344
HAROLD ROSENBERG
adduced at the Senate hearings that Haldeman had prepared to re–
vive the myth that demonstrations in behalf of the Democrats were
financed by Moscow gold. Someone on the right - was it Gold–
water? - had declared that too much zeal (extremism ) in the de–
fense of freedom is not a vice, a statement that constitutes a revolu–
tionary manifesto in which law is put in second place behind ideo–
logical enthusiasm. But when the program of the radical right was
forthrightly presented by Goldwater in 1964, it was overwhelmingly
defeated. Nixon supported Goldwater, but to him Goldwaterism is
another form of overzealousness, in that it invites being caught by
the voters. He believes in the right-wing revolution, but he believes
in revolution by stealth. His is a
politics of cover-up.
Watergate is the
quintessence of his quarter of a century in public life. He has come
close to leading the radical right to triumph through presenting its
program in the nonradical terminology of Middle American aspira–
tions: support of the Constitution, individual freedom, reduced bu–
reaucracy, grass roots control, prosperity without inflation, world
peace, and so on, a list of objectives irrelevant to his real aim –
that of consolidating a centralized power - and which his years in
office have consistently violated. It is said that Mitchell, Haldeman,
and other Nixon intimates hate the term "cover-up." With good rea–
son: it sums up the entire Nixon philosophy of masquerade and
concealment as the means of ruling a free country.
In exposing White House inroads into the American system,
Watergate has forced Nixon to assert the
right
to cover up. His
swollen conception of Executive Privilege is nothing else than a de–
mand to
be
allowed to run the government in secret: to bomb in
secret, to make trade deals in secret, to pressure corporations for cam–
paign contributions in secret, to take steps against a secret list of
enemies, to commit secret crimes for the sake of what he chooses to
define as "national security." Nixon says that his predecessors also
ordered break-ins and wiretaps. Be that as it may, Nixon is the first
President of the United States for whom the right to hide
his
actions
is the essence of his office. Everyone else, from the Secretary of State
and Congressional leaders down, is spied upon and bugged - the
President alone is the invisible seeing eye. Nixon requires Executive
Privilege not, as he says, in order to protect confidentiality but to hide
the systematic pattern of his moves to concentrate power in his own
