9 Aftermath
There is only one nation in the world which is capable of true leadership
among the community of nations, and that is the United States of
America.
Jimmy Carter
Nixon was deeply conscious of the centrality of the presidency, not just as
a functioning part of the American political system but as the symbolic
heart of that system and of the nation itself. He banked on the extraordi-
nary respect normally accorded the oYce to see him through the ‘‘hor-
rors’’ that began to unfold after April 1973 – the revelations of lies,
cover-ups, abuses of power, illegalities, corruption and sheer mean-
spiritedness. But Nixon’s actions and deceits, like those of Johnson before
him, had squandered much of that inherent respect. They had fallen
victim of the fact that presidential prestige and the expectations placed on
presidents are inadequately matched by presidential power, and succum-
bed to the omnipresent temptation to circumvent or overcome the legal
and constitutional obstacles to action – by deceit, by assertion of novel
prerogatives and by illegalities. Faced with diYcult and often contradic-
tory political imperatives, they put at hazard the oYce’s moral capital and
set in motion events that fractured not just trust in the presidency, but an
essential article of American self-faith.
The legacy they left succeeding presidents was, therefore, a complex
and unhappy one. As well as all the common diYculties of government
and economy that administrations must manage, Nixon’s successors had
to cope with the problem of national healing. This involved three issues.
The Wrst was the issue of trust in government in general, and of the
president in particular, and how to restore it; the second was the issue of
declining American power and the problem of pride associated with it;
and the third, inevitably intertwined with the second, was the loss of
innocence and the restoration of American virtue. I will deal with each in
turn before examining the diVerent solutions oVered by Carter and

government and its agencies. But the Wrst priority must be to get things
right at the top. This was why the nation breathed a sigh of relief when
Vice-President Gerald Ford took oYce after Nixon, having narrowly
avoided impeachment, went into premature retirement. Ford was truly
an accidental president, a man of no previous ambition and in no way
outstanding either politically or intellectually, but universally agreed to be
fundamentally decent and honest. After a brace of presidents who were
too-clever-by-half these were precisely the qualities the nation seemed to
need. And Ford’s presidency did bring to presidential politics a state of
dull normalcy far removed from the excitement, controversy and scandal
that had marked it since 1961, for which Americans had cause to be
grateful. Yet he himself is best remembered for a single act which
… This is the central subject of Bob Woodward’s Shadow: Five Presidents and the Legacy of
Watergate (New York, Simon & Schuster, 1999).
219Aftermath
destroyed his chance of being elected in his own right – his rapid granting
of a pardon to Richard Nixon for any crimes he may have committed
while president.
2
Ford had begun his presidency with the words ‘‘our long
national nightmare is over,’’ and the pardon, he said, was granted ‘‘to heal
the wounds throughout the United States.’’ Public reaction gave the lie to
both these statements. There were howls of outrage and accusations of a
deal having been struck (a presidency in return for a pardon). Ford seems
in fact to have been motivated by a stubborn sense of loyalty to a man he
admired,
3
but the sudden act smacked of favor, of top politicians looking
after their own, particularly since so many of Nixon’s underlings were left
to face the ordeal of trial and imprisonment.

À See Woodward, Shadow, pp. 3–38.
à Cited in John Dumbrell, The Carter Presidency: A Re-evaluation (Manchester, Manchester
University Press, 1995), p. 22.
220 Moral capital and the American presidency
their trust. If he ever lied, he said, they could take him out of the White
House.
5
Understandable as this might have been with the specter of
Watergate hovering still so near and given Carter’s genuine conviction
of his own born-again purity, it was nevertheless a dangerous tactic.
Promises of exceptional probity raise either exaggerated hopes or exag-
gerated cynicism, but they inevitably raise levels of scrutiny while lower-
ing tolerance of discovered slips. Carter’s campaign promises gave him an
early lead in the polls, but this evaporated at the end because of accusa-
tions of temporizing on major issues, a worrying ‘‘fuzziness’’ on policy.
This form of deceit is a political necessity in democratic politics where
candidates, to gain power, must appeal across many constituencies while
oVending none, but it is bound to be more harshly judged as a reXection
of individual character where a candidate has promised exceptional hon-
esty and frankness. In the White House, Carter’s moral reputation largely
recovered (he was the nearest thing to a saint the White House ever had,
according to one of his speech-writers),
6
though his loyal defense of his
friend Bert Lance, director of the OYce of Budget and Management,
accused of Wnancial improprieties back in Georgia, caused a severe drop
in his approval rating in 1977. The dramatic decline in Carter’s standing,
however, had causes other than perceived venality or deceit, as we shall
see later.
Subsequent presidents suVered much more than Carter from a gap

sal (which is what makes the statement ‘‘Trust me, I’m a politician’’ a
joke in itself). But in America this ordinary problem had acquired
broader ramiWcations because of the pivotal role of the presidency and the
part that presidents had played in undermining the American myth. At
issue was not just what people thought of the moral quality of their leaders
but what they thought of America itself and of themselves as Americans.
Each new presidential incumbent had to negotiate provisional public
mistrust rather then enjoy provisional trust while not only tackling the
outstanding domestic issues of the day but at the same time bearing the
responsibility of solving the deeper problem of American confusion over
national self-faith and self-conWdence. The latter, I have said, was a
question of the decline of American power and the damage to pride
associated with it, inseparable in America from the question of American
virtue and its fate.
The problem of power and virtue
There was more to the decline of American power than failure in Viet-
nam, which was merely where hubris got its most corruscating comeup-
pance. Important too was the loss of absolute economic dominance that
was a natural result of America’s own policies (sound for both economic
and Cold War political reasons) of helping rebuild, via American credit
and trade policies, the shattered wartime economies of future rivals. In
the 1970s the problems of the almighty dollar – that monetary symbol and
conveyor of American supremacy – were a consequence of West German
and Japanese development exacerbated by inXationary spending on Viet-
nam. The dollar’s decline, along with the oil-price shocks induced by
OPEC (the oil-producers’ cartel), signaled the end of the post-war boom
and of the liberal consensus based on it (funding social reform and the
expectations of labor through economic growth). It was the start of a huge
international economic readjustment toward a complex multipolar world
in which the United States would be, at most, only primus inter pares.

(The puzzled defensiveness this evoked in Americans was nicely caught in
the Billy Joel song that chanted a list of the world’s trouble-spots followed
by the refrain: ‘‘We didn’t start the Wre / Though we didn’t light it, we’ve
been trying to Wght it.’’) Had it not been for Vietnam (and the subsequent
tragedy of Cambodia/Kampuchea in which American actions played an
invidious causal role), this weight of critique and hostility might have
been more easily borne. The trouble with Vietnam was that, there,
America (or at least a signiWcant part of it) had condemned itself, found
itself guilty of real sin. Vietnam catalyzed America’s self-doubt and rad-
icalized its self-critique, making it more vulnerably receptive to external
criticism than it otherwise might have been. It also left a residue of vocal
domestic dissidents of the likes of Noam Chomsky, always willing to
believe the worst about America and American intentions.
Such consciousness of sin may evoke, either in individual or collective
life, one of two responses: honest soul-searching and acceptance of
guilt accompanied by a resolve to reform; or simple denial.
8
The Wrst
requires humility and a determination to Wnd honest grounds for the
223Aftermath