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been many conspiracies and conspiracy theories, but so far as we know
this is the first time in this country that the government itself was the
conspirator, ostensibly to protect itself from conspiracies on the left–
something usually associated with the military in backward countries and
the far right in advanced ones.
• Naturally most conservatives support Nixon. Still we were sur–
prised to find Irving Kristol, who we think would still like to be known
as a liberal, and Sidney Hook, who speaks of himself as a socialist, com–
ing out for the Republicans in the last election. The justification, we as–
sume, was to save America from the young and middle-aged kids on the
left. We were also surprised to see many of the contributors to a sym–
posium in
Commentary
as late as last spring quite sympathetic to the
aims of the government that gave us Watergate. But even on the other
side of the fence, it was distressing to see left liberals stand political
reality on its head by also supporting Nixon against McGovern - on the
ground (for which there was not a bit of evidence ) that he was more
likely to pullout of Vietnam.
• The New York Times
recently asked the signers of an ad for
Nixon in 1972 whether they still felt the same way about him. Some of
the replies were evasive, to say the least, and after all the revelations of
Watergate quite shocking. Sidney Hook, for example, in effect stuck to
his earlier stand by saying he would have voted for the Socialist Labor
Party had he known it would be a Nixon landslide. Edward Shils gave
the forthright reply that he had specified there be no university a ffili a–
tion after his name, as though that were the issue. Irving Kristol and
Gertrude Himmelfarb also met the question head on by declining to
comment.
If
there was ever any doubt about it, it is reassuring to know
that no group or movement has a monopoly of political foolishness or
equivocation; and obviously conservatives have just as much right to be
victims of their own ideology as radicals. But it is disturbing to see in–
tellectual conservatism serving as a shield for moral obtuseness and
political insensitivity to the implications of Watergate.
• One notable part of the Watergate spectacle has to do with the
gyrations and contortions that the "cover-up" required. This side of
things is beginning to find peculiar counterparts in the intellectual world
- a kind of "play-it-down" among the articulate and uneasy. An ex–
ample of this tendency is to be found in an article on Watergate by
Seymour Martin Lipset and Earl Rabb in the September issue of
Com–
mentary.
Intending ostensibly to locate Watergate within its proper his–
torical context, they end up by more or less denying both history and
the scandalous character of the incident itself. They do this by institut–
ing a comparison between Watergate and the raids after World War I,
led by Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, against domestic radicals.
Their conclusion is that in contrast to this earlier episode, Watergate was
a covert operation, whose most elaborate part was the "cover-up, which
is itself a measure of the restraining power of the cosmopolitan climate
not only within the administration but in the nation at large - in, that
is, the growing cosmopolitanization of the American people." In ot her
