting and office holding not as a way to help the country and to include African-Americans, but rather as a way to keep himself in power.

Joanne Freeman:

So again, using structures of power, using his office to give himself advantages of power, that is the charge. That is the core assumption about corruption, which is using things that are intended for the public good to benefit yourself. It’s a powerful charge.

Heather Cox Richardson:

This is so incredibly ironic because the reason that Sumner jumps on board, this is because he hates Grant and he wants to be in his place. The guy really leading the charge is Carl Schertz, who is one of Sumner’s closest friends.

Joanne Freeman:

So it’s inherently personal.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Yes, they are literally doing this to benefit themselves and they’re accusing it of Grant, which again, might say something about the present.

Joanne Freeman:

You know, it’s interesting. You can totally see the through line of real or imagined outrage at this idea that people in office are using their office to benefit themselves. It’s a powerful charge. It really is a serious charge. It suggests people who have power grabbing power and not being willing to give it up, but it’s a hard thing, or it can be a hard thing to prove. There’s a certain amorphousness or wiggle room to it that is part of what gives it power.

Heather Cox Richardson:

So if we’ve done finance and we’ve done voting and office holding, then we have Richard Milhous Nixon, who is at least until recently the poster child for the corrupt president.

Joanne Freeman:

That’s totally true, and in a sense, if the number one thing that people might think of, when you say corruption is money, the number two thing would probably be Richard Nixon. People won’t necessarily know why, but one of the most famous things that he said in the general public mind is…

Richard Milhous Nixon (archival):

People have got to know whether or not their president is a crook. Well, I’m not a crook.

Joanne Freeman:

That’s a fundamental part of his identity is the fact that in one way or another, he was a crook, but we need to get down into the heart of that because that links directly back to the other instances we’ve been talking about and really goes into the heart of this matter of using government structures for personal good.

Heather Cox Richardson:

So one of the ones that he really used corruptly was the intelligence agencies. I find Nixon, just an absolutely fascinating character because he is so complicated in so many ways, but the reasoning behind the way he used the intelligence agencies was that in 1970 America seems to be in chaos. You’ve got the anti-Vietnam war protests, you’ve got the Chicano walkouts in Los Angeles, you’ve got the American Indian Movement, you’ve got the Women’s Movement, you’ve got Kent State, in May of 1970 you’ve got in that period though, as well as the protest movements I’m talking about, you also have the reactionary movements. So the week after Kent State, you get the dedication of Stone Mountain in Georgia. You’ve got the increasing teeth of white supremacists in the south. You’ve got chaos.

He is desperately eager to figure out how he can anticipate how people on the left are going to be moving, what they’re going to be doing next, because he wants to stop what seems to him, escalating violence and escalating destabilization of the country. So again, you’re the president, you got things getting worse and worse and worse. What are you going to try to do?

Joanne Freeman:

He calls together all of these heads of these various intelligence agencies, so that rather than acting separately and not communicating with each other, that they will indeed communicate with each other and act together to do things that in his mind and in the mind of many on that committee are going to be having something to do with national security. And some of the things that they debate doing really do have to do with monitoring what US citizens are saying, for example, to people in other nations or electronically looking at domestic dissenters and what they’re saying, or reading international mail of American citizens

Heather Cox Richardson:

When they get together, one of the things that is interesting about the American government when things go badly, as they very often say, “Oh, we have a problem with communication.” That movie like, “What we have here is a failure to communicate.”

Joanne Freeman:

Yeah, Oh, Cool Hand Luke. Yes, Cool Hand Luke.

Heather Cox Richardson:

It’s like the government version of Cool Hand Luke.

Cool Hand Luke Clip:

What we’ve got here is failure to communicate.

Heather Cox Richardson:

So they turned to a staff man, this guy named Tom Huston, who’s a young activist. He’s from Indiana and earlier he had led a conservative group called Young Americans for Freedom, which ended up playing a role in Nixon’s 1968 victory. He had become a special assistant to the president, otherwise known as an SAP or a SAP. I’m sorry, I couldn’t resist that. But what he does is after they have this meeting, he goes home and he writes a 43 page memorandum. He says that what needs to happen is this new organization that these intelligence heads have come up with, the inter-agency committee on intelligence or the ICI should go ahead and do what Joanne said.

