Quote of the Day (Bill Moyers, on a Prior Presidential ‘Arrogant Disregard for the Rule of Law’)

“There in brief is the Watergate morality embedded in the Nixon White House—belief in the total rightness of the official view of reality and an arrogant disregard for the rule of law, the triumph of executive decree over due process. By arbitrarily and secretly invoking the national security, the President or his men can nullify the Bill of Rights and turn the Constitution into a license for illegitimate conduct. The President is set above ordinary standards of right or wrong. What's right is what works. And he alone decides what that is. One man, in effect, becomes the state. It was close. It almost worked. And it would have changed things for keeps: the public conscience smothered, the Congress intimidated, the press isolated, and the political process rigged. The President would have been free to dictate the popular morality for his own ends. And we would have been at the mercy of unbridled, capricious and arbitrary rules. It was close. It almost worked. But not quite. Something basic in our traditions held.”— American journalist, political commentator, and former White House Press Secretary Bill Moyers (1934-2025), “An Essay on Watergate,” Bill Moyers’ Journal, original air date Nov. 7, 1973, directed by Jack Sameth

I was fortunate enough to meet Bill Moyers at a local promotional event for Fooling With Words: A Celebration of Poets and Their Craft—one of his book/PBS series tie-ins in which he interviewed cultural figures such as Joseph Campbell. He signed my copy of this particular book, and immediately followed up with a response to a question I had asked about the source of a quote.

Late last month, when I heard about Moyers’ death, I realized with a shock that I hadn’t heard about him for a while. His commentaries had become lower-profile, largely confined to his Website, after his retirement from PBS in 2015.

That year, I remembered with a start, coincided with Donald Trump’s descent down the escalator at Trump Tower and into a political arena that he quickly defiled more than many of us dreamed possible. 

I badly missed Moyers’ soft-spoken, earnest, but piercing insights into the culture of Washington and what the changes about to ensue in American life meant for the survival of the republic.

The memories forged in youth endure the longest. So it was for me, as, I suspect, for many others, in my first exposure to Moyers—not as the press secretary for Lyndon Johnson (a tenure that began 60 years ago this month), but in my early teens, watching Bill Moyers’ Journal.

From his time in government, and even as part of major news organizations (Newsday, PBS, CBS), Moyers knew how addictive power could be. He was hardly a naif, giving, for instance, the go-ahead to the ethically dubious “mushroom cloud” commercial used against Barry Goldwater in LBJ’s 1964 Presidential race.

But, as a Baptist deacon's son and ordained minister himself, he also recognized that at some point, it was necessary to one’s soul to cease participating in evil. When he couldn’t continue defending a Vietnam War policy he knew to be wrong, he resigned after only a year as press secretary, even if it meant incurring his boss’s wrath to the end of the Johnson’s life.

“An Essay on Watergate” outlined in detail, through conversations with Presidential historians, how LBJ’s successor, Richard Nixon, sought to expand the prerogatives of his office as a means of striking at his enemies. 

But neither Johnson nor Nixon could even conceive of the lengths to which Donald Trump would defy the Constitution, trampling norms and pushing, pushing, pushing against laws, daring Congress and the courts to rein him in.

What Moyers warned could have come to pass had Watergate gone undetected and unpunished—" the public conscience smothered, the Congress intimidated, the press isolated, and the political process rigged,” not to mention “unbridled, capricious and arbitrary rules”—has occurred with Trump’s second coming to power.

In a 2022 podcast interview with Dr. Bandy See, Moyers laid out a case for how a notably psychologically disturbed Trump had posed a threat to the Constitution. 

But fewer people were aware of this discussion compared with the audience he could reach in his years on television—and it’s a sign of our political fragmentation that, even if he had reached the old numbers, many people would not have paid attention to the message.

Such is the plight of our time—or, as the biblically conscious Moyers would have known, a prophet is without honor in his own country.

