Impeachment

FEW MEN HAVE been so obviously unqualified to be president of the United States as Richard Nixon. Perhaps in the past men of lesser talent have occupied the post, but they held it in times when the demands of the job were not so great. Among presidents, Nixon holds the unhappy distinction of being the most disastrously incompetent. He should either leave or be removed from office.

The terror bombing of Indochina is in itself sufficient to make toppling the Nixon regime morally imperative. The continued bombing of the Khmer Rouge right up until the Congressionally imposed August 15 deadline betrayed any attempt of Nixonian "statesmanship" to rationalize its murders, and conclusively demonstrated the vicious insanity long buried in Nixon's psychology.

Other crimes are exclusively domestic. Some of these are clearly grounds for indictment. Watergate has been the Nixon administration's most glaring departure from acceptable American political practice, and it has done more to arouse public animosity than any other. The continuing efforts to cover up the administration's continually growing involvement in the Watergate and the president's continued squirming to avoid disclosing his own role in the incident have disgusted most people, even if it has not moved them to call for impeachment.

Watergate is America's Dreyfus Affair, a symptom of moral decay. During the Ervin hearings, Nixon aide after Nixon aide demonstrated to all the world the distance that has developed between the cause of the president of the United States and the cause of justice.

NIXON IS RESPONSIBLE for his underlings transgressions. Whoever the immediate agent of the crime--a pilot over Vietnam or a cabinet-level crony conniving with ITT--Nixon bears a direct and immediate responsibility for the acts. By continually cloaking himself in the paraphernalia of the presidency, by systematically confusing his personal and political needs with the needs and interests of that impersonal entity, "the office of the president," Nixon has cultivated an atmosphere in which his agents would inevitably confuse their master's instructions with the law.

Nixon has attempted to become not just the president but also the presidency. He is certainly unwilling to admit publicly that the interests of Richard M. Nixon are different from the interests of the presidency, and that the interests of the presidency may be quite different from the interests of the country as a whole. This over developed identification of self with office is quite alien from any American political tradition. It is also a phenomenon which demands Nixon's impeachment. The Yamashita precedent--set when a Japanese general was hanged (by American justice) for crimes his troops committed--is inapplicable for anything but political crimes. Yet political crimes are what the American Congress faces when it confronts the Watergate affair and other comparable incidents in Nixon's presidency. As Mitchell has pointed out, he did not expect to personally profit by anything he did. As Jeb Stuart Magruder has claimed, he did what he did because he believed it to be justified by political necessity. The political nature of these crimes must not be ignored.

Similarly, the political nature of impeachment must be recognised. "High crimes and misdemeanors" has no precise equivalent among the crimes that Federal courts try, yet the term is the constitutional basis for impeachment. Clearly impeachment is not meant to provide a definitive resolution of policy differences between Congress and the other branches. It is equally clear that it can be used to deal with severe and repeated violations of public morality--even if those violations are not mentioned in the Federal code.

To seek a political remedy for a political crime is hardly unreasonable. Indeed, it would appear to be the only course harmonious with justice. The Judicial arena is the obvious and appropriate one to decide questions of executive privilege, but it is not the place, and its standards are not the proper guidelines, to investigate the country's chief executive. As long as the Department of Justice is constitutionally subordinated to the president, the problems inherent in that department prosecuting its superior in Federal courts should be obvious.

IS THE REMOVAL of a president such a terrible thing? Perhaps, but the alternative--permitting Nixon to finish his term as a crippled executive--must be seen as setting an equally terrible president. The president's administration is now a matter of public record, even without the vaunted Watergate tapes. Failure to relieve Nixon is tantamount to deciding that a president may, without fear of retribution, lead an Administration of liars, cheats and criminals. It is tantamount to deciding that an American government can pursue insanely vicious policies without losing its legitimacy. If Nixon is permitted to remain in office what vices will ever constitute grounds for removing a president?