Conservatives Without Conscience (29 page)

Preface

1.
Georgie Anne Geyer, “Impolite Society: How ideological zeal and social distance silenced a disputatious capital,”
American Conservative
(January 16, 2006), 25.

2.
Eric Nordon, “Interview of G. Gordon Liddy,”
Playboy
(October 1980) from
Playboy
CD collection of interviews.

3.
See Watergate Special Prosecution Force, January 9, 1974, Memorandum to Bill Merrill from Phil Bakes, Subject: “Charles Colson—Synopsis of Areas where Colson may be Perjuring Himself or Have Some Involvement.” This memorandum sets forth nine areas of interest to the prosecutors, which I have summarized: (1) Colson’s testimony that he had no knowledge regarding the recruitment of homosexuals to support McGovern, and the fact that his top aide Bill Rhatican contradicts this. (2) Colson’s claim that he never instructed Jack Caulfield to firebomb the Brookings Institution; rather, he claimed that Ehrlichman instructed him to have Caulfield obtain the Brookings documents. Ehrlichman denied giving Colson such an instruction. Caulfield and this author testified that not only did Colson give such instructions, but I had to fly to California to turn them off. (3) Colson denied discussing phony State Department cables with Howard Hunt, or having knowledge that Hunt had prepared such, that would have shown an involvement of the Kennedy administration in the assassination of South Vietnam leader Diem. Hunt contracted Colson’s denials, as did secretaries.(4) Colson’s own memorandum, obtained by the prosecutors, contradicted his testimony about whether Dan Ellsberg should be criminally prosecuted.(5) Evidence of Colson’s role in the break-in of the office of Dr. Fielding, Ellsberg’s psychiatrist, for which Colson would later be indicted. (6) Colson’s contradictory testimony about when he learned of the Ellsberg break-in. (7) Colson’s possible destruction of evidence, since he walked out of the White House with his files, returning only some of them after he left, with the omissions being conspicuous. The prosecutors believed “Colson may
have sanitized his files.” (8) Evidence that Colson orchestrated a physical assault on Dan Ellsberg and others when they were demonstrating in May 1972. (9) The suspicion of the prosecutors that Colson had suborned perjury of several people.

4.
This $14 million figure was given in open court by an attorney for one of the insurance companies involved. We believe it is a conservative number, and, in fact, the actual amount may have exceeded $18 million. Not long after we filed our lawsuit, and had defeated the early motions to get the case dismissed, St. Martin’s general counsel, David Kaye, boasted to a group of attorneys at a bar association meeting that they were going to employ a scorched-earth spending policy—endless motions, depositions, etc.—that would make us regret having filed the suit, and force us to drop it. It is a very small world, for Kaye’s remarks got back to me within days of his making them. While we could not outspend an insurance company, we simply planned accordingly, husbanding and marshaling our resources, and making our own preemptive moves. One day I will write about this lawsuit, for I believe public figures—who find defamation law stacked against them—should hold others responsible for false and harmful statements.

5.
My Los Angeles attorneys (Doug Larson and John Garrick of Iverson, Yoakum, Papiano & Hatch) had cleared their calendars for a trial against Liddy back in Washington, and, in fact, we were packing up files and making plans to return to Washington, when the federal judge handling the case, U.S. District Court Judge Emmett Sullivan, forced a settlement with Liddy. That was fine by me, because it was not really fair to our lawyers, given that Liddy’s assets were hidden in his wife’s name; it would take years to unwind his affairs, and we wished his wife, Frances, no ill. More important, my Washington-based attorney, David Dorsen, was very interested in keeping Liddy busy for a few more years. David told me that he had offered to represent Maxie Wells (whose telephone had been wiretapped in 1972) in a lawsuit against Liddy, for Liddy was also defaming her based on Phillip Bailley’s fantasies, and she was ready to file an action. I told David we would assist in any way we could. But Liddy got lucky when Maxie sued him. The case landed with a federal judge in Maryland, where Liddy resided, who could not have been friendlier to him. The judge threw the case out, claiming Ms. Wells was a public figure, and that she could not meet the high standard of proof required. Dorsen got the case reversed by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, but the reversal meant that when the case went to trial, he had less than a friendly judge. Indeed, the judge refused to permit Mo or me to testify, yet permitted Liddy’s lawyers to put on a parade of witnesses who claimed they all believed
Silent Coup.
With a hostile trial judge, Maxie did not have a chance. Yet the undertaking was quite satisfying for me—someone had to pay some hefty legal bills (maybe seven
figures) for Liddy’s defense, because St. Martin’s had cut him off with our settlement. I suspect that Liddy’s wife and financial keeper was not terribly satisfied with this outcome; shortly thereafter, I was told, they separated.

6.
For example, in 1994 New York’s Republican senator, Alfonse D’Amato, said of Whitewater, “This is worse than Watergate” (
Dallas News,
November 7, 1996); in 1996 House Speaker Newt Gingrich, even though he engaged in similar practices, called Clinton’s White House fund-raising activities “worse than the Watergate scandal” (ABC News,
World News Tonight,
March 6, 1997); and according to Monica Crowley, Richard Nixon said Whitewater was “worse” because “in Watergate, we didn’t have profiteering, and we didn’t have a body” (referring to the suicide of Vince Foster). Monica Crowley,
Nixon in Winter
(New York: Random House, 1998), 312.

7.
Peter Baker,
The Breach: Inside the Impeachment and Trail of William Jefferson Clinton
(New York: Scribner, 2000), 19.

