They Said No to Nixon: Republicans Who Stood up to the President’s Abuses of Power

They Said No to Nixon: Republicans Who Stood up to the President’s Abuses of Power, by Michael Koncewicz (University of California Press, 2018)

Under an administration where presidential abuses of power have become almost too numerous to count, Michael Koncewicz’s book offers a timely and cogent historical perspective. Koncewicz takes us back to the late 60s and early 70s, to tell the story of key Republican members of Richard Nixon’s administration, who resisted the president’s attempts to use the federal government to attack his real and imagined enemies. The analysis not only highlights the contrast to the current period, it uncovers some of the roots of the decades-long institutional decay of Washington politics and government.

“Historians,” Koncewicz remarks, “are trained to have an almost natural inclination to challenge dominant narratives, especially when they are shaped by journalists” (p. 15). Beyond recounting the events, Koncewicz engages two critical debates in the book. The first is the perception and legacy of Nixon’s character and his stature as president. By comparison with his Republican successors, Nixon may now seem like a political moderate and pragmatist, but his ethical corruption and bitter antagonisms remained at the core of his personality. Second, while Nixon remained at some distance from the movement conservatives who would later take over the Republican Party, he was one with them in his authoritarianism and desire to remake the national state.

The book is organized into chapters that cover episodes at the Internal Revenue Service, the Office of Management and Budget, and the Justice Department during the Watergate prosecution. Koncewicz describes how IRS commissioner Johnnie Walters, backed by Treasury secretary George Shultz, refused demands to audit persons on two White House “enemies” lists prepared by counsel John Dean. Shultz also supported the resistance of Kenneth Dam, William Morrill, and Paul O’Neill, assistant directors at the Office of Management and Budget, to Nixon’s desire to cut off Department of Defense funds from MIT and other elite universities in retaliation for not suppressing student protests.  The author devotes two chapters to Elliott Richardson in his multiple cabinet roles and ambivalent status in the administration, including his short tenure as attorney general and eventual resignation rather than fire Watergate special prosecutor Archibald Cox.

A former staff member for the National Archives at the Nixon Presidential Library and Museum, Koncewicz draws from some 3,000 hours of audio tapes that now have been made public – many available online – as well as documents from the Nixon Library, the Watergate Special Prosecution Force files, and other sources. Closely argued and thoroughly documented, They Said No to Nixon makes a convincing argument about how hard Nixon tried to politicize the federal government, and the vision of authoritarian power that he held dear (and hoped to achieve in his second term).  The evidence quoted from the tapes and other sources clearly shows Nixon’s political venality, crude anti-Semitism, and the obsessive culture of loyalty and tough-guy masculinity in his administration that may remind readers of  another more recent president.

Koncewicz does not dwell at length on comparisons to current conditions, other than to emphasize the transformation of the Republican Party. Richardson, Shultz, and others were able to act as they did in part because moderate centrists remained a significant force in the GOP, in a way that no longer exists. Koncewicz acknowledges that the men (they were all men) in this book were themselves deeply conservative, although they upheld principles of nonpartisan civil service and honest administration. Yet, it seems a bit of a stretch to describe them as mere technocrats, or “bland professionals” as Nixon said of Shultz and Housing and Urban Development Secretary George Romney (p. 96), especially in their later careers.

Lest we forget, Shultz left government in 1974 to become executive vice president of the Bechtel Group, served as Ronald Reagan’s Secretary of State, backed both Bushes for president, and was a member of the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq. O’Neill left in 1977 for International Paper (IP), where he was vice president until 1985 and then president until 1987, when he left to take over as CEO of Alcoa. Labor historians will recognize 1987 as the year International Paper forced a strike by and permanently replaced members of the United Paperworkers International Union, and it would be interesting to know more about O’Neill’s actions in IP management in the years leading up to the strike.

That raises the question of the extent to which Republican corporate elites have long made alliance with reactionary populism to achieve electoral power, going back to the postwar Red Scare and Senator Joseph McCarthy. Nixon may have kept arm’s length from McCarthy himself but he clearly shared the latter’s anti-communism and political opportunism, and Nixon himself pursued the “Southern strategy” that cemented the Party of Lincoln to white supremacism. As Koncewicz notes, Watergate actually redeemed Nixon in the eyes of the radical right, who blamed Democrats and the news media for making a martyr of the president (p. 13).

In the events described in the book, however, Shultz, O’Neill, and the others stand in sharp contrast to John Ehrlichman, H. R. Haldeman, Henry Kissinger, Caspar Weinberger, and a cast of lesser but no less notorious figures. Even now, it can be chilling to read the details of conversations discussing vicious plots and blatant violations of the Constitution. Koncewicz presents the evidence effectively and dispassionately, although as a narrative it can start to seem like a complex bureaucratic intrigue, with an endless series of meetings and memoranda. The most dramatic account is of the “Saturday Night Massacre,” and even though the story is well-known there are still surprising (to this reader, anyway) details: for example, both Richardson and deputy attorney general William Ruckelshaus encouraged solicitor general Robert Bork to fire Cox if it came to him, in order to maintain continuity in the Justice Department (pp. 163-164).

It can be stunning as well to consider how far we are now from the conditions of the 1970s. It is difficult to imagine someone like Richardson in the same universe as our current attorney general William Barr, and even Nixon’s behind-the-scenes efforts to get rid of Cox seem restrained next to the constant, open harassment of Robert Mueller’s investigation. Nor is the current White House isolated or divided in its ambitions; rather, it is enabled by Republicans in Congress and a right-wing media complex that thrives on and fuels extremism and polarization. In the midst of multiple crises – biological pandemic, economic recession, and mass protests again racial inequality – it can seem strange to feel nostalgic for the integrity of an earlier era. Michael Koncewicz’ important book reminds us what is at stake and what we need to demand in our government.

Reviewed by Chris Rhomberg, a Professor of Sociology and Urban Studies at Fordham University, in the Bronx. He is the author of The Broken Table: The Detroit Newspaper Strike and the State of American Labor (Russell Sage Foundation, 2012) and No There There: Race, Class and Political Community in Oakland (University of California Press, 2004).