(The image accompanying this post shows Bill Moyers speaking with attendees at a special screening and discussion of his documentary, "Rikers: An American Jail", at the First Amendment Forum at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University in Phoenix, AZ. It was taken Apr. 19, 2017, by Gage Skidmore from Peoria, AZ.)

This Day in Vietnam War History (Congress Approves Tonkin Gulf Resolution, a ‘Historic Mistake’)

Aug. 7, 1964—When the U.S. Congress passed the Tonkin Gulf Resolution with shamefully minimal debate, it did more than just abrogate its constitutional authority to declare war.

It also furnished Lyndon Johnson with carte blanche to widen American participation in the Vietnam War from a limited advisory capacity to a massive ground-troop commitment—eventually resulting in 58,000 lives lost, along with hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese soldiers and civilians.

The incident that gave LBJ the congressional authorization he jokingly termed “Grandma’s nightshirt” (i.e., “it covers everything”) foreshadowed a pattern that continued through the war of military intelligence twisted to fit preconceived policy or strategic objectives. Like the war itself, the American intelligence operation was conceived in error and carried to term through deception.

The resolution came following a week of heightened tensions and misinterpreted actions by the Communist government in North Vietnam and the U.S. In late July, in assisting the South Vietnamese in warding off North Vietnamese attacks and Vietcong subversions, the U.S. Maddox (pictured) started a reconnaissance patrol off the coast of North Vietnam.

The destroyer was not far from the island of Hon Me on August 2 when torpedo boats advanced towards it. The boats ignored warning shots from the Maddox and continued. Shots were exchanged, with the North Vietnamese vessels withdrawing after sustaining damage.

Two days later, U.S. radio operators misinterpreted a message, concluding that a North Vietnamese military operation was imminent. Actually, Hanoi had warned torpedo boat commanders to be ready for a new raid by South Vietnam.

Later on the 4^th, as the Maddox and a second destroyer, the Turner Joy, found themselves amid thunderstorms and rain squalls. With radar malfunctioning, they fired into the night at what appeared to be oncoming ships.

LBJ, when told a second North Vietnamese attack was probable but not certain, went ahead on the assumption that it had occurred. He even scoffed a few days later about the accuracy of the initial reports: “Hell, those dumb stupid sailors were just shooting at flying fish.”

The deception didn’t end there:

*While claiming that the destroyers were within “international waters” when fired upon, the administration didn’t mention that its recognized three-mile limit was far less than North Vietnam’s 12-mile restriction.

* U.S.-backed South Vietnamese commando attacks and intelligence-gathering missions along the North Vietnamese coast, codenamed Operations Plan (OPLAN) 34A, had probably provoked the August 2 attacks on the Maddox.

*The administration engaged in a rush to judgment about the confusing stream of intelligence reports that initially arrived, with some intelligence about the August 2 attack being included in reports about August 4—thereby mistakenly confirming North Vietnam had initiated hostilities on the latter date.

The incident served as a convenient pretext for ordering retaliatory air strikes and for sending to Capitol Hill a resolution—drafted two months earlier by Presidential aide William Bundy—providing the White House with freedom of action in Vietnam.

Polls showed a gain of more than 30% in public support for Johnson’s response—which was seen as firm but calibrated, in contrast to GOP Presidential nominee Barry Goldwater’s charge that the President’s irresolution in the face of Communism had invited the attack.

Both houses of Congress quickly got in line behind the President. The House of Representatives took only 40 minutes before passing the resolution 416-0. The Senate took longer—nine hours—before giving way, too, with its two dissenters easy to overcome and even ignore.

Even aside from his migrating party affiliations (first Republican, then independent, then a Democrat), the first dissenter, Wayne Morse of Oregon, had earned a reputation as a maverick and gadfly, even a crank and obstructionist. Eleven years before, he had conducted what was at the time the longest one-person filibuster in Senate history, and later in the 1950s he had publicly feuded with a Senate colleague from his own state and party. Moreover, his disdain for alcohol and levity alike left him isolated in a chamber that operated like a club.

