About a year ago, just after the massacre--Cox wouldn't submit, and had to be eliminated; Richardson wouldn't do it, was offed; Ruckelshaus wouldn't, was offed; but then Bork did, and he was on, promoted beyond his wildest aspirations, Attorney General of the United States--Tom Braden said that a bork, then, is someone who will do as he is told.  Forget the term for a moment and consider the category:  will do as he is told.

It surfaced early on in the Nixon crisis, as the Watergate cast made their entrances.  The first article about John Dean in the Minneapolis Tribune (on March 25, 1973, just four days after he reported a "cancer on the presidency," though we didn't know that then) was headed "'Please the Boss' Called Secret of John Dean's Rise to Prominence."  A reader asked why a cabinet member said he quit because his "calves were too fat," and Parade replied on April 1, 1973, by quoting him fully:  "My calves were too fat.  I couldn't click my heels."  A Time article on March 26, 1973, said that Pat Gray, "a former Navy captain who has demonstrated a career-long obsession with loyalty to his superiors," "was selected by Nixon . . .  because of, above all else, that subservience."

Selected for subservience.  The notion that the competition inherent in a hierarchy brings the best men to the top is deeply embedded in the American psyche, though all the president's men should by now have dealt it a death blow.  That is what Garry Wills' Nixon Agonistesis all about--the market, the success ethic, as a failure: "if our system does not choose 'the best man,' its winnowings tend to produce an appropriate man to lead us, one amenable to the merchandizing trends of the moment."  But perhaps, having agreed we do not get the best men, we can be more specific (about what we do get, and do not) and more general as well--if we can find out what the system does select for, we may have found out what all systems select for, and that would be the lesson of Watergate.

On April 29, 1973, an article by James Deakins in the Boston Sunday Herald-Advertiser entitled "White House Mystery Man" said that "Haldeman's loyalty to Nixon is complete, and what is more important, Nixon knows it," and "in the Nixon White House, everyone imitates the man above him."  The system selects--we might as well generalize it at the outset and say systems select--for subservience, and only secondly for talent, and reject (does subservience imply a lack of anything else?) the most talented (superiority in any area is accompanied by a bent for freedom and a rejection of authority, of the old theory or the old guard) . . .  and reject the most talented, who will not surrender.

That would, if it were true, reverse the conventional wisdom:  systems do not select the best men, but reject them.  Assuming it is true makes the massacre perfectly clear:  Cox, Richardson, and Ruckelshaus, exceptional men, eliminated because they wouldn't do as they were told, Bork vaulted into prominence because he would.

The concept also helps us see the Judiciary Committee hearings clearly.  The axis of the conflict was not intellectual or political, but moral, demonstrating, since there were conservatives and liberals, Republicans and Democrats, all arrayed against Nixon, that neither the intellectual nor the political choice is a moral choice.  The moral choice is power or the good, subservience or service and, before the confession made the truth impossible to deny, it separated the loyalists from the rest.

That loyalty made Dick's defenders deny the truth is evident; that it made them deny the good requires proof more detailed and extensive than I've room for here, but I can hint at it.  While Nixon was pretending to be innocent and we were presuming him innocent, his "Let's put Watergate behind us" routine was credible.  In his telling of it, the media and the Congress were prolonging the trauma, Nixon himself anxious to get it over with and get back to "the people's business."  But now that we know he was always guilty, it is necessary once and for all to correct the Nixon version.  Getting it over with did not mean getting off his back but removing him from office.  It is still true that "dragging out Watergate drags down America," but now the roles are reversed.  The media were the most powerful force hastening the drama to its just conclusion, and Nixon was the primary force prolonging it, his every moment in office an abuse of power in the obstruction of justice.  But however enraged we become that he would put us through all those changes at the whim of his image, we could not expect him to do otherwise.  He had defined himself in terms of his position; he was president or he was nothing, so of course he delayed all the way.

We can, however, reasonably expect our elected legislators, making the law and charged with protecting it, to try to keep him from getting away with it.  This the conservatives did and the liberals did.  This the loyalists did not.  When they finally did repudiate him (once it had become a political rather than a moral choice), he went away, and we can only assume that if they had repudiated him earlier, he would have gone away then.  If "a year of Watergate is enough," two were too many, and we can hold the loyalists responsible for the last, most traumatic months of the scandal.  In this case it matters very much who turned out to be right.

The hearings give us a chance to probe Lott Latta Lawyalist's mind, observe his behavior in a crisis, and it is an analysis that cannot begin too soon, because the system did not stop selecting for subservience when Dick departed.  Ford, nothing if not a loyalist, fired Sawhill for dissenting.  Rockefeller is having his problems (chief among them, though beneath the surface, his 1964 disloyalty) but he is V.P. designate over Richardson, the obvious alternative, because of Richardson's more recent disloyalty.  George Bush was mentioned with Rockefeller (not seriously, perhaps, but the very mention a reward) as a potential vice president--for his service to the party, holding it together through Watergate, loyal to Nixon.

The bork is a far from endangered species; they're behind every bush.  Washington D.C., in fact, is one big Borkbush.  Liddy builds an ethic:  "Let those virtues to be practiced, then, be those natural to man:  duty, loyalty, patriotism."  In other words, subservience.