They should monitor the international communications of US citizens. They should intensify electronic surveillance of domestic dissenters and selected establishments by which that means, antiwar activists and institutions that they consider to be operating against the United States government that is non Nixon supporters. They should read the international mail of US citizens. They should break into the homes of people that are established to be domestic dissenters against people who don’t support and I almost said Donald Trump, who don’t support Richard Nixon, just to emphasize there what this looks like, who is on the table here.

Joanne Freeman:

And that raises an important point in the same way that corruption can be a fuzzy term. Dissenter is another term that can have a lot of definitions. And one of them can be people who don’t support me.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Yes. And also to break into again, specified establishments, which we’re going to hit in a second. This is one of my favorites, intensify the surveillance of American college students.

Joanne Freeman:

Interesting. I glance at Florida and shall remain silent.

Heather Cox Richardson:

I’m not sure we shall remain all that silent on that. Again, the argument here was that you couldn’t stop the real fear in America in 1970 without having better intelligence. So how are you going to get better intelligence? You’re going to have to break a few eggs to make a good omelet. So they’re going to go after using the powers of the federal government to investigate American citizens, to see if they’re up to no good, but that no good of course is defined as are they going to be operating against the Nixon administration? And there’s a really interesting argument that really comes up during the Nixon administration of why Americans should not be able to dissent against the president.

The argument for that is that because the United States president has his finger on the nuclear button, if you will, that to operate against the president means that you are essentially undermining the person who has the ability to destroy the world at hand. This makes the president, at least in Nixon’s case, go far a field and believe that he really does represent the country and in this case humanity. So there’s this idea that anybody who criticizes the president is…

Joanne Freeman:

An enemy of the people, an enemy to the country.

Heather Cox Richardson:

And an existential threat to humanity, right? Not just to Nixon’s reelection in 1972. So when Huston has to go ahead and explain why this is going to be okay, he comes up with a series of ideas and the first two bullet points and why he thinks it’s okay for the government to do this really jumped out at me. He said, “The US government has an overriding obligation to use every available scientific means to detect and neutralize forces that pose a direct threat to the nation.” And his second point was, “Every major intelligence service in the world, including in the Communist block, uses such techniques as an essential part of their operations.”

Heather Cox Richardson:

It is believed the general public would support their use by the United States for the same purpose. I mean, you could write an entire book on that point alone. The Americans should do the same thing the communists are doing, which is a point about authoritarianism I want to come back to and the passive voice it is believed.

Joanne Freeman:

By whom? How many times have either you or I said to our students, passive voice is bad because whoever you’re describing has no blame put on them for any of the actions that they do. So, no, that is a great example of the power of passive voice. But yeah, that’s a fascinating statement because it’s talking about on the one hand, why these kinds of actions, why this kind of investigation is needed and partly it’s because we’re at a disadvantage if we don’t do this because other places are doing it, regardless of what we think about whether it’s right or wrong.

Heather Cox Richardson:

So how this played out was interesting because Nixon planned to go ahead and sign on to Huston’s plan, but the intelligence leaders particularly J. Edgar Hoover had reservations about it for obvious reasons. Obviously, if you know anything about intelligence services and how they interface with the government, you know that getting the government a blank check to go and look in any place at once is probably not a good idea. So even Hoover thought this was a bad idea and it was never formally implemented, but it did in fact, go on to be a really important part of the Nixon administration, because Nixon actually ordered a break in of the Brookings Institution, which was a left-leaning institution using the Huston plan as his justification. He and his advisors believed that there was stored at Brookings, a series of files that would reveal some information about Lyndon Baines Johnson, the previous president.

Heather Cox Richardson:

So they decide they’re going to go ahead and break into Brookings to go ahead and get that file. Nixon even references the Huston plan in audio when he’s planning the break in it’s recovered from the taping system in the Oval office and it’s scratchy on the tape, but they say something like this, Haldeman goes, “Huston swears to God there’s a file on it at Brookings.” Kissinger says, “I wouldn’t be surprised.” Nixon, “All right. All right. All right. You Bam.” Now you remember Huston’s plan, implemented. Kissinger says, “But couldn’t we go over?” “Now, Brookings has no right to have classified documents.”

Nixon says, “I mean, I want to implement it on a thievery basis. God, get in and get those files, blow the safe and get it.” That break never actually was carried out, and I think it’s actually the only time Nixon actually ordered a break in, but of course, that’s the backstory to the idea of the break-in in September of 19 71 of the people who became known as the plumbers who were called the plumbers, because they were supposed to stop leaks. Seriously that’s…

Joanne Freeman:

I know that’s true, but you just have to juggle the sadness of that.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Well, I know that people tend to think that people in the government are some part of some really cerebral deep state, and then they do things like that and you’re like, “They’re plumbers just to stop leaks.

