Schiff sees Howard Baker as a noble, bipartisan impeachment hero. In reality, he was just another attack dog for Nixon. Here’s why Democrats need to get their history right.
By MAX HOLLAND
Representative Adam Schiff posed a rhetorical question the other week that grated on the sensibility of anyone who remembers well the Watergate scandal.
“Where is Howard Baker?” Schiff asked plaintively.
Schiff was evoking the late Republican senator from Tennessee, who died in 2014, in a transparent plea to Republicans’ better selves. Ostensibly, Baker, the ranking minority member on the Senate’s Watergate Committee, put aside partisanship to join Democrats in a search for the truth. The proof lies in Baker’s very first question to John Dean, President Richard Nixon’s former White House counsel and the desk officer for the Watergate cover-up. On June 28, 1973, Baker famously asked Dean, “What did the president know and when did he know it?”
Yet what many recall as an incisive, if not noble, question about the behavior of a president from Baker’s same political party was anything but. Rather, it was a shrewd and calculated attempt to stem the rising tide against Nixon. Nor was it even Baker’s first assault against getting at the truth of Watergate, and it would not prove to be his most cynical.
It is true that Baker’s behavior during the Senate hearings does not resemble in the slightest Republicans’ comportment so far. At every good opportunity, which is to say constantly, Baker, oozing border-state charm without being too obsequious, flattered Sam Ervin, the folksy, 76-year-old Dixiecrat from North Carolina who chaired the committee. “It has been a great privilege for me to learn from you and to go forward in this unpleasantness,” typified the remarks Baker directed at Ervin.
But here’s the thing: Baker was a highly sophisticated, even Machiavellian, partisan. His genuine role was one of collusion with the White House; followed by an attempt at a firebreak that failed; and finally, in desperation, an embrace of conspiracy-mongering.
Much of what we know about Baker’s true role comes from three books: a memoir by Fred Thompson, the Watergate committee’s minority counsel (At That Point in Time, 1975); a memoir by Sam Dash, the panel’s majority counsel (Chief Counsel, 1976); and a comprehensive history based on primary documents by the late dean of Watergate historians, Professor Stanley I. Kutler (The Wars of Watergate, 1990). In addition to these books, a fine-grained picture of Baker’s behind-the-scenes behavior has emerged as more of the tapes surreptitiously recorded during Nixon’s presidency have been released and deciphered.
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