8.
Watergate: Chronology of a Crisis
(Washington: Congressional Quarterly, 1975), 170.

9.
See
Goldwater v. Ginsberg,
414 F.2d 324 (1969).

10.
Notes, telephone conversation with Senator Barry M. Goldwater, November 1994.

11.
Correspondence with Senator Goldwater about our project is among his papers at the Arizona Historical Foundation.

12.
Robert G. Vaughan, “Transparency—The Mechanisms: Open Government and Accountability,”
Issues of Democracy
(electronic journal of the U.S. Department of State, vol. 5, no. 2, August 2000) at http://usinfo.state.gov/journals/itdhr/0800/ijde/vaughn.htm.

Chapter One: How Conservatives Think

1.
Ramesh Ponnuru, “Getting to the bottom of this ‘neo’ nonsense: Before you talk about conservatives, know what you’re doing,”
National Review
(June 16, 2003).

2.
Russell Kirk,
The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Eliot
(Washington: Regnery, 2001), 8.

3.
George H. Nash,
The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America
(Wilmington, DE: Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 1998), xiii–xv.

4.
Jonah Goldberg, “What Is ‘Conservative’? We’re Comfortable with Contradiction,”
National Review
Online (May 11, 2005) at http://nationalreview.com/goldberg/goldberg200505111449.asp.

5.
Michael K. Deaver (ed.),
Why I Am a Reagan Conservative
(New York: Morrow, 2005), xv.

6.
Frank S. Meyer,
In Defense of Freedom and Related Essays
(Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1996), 155.

7.
Kirk,
The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Eliot,
89.

8.
Franklin Foer, “Ur-Conservative,”
Washington Monthly
(October 2004), 54.

9.
Anonymous, “Santorum: ‘Conservatism Is Common Sense,’”
Human Events
(August 1, 2005), 3.

10.
A less than exhaustive search of these conservative publications revealed a number of references to conservatism as an ideology. For example, the December 11, 1995,
National Review
discusses “making conservatism the ideology of Western revival”; a December 31, 1999,
Human Events
refers to Reagan’s “ideological conservatism”; the August/September 2003
American Spectator
states “America is moving rapidly toward conservatism as its prevailing ideology and the Republican Party as its governing party”; a December 20, 2004, issue of the
Weekly Standard
refers to “the elasticity of conservative ideology”; and the January 13, 2003,
American Conservative
asked how conservatism turned into an ideology (the cold war, they respond). Suffice it to say there is no rigid conservative ideology on whether or not conservatism is an ideology.

11.
Nash,
The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America,
198.

12.
James Burnham,
Congress and the American Tradition
(New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2003), 128–29. (This is a republication of the 1959 original edition.)

13.
George F. Will, “Why Didn’t He Ask Congress?”
Washington Post
(December 20, 2005), A-31

14.
George F. Will, “National Review Hits 40,”
National Review
(December 11, 1995), 102.

15.
Burnham,
Congress and the American Tradition,
298.

16.
Ibid., 128–29.

17.
Ibid., 122.

18.
There are a number of works (probably three dozen or more) in which this story is told. These include Dan T. Carter,
From George Wallace to Newt Gingrich: Race in the Conservative Counterrevolution: 1963–1994
(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1996); John B. Judis,
The Paradox of American Democracy: Elites, Special Interests, and the Betrayal of Public Trust
(New York: Pantheon Books, 2000); and Stephan Lesher,
George Wallace: American Populist
(Reading, PA: Addison-Wesley Publishing, 1994).

19.
Among the better historical accounts that have been written are (listed chronologically): Godfrey Hodgson,
The World Turned Right Side Up: A History of the Conservative Ascendancy in America
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1996); Lee Edwards,
The Conservative Revolution: The Movement That Remade America
(New York: Free Press, 1999); Jonathan M. Schoenwald,
A Time for Choosing: The Rise of Modern American Conservatism
(New
York: Oxford University Press, 2001); and Gregory L. Schneider (ed.),
Conservatism in America Since 1930: A Reader
(New York: New York University Press, 2003).

20.
Lewis L. Gould,
Grand Old Party: A History of the Republicans
(New York: Random House, 2003), 488.

21.
See Joseph Scotchie,
The Paleoconservatives: New Voices of the Old Right
(New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1999).

22.
William Rusher, “Toward a History of the Conservative Movement,”
Journal of Policy History,
vol. 14, no. 3 (2002). See also Kirk,
The Conservative Mind,
476.

23.
Historian Jennifer Burns has called this “a rare work of history that remains the authoritative treatment of its subject nearly thirty years after publication.” Rarer still, she explained, is the fact that it appeared in prepublication form as a forty-seven-page insert in the
National Review
(December 5, 1975). Ms. Burns noted that this “work exerts a deep influence on our common understanding of conservatism in America.” While George Nash’s politics are difficult to discern from his work, Ms. Burns reports that he is a conservative. See Jennifer Burns, “In Retrospect: George Nash’s
The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945
,”
Reviews in American History,
vol. 32 (2004), 447–62. (I have relied heavily on Nash’s work because of the near universal esteem with which it is held by conservatives among all the factions.)

24.
Nash,
The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America,
xv.

25.
Because conservatives do not view the Declaration of Independence as based on liberalism, I had to scratch my head for an authority that was clearly neither liberal nor conservative yet stated the obvious fact of its classic liberalism. The Wikipedia online encyclopedia has its weaknesses (for example, its entry for yours truly has clearly been distorted by my detractors, but I have never bothered to correct it to see if the entry is self-correcting), yet I thought this a good source to make my point, for clearly conservatives have been quite active in getting their point of view into the Wikipedia. Of the Declaration, and the Constitution, Wikipedia states that “the United States Constitution and the United States Declaration of Independence are both documents that embody many principles of classic liberalism.” See “classic liberalism” at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_liberalism.