"Off with her head! Off with--"The President predicts prosperity, and presumably apprehensions ease, but could he prove his hope is any more than wishful thinking? Do the men positioned to see where we're headed see more clearly than the rest of us? They say they see the road and can control our course along it, but do they watch the factors which affect our fate? Do they even see them, much less intentionally influence them?"Nonsense!" said Alice, very loudly and decidedly, and the Queen was silent.
Dick predicts prosperity because he has no choice. The mob hasn't much of a memory for scandal when it's warm and well-fed, but even Moses looked bad when the food ran short, and this is no Moses. Only prosperity will save him, and saying it might help to make it so. All of his efforts are cosmetic, and this is just another ruse, an old one. He can use it harmlessly as long as we are not fooled by it.
Harmlessly, but not, of course, effectively, because the future--his and ours, economic and political--is beyond his control, and it is a measure of his distance from reality that he does not realize it. He will be impeached, and the trial will make the Ervin hearings seem in retrospect like child's play. Not a committee this time, uncertain of its jurisdiction, fighting for evidence and empowered to do nothing more, finally, than write a report, but the full Senate (and the House as an audience), the highest court in this or any land, higher by quantum leaps than other courts and with unlimited jurisdiction, sitting in judgment on the President of the United States.
Impeachment is a fundamental fact for the system, and must remain an unknown until it is done. We know it will be traumatic, but cannot foresee its effect. It makes prediction nearly futile, renders existing scenarios inoperative and new ones impossible to construct, so it is crucial that we see the situation clearly, or we give up whatever hope we have of shaping it.
The primary obstacle to a clear view of our dilemma is the insistence on assuming Richard Nixon innocent until he is proven guilty. The assumption of innocence given any defendant is a hallowed legal tradition not lightly criticized, but it is only a legal tradition, and an insistence on holding it as a matter of practical and political reality is dangerous and foolish. It makes the evasion of a stance on a vital moral issue too easy, and it allows Nixon to retain a nearly absolute freedom from restraint which a properly suspicious Congress should by now have at least called into question.
This is not a normal case, nor primarily (or even secondarily) a legal question. Mr. Nixon's guilt or innocence is so far from the heart of the matter that Wilbur Mills has offered to sponsor legislation--which he says would pass easily--guaranteeing the President immunity from prosecution if he will resign.
This leaves us with no overriding reason to assume his innocence, and though we do not have proof of his guilt (at least not positive proof that he is guilty of a St. Clair impeachable offense--and we can expect to have none, since no one so aware of criminal liability would release evidence of his criminality, and he's released all the evidence we have), if you do not have clear-cut evidence in favor of either of two contradictory statements, you accept the one which best explains the facts you do have, and that leaves us with no choice at all. Assuming he is innocent reduces the entire drama to meaninglessness. Only when we assume that he is guilty do his actions make sense, and once we do that many things become perfectly clear.
He will not resign. He will fight to the far end of the last ditch, and he reached the near end of that one with his refusal to release any more evidence; from now on he backs down that ditch. The Judiciary Committee may be delayed, but will not be denied. The truth will out and he will be convicted.
The White House, of course, does not see it that way, insists that its man is innocent and claims to have (in a phrase which has become pathetic) "turned the corner." How, then, did Watergate happen? Nixon claims to have proved that it did not, with a case plucked from a pirate's treasure of evidence, and bids us be pacified because he's found a ring that fits his finger.
Even the ring proved brass, its magic in reverse, turning its wearer visible. The revelation disgusted all but the loyalists (a meaningless support, defined as loyal: would back anyone in power) and still Congress moves cautiously, prolonging the ultimate crisis in the face of overwhelming evidence that this president--at the tension point and in charge of the country--does not function well in crises.
Perhaps congressmen must continue to assume his innocence, since they must render the verdict and any sign of unseemly haste would turn partisan. And maybe the media must remain fairly calm since an appropriate rage would only fuel a paranoia that could easily turn fascist.
St. Clair says the public must ultimately resolve Watergate, though it is difficult to see how, since with the press disposed of by defining it as adversary and the Congress emasculated by a necessity to judge Nixon's guilt or innocence, the public has no voice.
Except in the streets, and it might be time to go there. It is, at any rate, time to say "Nonsense!" very loudly and decidedly. If we cannot silence the Queen we must attempt to still his fools, because until we do we cannot prepare for (or even steel ourselves against) the calamities that--as Nixon grows continually less credible--seem daily more likely.