Mcjoan has an excellent piece on the front page about how the big post-Watergate reform agenda petered out. Via digby, she cites an excerpt from a book by Kathryn S. Olmsted, Challenging the Secret Government: The Post-Watergate Investigations of the CIA and FBI in which the author explains how revelations by reporters such as Sy Hersh and Daniel Schorr about CIA and FBI crimes like domestic spying and assassination plots led to the formation of the Church Committee which was tasked to investigate the intelligence community. These investigations uncovered severe crimes and abuses by the government, yet few if any of the committee's reforms were ever implemented and no one of stature was held to account.
Here is the excerpt digby posted. It is a must read.
When Richard Nixon resigned in August 1974, the United States concluded one of the most traumatic chapters in its history. During the Watergate scandal, Americans had been shocked by the crimes of the Nixon presidency. Investigations by the press and Congress had exposed previously unimaginable levels of corruption and conspiracy in the executive branch. The public's faith in government had been shaken; indeed, the entire "system" had been tested. Now, with Nixon's resignation, two years of agonizing revelations finally seemed to be over. The system had worked.
Yet only four months later, New York Times reporter Seymour Hersh disclosed that the government's crimes went beyond Watergate. After months of persistent digging, Hersh had unearthed a new case of the imperial presidency's abuse of secrecy and power: a "massive" domestic spying program by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). According to Hersh, the CIA had violated its charter and broken the law by launching a spying program of Orwellian dimensions against American dissidents during the Vietnam War. The Times called it "son of Watergate."
These revelations produced a dramatic response from the newly energized post-Watergate Congress and press. Both houses of Congress mounted extensive, year-long investigations of the intelligence community. These highly publicized inquiries, headed by experienced investigators Senator Frank Church and Congressman Otis Pike, produced shocking accusations of murder plots and poison caches, of FBI corruption and CIA incompetence. In addition to the congressional inquiries, the press, seemingly at the height of its power after Watergate, launched investigations of its own. The New York Times continued to crusade against CIA abuses; the Washington Post exposed abuses and illegalities committed by the FBI; and CBS's Daniel Schorr shocked the nation by revealing that there might be "literal" skeletons in the CIA closet as a result of its assassination plots.
In this charged atmosphere, editorial writers, columnists, political scientists, historians, and even former officials of the CIA weighed in with various suggestions for reforming an agency that many agreed had become a ''monster.'' Several policymakers, including presidential candidates Fred Harris and Morris Udall, called for massive restructuring or abolition of the CIA. Media and political pundits suggested banning CIA covert operations; transferring most CIA functions to the Pentagon or the State Department; or, at the very least, devising a new, strict charter for all members of the intelligence community.
Few barriers seemed to stand in the way of such reforms. The liberal, post-Watergate Congress faced an appointed president who did not appear to have the strength to resist this "tidal shift in attitude," as Senator Church called it. Change seemed so likely in early 1975 that a writer for The Nation declared "the heyday of the National Security State', to be over, at least temporarily.
But a year and a half later, when the Pike and Church committees finally finished their work, the passion for reform had cooled. The House overwhelmingly rejected the work of the Pike committee and voted to suppress its final report. It even refused to set up a standing intelligence committee. The Senate dealt more favorably with the Church committee, but it too came close to rejecting all of the committee's recommendations. Only last-minute parliamentary maneuvering enabled Church to salvage one reform, the creation of a new standing committee on intelligence. The proposed charter for the intelligence community, though its various components continued to be hotly debated for several years, never came to pass.
The investigations failed to promote the careers of those who had inspired and led them. Daniel Schorr, the CBS reporter who had advanced the CIA story at several important points and eventually had become part of the story himself, was investigated by Congress, threatened with jail, and fired by CBS for his role in leaking the suppressed Pike report. Seymour Hersh's exposes were dismissed by his peers as "overwritten, over-played, under-researched and underproven." Otis Pike, despite the many accomplishments of his committee, found his name linked with congressional sensationalism, leaks, and poor administration. Frank Church's role in the investigation failed to boost his presidential campaign, forced him to delay his entry into the race, and, he thought, might have cost him the vice presidency.
The targets of the investigation had the last laugh on the investigators. "When all is said and done, what did it achieve?" asked Richard Helms, the former director of the CIA who was at the heart of many of the scandals unearthed by Congress and the media. "Where is the legislation, the great piece of legislation, that was going to come out of the Church committee hearings ? I haven't seen it." Hersh, the reporter who prompted the inquiries, was also unimpressed by the investigators' accomplishments. "They generated a lot of new information, but ultimately they didn't come up with much," he said.
I first heard the term "secret government" from Bill Moyers in his 1980s documentary for PBS, The Secret Government: The Constitution in Crisis. You can watch it online here.
Moyers is referring to the secretive national security state that arose after WWII, presumably to fight the Cold War. His expose, however, deals with the Iran Contra scandal which came to light only a decade after Watergate.
And just as the Church committee failed to bring the secret government under check, so did the Iran Contra hearings. Here, as the Moyers piece clearly shows, the secret government, far from being subjugated after the post-Watergate investigations, merely went further underground and became more arrogant.
Speaking at the Iran Contra hearings, senator Daniel Inouye, referred to it this way:
"Shadowy government with its own navy, its own air force , its own fundraising mechanism, and the ability to pursue its own ideas of the national interest, free from all checks and balances, and free from the law itself."
Constitutional crisis indeed. The national security state, aspiring to get out of the shackles of congressional oversight and appropriations authority, privatized.
And just as with Watergate and the post-Watergate investigations, the big fish of Iran Contra took a walk. The biggest fish, George H W Bush, was promoted. He had denied being in the loop on the Iran Contra operation. But, as David Corn points out:
...according to documents later released, he had attended high-level meetings on the Iran initiative and had participated in the Administration's quid pro quo with Honduras. It was only after Bush I was bounced out of office that his personal diary notes--long sought by investigators--became available. His entry for November 5, 1986 (two days after the Iran initiative was revealed by a Lebanese weekly), reads, "I'm one of the few people that know fully the details.... This is one operation that has been held very, very tight, and I hope it will not leak."
Now, as the criminal presidency of George W Bush comes to a close, we are yet again looking at the prospect of big fish taking walks. And once again, the very corrupt secret government will go on, unimpeded.
The consequence of all this, of course, is that as long as these guys keep getting off, they will keep reemerging - albeit, sometimes in different forms.
Only recently we've been hearing utterances about a possible Jeb Bush return to the national stage. It appears he was instructed to back off, for now. But there can be little doubt that he will make a play at some point. He's a young man and the Washington press has a very short memory. He could have the presidency within 12 years.
And all the presidents men, from Elliot Abrams to Karl Rove, will not be forced to retire to the shadows in shame. They are regrouping, scheming on a return to power, and getting talk show gigs. Just like Gordon Liddy. It would appear in modern Washington, one's reputation cannot be tarred enough to prevent them from making a comeback.
Imagine what a different world we would live in if in any one of these opportunities to reign in the secretive national security state had been seized upon. Iran Contra was almost certainly a George H W Bush operation. If he had gone to jail, it is very unlikely Jeb Bush would have been governor of Florida, and George W Bush would have become president.
We can never know for sure. As I said, Washington rewards criminality. But one thing is for certain: If we don't hold this president and his cronies to account, once and for all, it is just a matter of time till we see the reincarnation of George W Bush. Perhaps he'll come back as his brother, or someone we can't even think of. But it will be him. Right down to his churchwarden's pipe.