Joanne Freeman:

Yeah, they’re plumbers. They stop the leaks.

Heather Cox Richardson:

But they break into a psychiatrist’s office, the office of Fred Fielding, who was the psychiatrist of Daniel Ellsberg and Daniel Ellsberg was the man who had leaked the Pentagon papers to the New York Times. And the Pentagon papers were a series of investigations of the presidents before Nixon. They didn’t go up to Nixon and how basically they established that those presidents had misled. I.e lied to the American people about what was actually happening in Vietnam. So they burglarized the office of Fred Fielding, who was Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist in 1971.

And then of course on June 17th, 1972, those same plumbers break into the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate Office Building, and that’s of course how the Watergate scandal begins, but the idea here was that it was okay for the Nixon administration to use the powers of the intelligence community, to spy on people who stood against the Nixon administration.

Joanne Freeman:

After Nixon resigned, Huston appeared before the Senate church committee, which was investigating intelligence abuses in the wake of Watergate and he explained his initial belief that his plan was necessary and his eventual recognition that the types of intelligence liberties that he helped create invariably led to too much corruption to really be feasible.

Tom Huston (archival):

And therefore I’ve come to the conclusion that, whereas I would traditionally have taken the position that I’m willing to run some small risk of infringing upon some small portion of the publics, otherwise the gentlemen rights for the greater good of the security of all the people. I now come to the conclusion that we have no practical alternative, but to take a far greater risk that they’re going to be these kinds of things that we can’t deal effectively against.

Heather Cox Richardson:

So Huston showed some regret. Nixon didn’t though. Nixon continued to defend what they had done even after everything had played out. He went on in 1977 to agree to a set of interviews with British journalist David Frost and they became very famous in part because of his defense of the initial justifications of that Huston plan. Nixon said, “Let’s look at the year 1970, we had a situation where 35,000 people had been victims of assault. So a number of them had been killed. It was a year in which we had 16 airplane hijackings. There’ve been about 11 the year before, but most significantly it was a year in which there had been 3,000 bombings and 50,000 bomb threats, which caused the evacuation of buildings. It was a year of turbulence in American society.

All right, now in the middle of 1970, we were faced with a situation here, first where the intelligence agencies weren’t working together. Under the circumstances, I felt that we had to coordinate these activities and get a more effective a program for dealing with first foreign directed espionage or foreign support and subversion. And in addition with domestic groups that used and advocated violence.”

Joanne Freeman:

And then frost says, “So what, in a sense you’re saying is that there are certain situations and the Huston plan or that part of it was one of them where the president can decide that it’s in the best interest of the nation or something and do something illegal?”

Heather Cox Richardson:

And then Nixon’s so famously answered.

Richard Milhous Nixon (archival):

Oh, when the president does it, that means that it is not illegal by definition.

Joanne Freeman:

Internal cringe.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Yeah. An amazing statement. Nixon’s comment is a wonderful segue to the presidency of former president Donald Trump, because while we looked at Hamilton and the use of the financial community as a way to perhaps bolster the Federalists and Grant using voting and office holding as a way to support the Republicans of his day and Nixon going ahead and using the intelligence community as a way to do what he thought was important to try and stop domestic subversion or foreign directed subversion in America, by the way, that was something Reagan talked a lot about as well. We now are looking at a former president who used that idea that if the president does it, it’s not illegal in a really modern day context.

Joanne Freeman:

Throughout much of what we’ve been saying today, it’s very easy to draw all kinds of interesting links and comparisons with some recent events. But when it comes to former president Trump, he said things for example, about impeachment like this.

Donald Trump (archival):

When you look at past impeachments, whether it was President Clinton, or I guess President Nixon never got there, he left. I don’t leave. There’s a big difference. I don’t leave.

Heather Cox Richardson:

In his first impeachment trial, which was over something that we’re not really going to talk about a lot today, but it’s very interesting. His use of the powers of the White House to pressure foreign governments in such a way that they would contribute to his reelection. So what happened then was in July of 2019, the Office of Management and Budget under Mick Mulvaney went ahead and withheld from the new Ukraine government run by Volodymyr Zelensky. Monies that Congress had appropriated to help Zelensky, Ukraine being one of our key allies to hold back Russian aggression.

