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 Presidential History (JFK’s East German Mistress-Spy)

August 21, 1963—Justice Department officials quietly but hastily deported Ellen Rometsch, a 27-year-old brunette from East Germany, in an attempt to prevent disclosure of possibly the most explosive secret of President John F. Kennedy: his sexual involvement with an alleged Communist spy.

I learned about this scandal in two of the more substantial, less gossip-ridden histories of the Kennedy years: Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 1954-63, by Taylor Branch, and The Crisis Years: Kennedy and Khrushchev, 1960-1963, by Michael Beschloss. Branch and Beschloss write vividly but carefully from oral history memoirs and primary sources, with a view of the President that is sober and balanced. In other words, they have produced neither hagiographies nor anti-Camelot screeds, earning credibility in their accounts of this episode.

Who was Ellen Rometsch? Start with the photo accompanying this blog. She looks like a somewhat more exotic version of Elizabeth Taylor, doesn’t she? Or, perhaps, one of the President’s other dangerous liaisons, Judith Campbell Exner.

Rometsch’s sexual loyalties were as shifting as her political ones. As a teenager she had joined the Communist Party Youth Group. In 1955, she flew to West Germany. With one bad marriage already behind her, she soon wed Rolf Rometsch, a sergeant in the West German air force. His assignment to his country’s military mission in Washington brought the couple to the U.S.—and, eventually, Ellen to the attention of the American President.

Even a five-year-old son did not slow her down, as she soon became involved in the swirling excitement of the Quorum Club, located in a three-room suite at the Carroll Arms Hotel, just across the street from the new Senate Office Building. This private social club was run by Bobby Baker, a former aide to Lyndon Johnson now coming under suspicion for influence peddling. The terms that were beginning to be applied to her included “party girl,” “courtesan,” “hostess,” and worse.

The Quorum Club’s central location made it convenient—in some cases, too readily so—for the Capitol Hill power players and fixers swirling about. "My wife is fond of the steak and sandwiches," claimed Congressman Bill Ayres.

The affair between Rometsch and JFK appears to have started in 1961 and continued for some time. Its days were numbered once FBI agents got wind of it and interrogated the young woman. 

Her prior East German background might have been enough to convince director J. Edgar Hoover that she was a spy for East Germany’s head, Walter Ulbricht. His leak to this effect, to journalist Courtney Evans, convinced Robert Kennedy that she had to be deported.

JFK’s affairs had the frequent thrill of danger, whether with a twenty-year-old intern in the White House press office (Marion Fahnestock), a Hollywood superstar (Marilyn Monroe), an artist who brought him LSD from Timothy Leary (Mary Pinchot Meyer), and a Mafia moll (Judith Campbell Exner). 

Yet, judging from his actions around this time--including unusually high interest in the Profumo sex scandal convulsing the United Kingdom at this time--none of them had the sheer political TNT potential of the Rometsch affair.

The problem was that it showed no signs of going away—particularly because of 1) ongoing investigations into the affairs of Baker, and 2) Hoover's in anything that might give him blackmail material over the President. 

(As if he didn't already have enough: not only knowledge of Rometsch and Exner, but, dating back to the early 1940s, of Inga Arvad, a Danish woman the FBI suspected of being a Nazi spy--and knew was the paramour of dashing young Lt. John F. Kennedy). 

In late October, reporter Clark Mollenhoff used a leak from Hoover to charge that “some prominent new frontiersmen from the executive level of government” were involved with the “party girl.”

Rushing once again to protect his brother’s interest, Bobby Kennedy pursued a two-track course: 1) dispatch an aide to Germany to convince the now-separated, now-annoyed Ellen from going public, and 2) persuade Hoover to steer Congress from investigating. 

In the second case, Hoover actually sat down privately with Senate leaders Mike Mansfield and Everett Dirksen to convince them that any exposure of this affair would ruin the reputations of senators from both sides of the aisle.

You'd think he'd learn from his scrape, but JFK couldn't resist a gibe at the institution in which he sat before becoming President. "Boy, the dirt he (Hoover) has on those senators," he remarked. "You wouldn't believe it."