Nevertheless, Morse already sensed something was amiss with this incident. As noted by Randall Bennett Woods’ biography of Senate foreign policy grandee J. William Fulbright, a Pentagon contact urged Morse to request the logbooks for the Maddox and Turner Joy from Robert McNamara. (The Defense Secretary claimed they were still aboard ship when, in fact, they had already arrived in Washington.)

Morse chose not to make this an issue when he rose to speak. Instead, he denounced the resolution for being unconstitutional:

“I believe that history will record that we have made a great mistake in subverting and circumventing the Constitution of the United States, Article I, Section 8 [which gives Congress the power to declare war] thereof by means of this resolution. . . I believe [this resolution] to be a historic mistake. I believe that within the next century, future generations will look with dismay and great disappointment upon a Congress which is now about to make such a historic mistake. Our constitutional rights are no better than the preservation of our procedural guarantees under the Constitution.”

As for 77-year-old Senator Ernest Gruening of Alaska, his arguments against the resolution, if they were mentioned at all in the news coverage, were dismissed as unrealistic and not to be taken seriously. His prediction proved as eerily prophetic as Morse’s, however:

“We now are about to authorize the President if he sees fit to move our Armed Forces…not only into South Vietnam, but also into North Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Thailand, and of course the authorization includes all the rest of the SEATO [Southeast Asia Treaty Organization] nations. That means sending our American boys into combat in a war in which we have no business, which is not our war, into which we have been misguidedly drawn, which is steadily being escalated. This resolution is a further authorization for escalation unlimited. I am opposed to sacrificing a single American boy in this venture. We have lost far too many already.”

Administration and Pentagon assurances to the contrary, U.S. plans for a rapid victory were about to sink into the jungles of Vietnam.

The same pattern of U.S. military authorization framing intelligence in a misleading manner recurred in the run-up to the Iraq War. Although that conflict did not lead to as many American casualties as the Vietnam War, the damage to the Iraqi population—and, ultimately, to US credibility in the region—was worse.

When will U.S. policymakers learn to make sure they are right before the shooting starts? 

Quote of the Day (Lyndon Johnson, With a Futile Attempt at Gun Control 50 Years Ago)

“Last year, two million guns were sold in the United States. Many of them were sold to hardened criminals, snipers, mental defectives, rapists, habitual drunkards and juveniles.

“There is no excuse for this. 

“There is no excuse for a holdup at gun point on a dark city street or an armed robbery in a house where children are sleeping. We are long past the point where we can allow lethal weapons to be hawked by the same mail order techniques used to market frozen steaks or baskets of fruit. We are long past the point where we can allow an enemy of society to buy and use a weapon of death and disorder—when existing state laws would not even allow the same person to drive a car, or to vote.”—President Lyndon B. Johnson, “Letter to the President of the Senate and to the Speaker of the House of Representatives Urging Enactment of Gun Control Legislation,” September 15, 1967

Lyndon Johnson—who became President when predecessor John F. Kennedy was murdered with a gun, and whose last year in office was darkened by the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy—would be appalled at the toll that guns have now taken on U.S. society. Last year,according to the FBI, a record 27 million guns were sold in this country—more than 10 times the number that appalled LBJ a half-century ago. We have become immune to each time a gun is employed in a different way: to kill schoolchildren, say, or a hall of concertgoers in Las Vegas.

Is this something for America to be proud of????

Flashback, April 1967: King Breaks With LBJ in Fiery Anti-War Speech

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (seen here, accepting the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964) spoke out more directly and passionately against the Vietnam War than he ever had before 50 years ago this week, in a controversial address, “Beyond Vietnam,” at New York’s Riverside Church. The Nobel laureate’s break with Lyndon B. Johnson, who had helped pass civil-rights legislation King had long advocated but who was now pursuing a conflict that the minister regarded as “madness,” came amid a year of personal anguish and reduced effectiveness in leading his movement.

