Abstract
Through July and August of 1974, during Watergate, major political constituencies in the United States withdrew support from a popularly elected president and his inner governing circle. Voters who had voted for President Nixon considered their vote to have been fraudulently claimed and felt betrayed by the candidate for whom they had voted. Other citizens and leaders who had not voted for Nixon no longer felt a commitment to respect the results of the election. The withdrawal of support and consent from the ruling circle of political leaders resulted in a virtual paralysis of governmental operations.
Reprinted from Social Research, vol. 42, no. 4 (Winter 1975).
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Notes
For a cogent statement of this position, see Hans J. Morgenthau, “Decline of Democratic Government,” The New Republic, CLXXI (Nov. 9, 1974), 13–18.
For a contemporary version of this statement, see John R. Silber, “The Thicket of Law and the Marsh of Conscience,” Harvard Magazine, November, 1974, pp. 14–18.
Jonathan Schell’s series of six essays in The New Yorker, June–July 1975, presents a thorough recapitulation of the illegal and extralegal underpinnings of Nixon’s presidency. By his reassessment of almost all of Nixon’s private presidential actions after the fact of the exposures, Schell presents in combination the secret and official sides of government. His simultaneous juxtaposition of rhetoric and reality within the Nixon administration reveals the two faces of the rule of law. A similar analysis of the mass-media industry has not yet appeared, although David Halberstam has laid out the contours for such an analysis in “Press and Prejudice: How Our Last Three Presidents Got the Newsmen They Deserved,” Esquire, LXXXI (April 1974), 109–114.
At least some members of the journalism profession were chastened by the power of the press in penetrating government operations during the Watergate affair. See Katharine Graham. “The Press after Watergate: Getting Down to New Business,” New York, Nov. 4, 1974, pp. 69–72, where the point is made that Congress allowed the press to do its investigative work and that the journalists overly enjoyed it because they felt that Nixon had deceived and tricked them. This author argues that the press damaged itself by overstepping its role, but offers no clear definition of what its role is or should be.
See Arthur J. Vidich and Joseph Bensman, Small Town in Mass Society, rev. ed. (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1968), chap. 9, for a description and analysis of this form of government.
These are the remnants of the old middle classes described in C. Wright Mills, White Collar (New York: Oxford University Press, 1951).
Vidich and Bensman, Small Town in Mass Society; and Joseph Bensman and Arthur J. Vidich, The New American Society (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1971).
For futher clarification of the distinction between these two groups, see our debate with Ivan Light in “Recent Developments in American Society: Reply to Ivan Light,” Theory and Society, II (1975), 125–133.
See Vidich and Bensman, Small Town in Mass Society, chap. 12, “A Theory of the American Community,” pp. 317–347.
This system places heavy emphasis on the politics of means. Nixon and his inner group never thought of themselves as having committed crimes. They operated on the principle of a higher morality in the cause of saving the country from its enemies. Gordon Liddy, one of the Watergate conspirators, stated this position most fully in “Gordon Liddy: A Patriot Speaks,” Harpers, CCIL (October 1974), 45–51, where he invokes the revolutionary spirit and the lawlessness of the founding fathers to justify his moral duty to protect American values.
Robert Lillienfeld, “Systems Theory as an Ideology,” p. 637–660, and Peter Ludz, “Marxism and Systems Theory,” p. 661–674 in Social Research, vol. 42, no. 4, Winter, 1975. See also Peter C. Ludz, The Changing Party Elite in East Germany (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1972), especially Part IV, for a comprehensive discussion of East European managerial ideologies.
Milovan Djilas, The New Class (New York: Praeger, 1957).
See Theodore H. White, Breach of Faith: The Fall of Richard Nixon (New York: Atheneum, 1975) for documentation of the role of Alexander Haig. White claims that Haig managed the country during the weeks preceding Nixon’s resignation.
See The New York Times, Aug. 26, 1974, p. 1, for James M. Naughton’s story “The Change in Presidents: Plans Began Months Ago,” where the activities of the group headed by Philip W. Buchen are described in detail.
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© 1995 Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited
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Vidich, A.J. (1995). The Politics of the Middle Class in a National Crisis: The Case of Watergate. In: Vidich, A.J. (eds) The New Middle Classes. Main Trends of the Modern World. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-23771-5_17
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