It was 34 years ago yesterday, and, despite its historical significance there was no mention of this anniversary, nor the obvious parallels between what we expect to happen this election year and the “liberation” that Americans of all political stripes felt when Richard Nixon finally called it quits.

 Our new president put it well the next day, when after being sworn in, he proclaimed, memorably, that “our long national nightmare is over.”

 But then he went on, and in the excitement of the moment, we let it pass as he claimed, “Our Constitution works; our great Republic is a government of laws and not of men. Here the people rule.”

I had not started law school yet, though Nixon and Watergate had certainly pushed me in that direction. I took the law boards on the day the House Judiciary Committee voted to impeach Nixon, but I knew, without a legal education, that President Ford was wrong: the Constitution had not worked and that our great republic was no longer a government of laws, but rather one of the most craven of politicians who would try to and usually succeed in getting away with as much as they could. I learned all of this, if I had not surmised it before, during the “long national nightmare” itself.

 The President’s crimes had been laid bare before an astonished nation during the hearings of the Special Select Committee of the Senate chaired by Senator Ervin during the spring and summer of 1973. When its co-chairman famously posed the question before the committee and the nation as “what did the President know and when did he know it,” the committee heard the testimony of the former White House counsel that almost fantastically placed the President of the United States in the middle of a criminal conspiracy to obstruct justice. And what happened? Nothing.

We were told that it was just the former counsel’s word against that of the President of the United States. (I learned years later that if a jury believes that sworn testimony proves beynd a reasonable doubt that someone committed a crime, that will usually be sufficient to convict the defendant, especially in a federal prosecution, and I suspected that was so even then, but it was the President we are talking about, so okay....). We were told that the testimony of the earnest young man who had served as counsel was so dramatic that it could not possibly be true.

This young man said to the President of the United States that there is a cancer on the presidency? Impossible. But then, even more incredibly, the right question was asked of Alexander Butterfield, as obscure a staff member in the White House as there could be, and, sworn to tell the truth, he told the committee that a system to record conversations the President had with others had been in place at the time in question and, low and behold, when at least some of those tapes were finally disclosed, it turned out that the counsel, John Dean, had told the truth and, in fact, had used exactly the “cancer on the presidency” phrase which was said to be so unlikely.

Yet in the meantime, a new Attorney General nominated by the President, was obligated to promise he would appoint a “Special Prosecutor” who, with complete independence, would take charge of the criminal investigation of the crimes which might have been committed by the President and others. Without that promise, he could not be confirmed so he made the promise, was confirmed and then made the appointment.

Then the Special Prosecutor quite naturally decided that any grand jury investigation of this sort would need to hear the tapes we now knew to exist and issued a subpoena for them. The President responded by instructing the Attorney General to direct that the Special Prosecutor withdraw the subpoena or be fired.

The Attorney General, who had promised the independence of the Special Prosecutor as a condition of his own confirmation, refused the President’s instructions, and resigned. The Deputy Attorney General did the same thing.
The next man on the rung, the Solicitor General (a man named Robert Bork, who was later nominated, but rejected, to become a Justice of the Supreme Court) did the deed. Was the President forced to resign then? No.

Was he impeached for trying to prevent a prosecutor from investigating him? No.

A new special prosecutor was appointed instead and, though he was ostensibly less likely to confront the President, he sought to enforce the subpoena. When the case finally got to the Supreme Court, it unanimously rejected a claim of executive privilege (and one that argued that there was but one executive branch, headed by the President, and the Court could not resolve issues between officials within that branch) and sustained the subpoena. (We later learned that the president’s chief of staff responded to the decision by questioning the President’s obligation to adhere to the decision, which, in my later educated opinion, would have amounted to a coup d’état.) Only then, when one of the tapes released included a conversation in which the President of the United States instructed that the head of the C.I.A. should lie to the F.B.I. to stop its investigation of the original break-in, was the President told he had to resign. And finally he did.

It is as hard to describe that process as the Constitution “working” since, but for the fortuitous taping system and the courage of some judges, lawyers, a few newspaper reporters, and some honest members of the administration, even the long national nightmare would not have succeeded in removing this crook from the presidency. And, sad to say, the new President’s giddy but understandable claim that the Constitution had “worked” was part of an inaugural speech that contained at least one utter falsehood, although only recently established as such. As discussed, in part, here, his claim in "a little straight talk among friends [that though] you have not chosen me by secret ballot, neither have I gained office by any secret promises: was, sadly, not true.

But what the hell: he buttered his own toast, he took the White House palace guard out of their ridiculous uniforms and, most importantly, Nixon was gone. But after the dust had settled and the new president replaced the chief of staff who had considered overthrowing the government in support of his corrupt President, the next man to take that job was Donald Rumsfeld, and, later, his deputy chief of staff took over for him. His name was Richard Cheney.

 And the lesson those two men took from Nixon’s demise was that the “imperial presidency” or “unitary executive” as they call it now, needed to be strengthened the next time they could, so as to prevent what had just occurred: that the people or the Congress might be forced into action to prevent the government from being subsumed into being a vehicle for the president to act as a monarch, and to have the absolute power they demanded.

They have succeeded.

Just as the proof was all around us in the summer of 1973, we have all known that the government has become the vehicle for the president for so many years. Cabinet officers are now described as having been “owned” by the president, rather than servants of the United States (“Secretary Powell, President Bush’s first Secretary of State”) and the “unitary executive” widely accepted. Those who have balked and left have disclosed perfidies that are simply shrugged off.

Paul O’Neill tells us of a president disengaged in economic matters, and focused on starting a war with Iraq from the moment he takes office, and nothing happens. The national security adviser discusses with the President a warning that Osama bin Laden is determined to attack the United States and, instead of doing anything about it, the President begins his re-election campaign fewer than nine months after taking office by doing a photo-op in Florida, while the predicted attack is taking place, and the result is a more popular president than imaginable.

And then this week, we find out that in order to further his plan to attack Iraq, ‘his’ White House created a phony letter which suggested that Iraq had something to do with these attacks which, of course, he knew to have been committed by bin Laden, an enemy of our enemy in Iraq. And what becomes of this treason? Nothing.

The Constitution did not work in 1973 and 1974 and its quaint division of authority between states and a federal government and between branches of that federal government, are all but moribund. Still we persevere and we try: a testament to the many in this country who will not accept the consequences of General Haig’s coup of 1974.