As King looked out on April 4, 1967, at the Morningside Heights congregation, hosted by the antiwar group Clergy and Laymen Concerned about Vietnam, he was aware that opponents had been questioning his direction over the past year. His 1965 march from Selma to Montgomery, Ala., followed by passage of the Voting Rights Act a few months later, was his last significant victory. Since then, he had endured:

*a failed “Chicago Campaign” that failed to alter either de facto discrimination in the city’s housing or the broader plight of its African-American population;

*criticism from “Black Power” activists that his continued belief in nonviolent protest was too accommodating to white power structures; and 

*gnawing self-doubt about his purpose as a leader. Once, he burst out at a meeting with associates that he wished he could simply be the pastor of a small church again. Instead, he had decided, while on a vacation that winter to finish his latest book, to embrace a broader role implied by his Nobel Prize: an advocate for wider social justice.

Above all, he was growing uneasy over American involvement in the Vietnam War and the collateral damage to African-Americans, the nation’s poor and world peace. At last, he told the full house at Riverside, he felt compelled to ‘‘break the betrayal of my own silences and to speak from the burnings of my own heart.’’

At this point widespread public recognition that the American involvement in the conflict was a failure had not yet crystallized. (In fact, it hadn’t even coalesced among African-Americans. Even after King’s address, only a quarter of blacks backed his stance on the war, according to one opinion poll.) That meant he was already veering far out on a limb, particularly for a white population (already annoyed, even suspicious, about his protests) who thought he was getting even further from his core role than he should.

King’s constant traveling as president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference left him little time to write a speech with such momentous implications for his cause. His associate Andrew Young helped stitch the address together with significant input from attorney Clarence Jones and King’s close friend Vincent Harding. “He knew that I would not be putting words into his mouth. I would simply be speaking as my friend would want to speak, and that was the way that I went about the task that he asked me to do,” Harding recalled in a 2008 interview with Juan Gonzalez and Amy Goodman included on the Website Democracy Now.

In his address, King reviewed the course of the war and offered reasons why he had come to oppose it--notably, diverted government resources and energy from the Great Society legislation proposed by LBJ only two years before, and the disproportionate impact of the conflict on the poor, who were forced to send “their sons and their brothers and their husbands to fight and to die in extraordinarily high proportions relative to the rest of the population.”

With time, King’s general rationale was repeatedly confirmed (e.g., “we increased our troop commitments in support of governments which were singularly corrupt, inept, and without popular support.”) But two examples of rhetorical overkill undercut the speech’s effectiveness: 1) What did Vietnamese peasants think of America, he asked, “as we test out our latest weapons on them, just as the Germans tested out new medicine and new tortures in the concentration camps of Europe?” 2) In bombing defenseless villages, King claimed, the U.S. government had become “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.” 

It was predictable that conservatives would fire back after the speech, taking their cue from William F. Buckley Jr., who termed it “one of the greatest acts of intellectual confusion in recent history.” The godfather of modern conservatism continued: “Dr. King gave a speech which could have been written in, indeed it was for all intents and purposes written in, Hanoi.”

More problematic for the future direction of liberalism in the U.S. was that King’s speech was condemned by such mainstream progressive media as The New York Times and The Washington Post, as well as such prominent African-American leaders as Urban League head Whitney Young and the player who broke baseball’s color line, Jackie Robinson. The board of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People even voted unanimously in favor of a resolution assailing his speech as a “serious tactical mistake.”

Most ominously for King’s future well-being, President Johnson was dangerously angered by King’s turn against him. He didn’t stop at merely referring to King in private as "that godd---ed n---er preacher." Instead, he stopped ignoring J. Edgar Hoover’s constant drumbeat of criticisms of the civil-rights leader and even asked his press secretary to distribute the FBI’s information about King’s ties with alleged Communist Stanley Levison to favorite reporters. 