They withheld that money in order to pressure Zelensky to make an announcement that the Ukraine government was going to be holding investigations of then Democratic presidential candidate, Joe Biden’s son, Hunter, for the work that he had done in Ukraine. They were deliberately running this shadow foreign policy shop out of the White House and refusing money to our allies to go ahead and win the 2020 election. And what Alan Dershowitz, who was a lawyer who was speaking out for Trump in a second impeachment said had really interesting echoes of Nixon.

Alan Dershowitz (archival):

Every public official that I know believes that his election is in the public interest and mostly you’re right, your election is in the public interest. And if a president does something, which he believes will help him get elected in the public interest, that cannot be the kind of quid pro quo, that results in impeachment.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Interestingly enough, John Dean, who is on Twitter and was one of the people who turned on Nixon early in the Watergate scandal said, “Alan Dershowitz, unimpeached Richard Nixon today. All Nixon was doing was obstructing justice and abusing power because he thought it was in the best interest for the USA, for him to be the president.” When the president does it and so on seriously, that was his motive.

Joanne Freeman:

What’s interesting about the case that we’re talking about here with former president Trump is that he wanted an announcement of an investigation because he was aiming at the public to have a public impact in a way that would benefit himself. And that’s a component we haven’t really talked about here, but that’s worth noting. Again, this has to do with Democratic modes of government and the fact that the American public actually really has power in determining what does get swept under the rug as corruption and what sometimes is subjected to. Trump and his supporters are trying to get the public to think a certain thing about Biden and the Democrats. Nixon did the same kind of a thing in the midst of the fear over his charges. He held a televised press conference to deny the charges against him, trying to appeal to the public.

Hamilton was the master of deploying newspapers to defend himself. He would do things like pretend to be different people in five different newspapers, all of them defending Hamilton. So in one way or another, not only are there similarities and structures of government being used here in corruption, but in a way there’s the deployment of a different structure of government, and that is the power of the American public that’s being yoked in to what’s going on here. That’s a fundamental part of a democratic political system, and it’s part of the process of, and the success or failure of corruption.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Okay. We’ve identified a problem. It’s got fuzzy edges. You appeal to the public to see what they think and whether or not they’re going to throw the guys out at the next election, if you will. But that does represent a fundamental question in American democracy. How do you stop this? If any of these presidents had used the powers that they have to keep themselves in power, we lose democracy in a real hurry and we become an autocracy. We’d become an autocracy because this is in fact exactly what autocratic governments do. They use the tools at their disposal to stifle dissent and to keep themselves in power. So interestingly enough, we spent a pretty long time last night thinking, “Okay, we’ve said that there’s a problem, where is the mechanics of the constitution to fix this baby, Joanne?”

Joanne Freeman:

Well, we came up with a number of different things that might act as brakes. So an obvious one is obviously impeachment, but impeachment relies on a bigger source of pulling the brakes, stopping in process corruption like this. And that has to do not only with congressional oversight, but with the Senate and the Senate’s ability to stop things, to exercise oversight, to draw lines, to state when there have been violations on the part of the executive or the president.

Heather Cox Richardson:

So this was the eye-opener for me is that when you get these moments, there is a mechanism for stopping this kind of corruption of the body politic that’s different than stopping somebody from taking a suitcase of cash. Again, that’s pretty easy to prove but the mechanics of that are the Senate is supposed to be exercising discretion when they advise and consent the appointment of some of these people. One of the people to whom we pointed was, for example, a former attorney general William Barr, whose understandings of the power of the president were known to be expansive after he had urged George H. W. Bush to pardon the people who’d been convicted in the Iran or accused in the Iran Contra affair during Reagan’s administration.

So they’re supposed to be using advice and consent, but they’re then also supposed to take the idea of impeachment seriously. So at the end of the day, and according to our constitutional system, it really does come down to a Senate that takes its job seriously.

Joanne Freeman:

So in the end to me, what this boils down to is a huge way that you can pull in corruption or use breaks and that is the American public, right? The public opinion is supposed to be the grounding power of our form of government. There’s a reason why all of these presidents immediately turned to the public to justify themselves. It was a total awareness of the fact that the public ultimately makes the decisions partly through elections, but partly even in a broader way. I mean, after Nixon, when his impeachment was being debated, there were almost half a million telegrams sent to the White House, demanding impeachment.

So the public is a big part of this. I think it’s a part that we don’t often think about. And I think where we are right now, it’s a part that people really need to realize they have a power and it can be exercised in a way to make it clear that there is a line that should be drawn and that investigations are necessary.