"Political Poison" Started With Nixon, Not Clinton
Peter Baker has an interesting story on the front page of the "Week In Review" section of today's New York Times about the impact of the Clinton impeachment, which occurred 10 years ago this week, on the atmosphere in Washington. The money quote:
Indeed, except for brief interludes, Washington in the last decade has been governed by a climate of anger and animosity, a modern-day tribalism pitting faction against faction that some trace to the days of the impeachment.
This seems to me to be correct but also misleading. As someone who not only worked on Capital Hill during Watergate but who worked for a member of the House Judiciary Committee when it was considering legislation to impeach Richard Nixon, there is little doubt in my mind that the "anger and animosity" Baker says has typified Washington since 1998 actually began at least 30 years earlier. That was when Republicans vowed to get even with Democrats for hounding Nixon out of office.
This is not supposition. Immediately after Nixon left, I attended a number of meetings where the discussion inevitably turned toward how the GOP was going to get even with the Democrats. I also remember a number of folks saying towards the end of the Clinton years that what the Republicans were doing to him was payback for what was done to Nixon. One of the people who said this, and who has confirmed it for me since, had been a very prominent member of the Republican House leadership.
Yes, you can make the case that few GOP representatives and senators who were in office during Watergate were still around during the Clinton administration and the folks who went after Clinton were not part of the Nixon legacy. But even if they weren't still elected officials, many were still party elders and big fundraisers, and had a great deal of influence in what the GOP was thinking and doing in the late 1990s. Thirty years after it occured, the Nixon experience continued to be a major influence in the GOP's thinking.
The 1970s were the start of my experience in Washington so it may be natural that I date the start of poisonous politics then. My guess is that we can actually trace the roots of the anger and animosity back even further, probably in some respects all the way to colonial days. It's hard to believe, for example, that duels between political opponents actually settled matters once and for all and that retribution by friends, family, and allies wasn't sought.
Goes back further
Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr....
joe mccarthy
Hatred for FDR
"Political Poison"
I agree with Stan completely. I also started my Capitol Hill career in the middle of Watergate, in March, 1974. There's no doubt in my mind that a previously complacent Republican minority vowed revenge, despite Nixon's seeming political death wish. How else can you explain hounding President Bill Clinton until he agreed to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate Monica Lewinsky? Did the lying around that rise to an impeachable offense? The Constitution is very specific in defining "treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors" as impeachable offenses. In 1868, another political vendetta launched by Radical Republicans upset with too lenient a reconstruction after the Civil War came within one vote in the Senate of convicting President Andrew Johnson. That was just as sorry an episode as we experienced in 1998, when the Republican House impeached President Bill Clinton. He wasn't convicted by the Senate either. Our government works best when political leaders rise above petty considerations and do what's best for the country. Sometimes they wallow too long looking for political retribution to the detriment of the country.
I disagree
I think the lesson of Watergate had to do with criminalizing disagreements over policy. Both parties learned that they could disrupt the other party's strategy by making issues of extraneous actions by members of the other party. Democrats started this with Watergate, which included not only Nixon's actions but those of many lower level staff people. Republicans began the payback as early as the carter Administration when OMB Director Bert Lance was hounded from office. There were also efforts aimed at WH COS Hamilton Jordan and others. The Democrats responded during the Reagan years with various scandals culminating in the Iran-Contra investigation. Hence the Clinton-Lewinsky affair was simply an evolution of a well-established technique used by both parties.