The animus caused by his Riverside speech may have helped fulfill King’s sense of his prophetic mission, but it came at the price of making him feel increasingly like a target, according to Stanford University historian Clayborne Carson, who in January told USA Today: “There were a lot people who preferred that (King) be dead. If they wouldn’t bring it about, they certainly weren’t disturbed by it. My feeling is that King would not have survived the ‘60s in any case.”

On April 4, 1968, less than a week after Lyndon Johnson announced he would not be seeking re-election—and exactly one year since King had denounced the President’s Vietnam policy so dramatically—the civil-rights leader was assassinated in Memphis, Tenn.

This Day in Senate History (Birth of Eugene McCarthy, Democratic Primary Insurgent)

Mar. 29, 1916— Eugene McCarthy, a cool intellectual who, to nearly everyone’s surprise—including his own—ignited voter passion in one of the most turbulent years in American political history, was born in Watkins, Minn.

The recipient of the most rigorous education, McCarthy earned his undergraduate degree at St. John’s University, then was briefly a novice in the Benedictine Abbey His friend Senator Philip Hart of Michigan called him "a man out of his proper time, a man meant for the Age of Faith... when men like Thomas More could make their last defense, beyond the civil law, in religious belief." He was the only politician I can think of who could have argued with James Madison, Alexander Hamilton and James Wilson at the Constitutional Convention about Thucydides, Aristotle, Locke and Montesquieu, then run rings around them when the conversation turned to Saints Augustine and Thomas Aquinas.

The friend of poets such as Robert Lowell, someone who could rattle off with little prompting hundreds of lines from William Butler Yeats, McCarthy also wrote verses that constitute some of the most intriguing of the 16 books he published in his lifetime. They fully vent his contrarian spirit, including these lines from the campaign that earned him a place in American political annals:

I am alone

in the land of the aardvarks.

I am walking west

all the aardvarks are going east.

Opposition to the Vietnam War was a cause he came late to, as he voted for the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin resolution that gave Lyndon Johnson virtually a blank check to escalate the conflict. But once he turned against the war, in 1966, he was all in, in a way that nobody else contemplated being. At a time when no other Democratic politician could be persuaded to test the President and his military policy at the polls, McCarthy took on an incumbent whose power derived in no small measure from vindictiveness against anyone who thwarted his will.

McCarthy did not win the 1968 Democratic primary in New Hampshire. But his 42% of the vote dismayed LBJ so much that the President announced he would not seek another term. The title of McCarthy's memoir of the Presidential campaign, The Year of the People, expressed his conviction that the feelings of the electorate, as reflected in the primaries, needed to be respected at the party’s convention. They weren’t—Hubert Humphrey ended up as the Democratic nominee, despite being too late to enter any primaries—but the need to contain the divisions exposed in these contests and at the convention led to major rule changes in both parties. (Eight years later, Ronald Reagan took his own challenge to a sitting President of his own party, Gerald Ford, all the way to the convention.)

The Minnesota Senator, then, posed the most consequential challenge to a sitting President and party bosses since ex-President Theodore Roosevelt ran against hand-picked successor William Howard Taft in the 1912 GOP primaries. Now, we have been living in a landscape transformed in his wake: instead of the steeplechase primary season of his “year of the people,” a seemingly permanent campaign.

This year, we have been witnessing another stormy, likely transformative primary season. But exactly which candidate fills McCarthy’s role, and how, is a matter of some dispute.

For instance, when I typed “Eugene McCarthy” AND Trump into Google, I came up with more hits on McCarthy and …Bernie Sanders. The high-toned style of Sanders does have more personality traits in common with McCarthy, another Senator critical of his party’s incumbent President, than the boorish Donald Trump does. But there, the similarities end.

When all is said and done, in the likelihood that Hillary Clinton beats Sanders, she will probably gain the support, however reluctantly granted, of his base. The same cannot be said of Trumpeters, however, who, if they walk out on the GOP convention in Cleveland, will sit out the general election, as many McCarthy supporters did in 1968.

