Observations on Credit and Surveillance

by @matthewstoller.
by @matthewstoller.
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  • Gerald Ford Was Knee-Deep in the Watergate Cover-up

    First of all, the more I learn about American history from reading original sources, the more I realize that nearly everything I learned about American history in high school and college is self-serving bullshit. American political history is taught as a succession of statesmen engaged in calmly deliberating about the shape of our society, but the reality is that it’s a nest of deeply shrewd politicians, intelligence officials, and financiers bitterly fighting each other over power, with some trying to fight abuses and some trying to stop them. And then the biggest asshole usually writes the history, or at least tries to. For example, J. Edgar Hoover lobbied very hard against commemorating Martin Luther King Jr. with a national holiday, passing out anti-King talking points after King had been assassinated. Hoover wanted to control history. But that’s just one example.

    Second of all, I’m increasingly convinced that the best Congressman of the 20th century, and perhaps one of the greatest American political figures of all time, is Congressman Wright Patman. Patman was a Texas populist elected in 1930, and he had a forty year career writing New Deal and Great Society banking legislation to create a more equitable society. But he was also ruthless and had a killer instinct, qualities he used to stand up for the little guy. For example, his first strong political move was in 1931, when he filed articles of impeachment against Herbert Hoover’s corrupt Treasury Secretary, Andrew Mellon. He asserted that Mellon had used his position to secure oil leases in South America for Mellon’s private company.

    Now, a freshman Congressman doesn’t normally take on the most powerful cabinet member and the richest man in the country, which Mellon was at a time. Or rather, a freshman Congressman doesn’t do that, and win. But Patman had the goods on Mellon, and there was a massive depression on. The political pressure was too great for Hoover to resist. So as a face-saving compromise, Hoover had Mellon resign and appointed him Ambassador to England. That was Patman - giant killer from the get-go.

    Patman then almost immediately took on FDR by aggressively demanding that FDR let World War I veterans in dire straights cash their promised bonus checks. FDR vetoed the bill several times, before being forced to accept it. That was Patman.

    Fast forward forty years. Patman, by now the powerful populist Chairman of the Banking Committee (where he railed against the Fed, banking deregulation, and credit cards), led the first investigation into the Watergate scandal from his perch on the committee. And once again, Patman had the goods (which you can see here), recognizing that the money-laundering to pay the burglars came from Nixon’s “Committee to Re-Elect the President”, or CREEP. Only, Patman had this stuff in 1972, before Nixon was reelected.

    How did it not come out before the election? Well, then Congressman Gerald Ford swung into action to prevent Patman from getting his Banking Committee to vote to subpoena Nixon officials. House Committees can’t just issue subpoena, the majority of members on those committees have to vote to do so. And in a 1982 article (see below), Jack Anderson described the arm twisting and smear campaigns run by Nixon to get Patman’s own Democratic colleagues to turn against him, using Ford as his House point person. Nixon engaged in a classic smear campaign, accusing Patman of colluding with Communists in Greece (when it was actually Nixon who had been using Greek right-wingers to launder CIA money to his own campaign). Nixon also also threatened Democratic members of committee with prosecution for minor campaign finance technicalities.

    Anyway, Ford and Nixon were able to stop Patman’s committee from issuing subpoenas, and thus stopped his investigation, temporarily. But from the moment Patman followed the money, Nixon knew he was cooked. The Speaker of the House Carl Albert said that Nixon lived in “constant torture” after Patman began his probe. Nixon did eventually resign, of course, to be succeeded by Gerald Ford.

    A lot of people are aware that Ford was a confidential informant to J. Edgar Hoover. The FBI helped Ford early in his political career, and the two were lifelong allies. When Ford became a member of the Warren Commission investigating the JFK assassination, Ford told Hoover everything about the commission’s confidential deliberations, which included overseeing FBI dereliction in tracking Lee Harvey Oswald. And of course, everyone knows that Ford pardoned Nixon.

    But I didn’t know that Ford was knee-deep in the Watergate cover-up, and blocked investigations that would have revealed Nixon’s crimes when the voters could have done something about it. So there you go.

    Anyway, that’s my little contribution to the historical record. Or you can read the New York Times obit on Ford, which talks about how he healed the nation, and and had “the uncommon virtue to have presided with a common touch.” For some reason, he didn’t have enough of a common touch to actually be elected by voters in 1976. Odd, that.

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    • January 29, 2014 (6:39 pm)
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