At another level, there are some intriguing parallels between the McCarthy and Trump campaigns:

*Each candidate did not realistically expect to win their party’s nomination. Stephanie Cegielski, a strategist for the Make America Great Again super PAC, has claimed that Trump did not originally think he would win, but would have simply been satisfied to place second in the delegate count, virtually guaranteeing what he wasn’t granted at the 2012 GOP convention: a prominent speaking role. Similarly, McCarthy had unsuccessfully urged Bobby Kennedy to yield to the entreaties of the “Dump Johnson” movement by running, and even as he announced his candidacy he expressed the hope that RFK would eventually enter the race.

*Each man emerged as a protest candidate. While McCarthy’s insurgency was fueled by anger over Vietnam, Trump’s has occurred with a GOP electorate that has largely upended conservative orthodoxy on free trade, entitlements and immigration.

*Each was transformed by encounters with rivals, becoming far more bitter than expected. The current nastiness between Trump and Ted Cruz is all the more striking considering their bromance in the early season of the primaries. And once Kennedy did jump into the race after New Hampshire, now knowing he could not be accused of splitting the party, McCarthy regarded the move as an act of opportunism that would only divide the anti-war vote.To the end of his days, he spoke more bitterly about his assassinated rival for the antiwar vote than about the President the two were trying to replace, according to a retrospective by NPR's Ken Rudin after McCarthy's death in 2005 . (See my account of their final, fierce faceoff in the winner-take-all California primary.)

*Each rewrote the rules of campaigning by introducing new players into their party’s coalition. Ominously for Hillary Clinton, Trump has done well in crossover primaries that allow Democrats to vote Republican, especially with angry white males. These might be termed “Falling Down” ex-Democrats, after the Michael Douglas movie of that name. In 1968, thousands of young people went “clear for Gene”—trimming their long hair and appearing presenting—in stumping door to door for the candidate.

*The tensions of the campaigns found explosive release in violence. Although neither McCarthy nor Kennedy encouraged this, it seemed a constant specter hanging over the campaigns. We are already seeing something of a repetition of that today. Fights have been breaking out at Trump appearances, with his own campaign manager arrested for interfering with a female reporter. Trump has warned darkly of “riots” if he is denied the Republican nomination, and his expressed willingness to allow delegates to carry weapons at the convention not only creates a security nightmare, but also a threat to democratic procedures.

*In both campaigns, candidates’ wives were collateral damage from the combustible energies unleashed by the campaigns. The current fracas involving Heidi Cruz and Melania Trump might be more public, but McCarthy’s family suffered as well. Abigail McCarthy—every bit as intellectually formidable as her husband, and an ardent backer of what appeared initially to be a quixotic campaign—ended up being hospitalized three times while her husband was on the hustings—and, within a year of the campaign’s end, the two had separated as a result of Eugene’s affair with a journalist.

Stylistically, of course, McCarthy can be considered the antithesis of Trump: far more intellectual, less willing to pander shamelessly.

And, although it’s been said that Trump has hurled “insults” at opponents, he is really only peddling puny epithets that any eight-year-old can toss in a schoolyard. For a real insult, one that could have come from the 19^th-century golden age of American political invective, consider McCarthy's elegant jibe at George Romney, a prospective GOP world-beater forced from the race because of his gaffe that he had been “brainwashed" by the military on a trip to Vietnam. In the case of Romney, widely regarded as an intellectual lightweight, McCarthy observed that “a light rinse would have been sufficient." Similar remarks to Capitol Hill colleagues over the years led them to nickname him "The Needler."

At best unconventional, at worst merely quirky, McCarthy could exasperate observers by his unexpected advances into and retreats from the American political thickets. (Garry Wills: “Eugene McCarthy spent a good deal of his time trying to prove that he was too good for politics. What use was that? Most of us are too good for politics; but we do not make a career of demonstrating it.”) Nowadays, though, most people would die to be represented by someone who doesn’t stick slavishly to an ideology or party line but is interested in something more than politics.