Words from Watergate

By Stefan Kanfer

Wilson: How do you know that, Mr. Chairman?

Ervin: Because I can understand the English language. It is my mother tongue.

Yes, but Lawyer John Wilson's clients, John Ehrlichman and H.R. Haldeman, are also children of that mother tongue. And so are Caulfield and Dean, Odle and Porter, Mitchell and Magruder, and virtually every other Watergate witness. Those witnesses are a peculiar group of siblings, obedient to every authority except that of their parent language.

Even with the admission of tapes, no one will ever master the entire vocabulary or thought processes of the Nixon Administration. But tantalizing glimpses are possible through the aperture of the Ervin hearings. By now, of course, the Nixonian cadre has turned a few phrases to bromides, notably the sci-fi sounds: "At that point in time," and, "In that time frame." Still, these cliches are excellent indicators of the Administration's unwritten laws of language: 1) never use a word when a sentence will do; 2) obscure, don't clarify; 3) Humpty Dumpty was right when he said to Alice: "When I use a word . . . it means just what I choose it to mean."

Most of the Watergate witnesses prefer not to answer with a simple yes or no. The vagueness shown last week by H.R. Haldeman has been the motto of the month: "I am not sure whether I was or not. I may very well have been." Other witnesses felt that truth was illusory; facts could only be construed "in their context." The quibbling over nuances would do credit to Henry James--as when Ehrlichman vainly tried to distinguish between "literal" and "actual."

Perhaps because Haldeman has been characterized as a former adman, he avoided any run-it-up-the-flagpole chatter. Still, he introduced some collector's items: "Zero-defect system," for perfection; "containment" for the withholding of information. Throughout the hearings, where precision would help, a file of worn metaphors and similes appears. Usually the phrases smack of the military or sports--two arenas notable for their threadbare lexicons. Porter thought of himself as "a team player," Dean as a soldier who had "earned my stripes." Ehrlichman considered himself proficient at "downfield blocking." J. Edgar Hoover was "a loyal trooper." Mitchell football-coached, "When the going gets tough, the tough get going"; and everybody worried about the chief "lowering the boom."

Responsibility was obviously diffused; in the New Nixon years, power no longer seems to emanate from persons but from real estate. The President rarely appears in testimony. The word comes from "the Oval Office." When Caulfield carried the fragile promise of Executive clemency, said McCord, he spoke of "the very highest levels of the White House"--perhaps the first time that favors were to be dispensed by architecture.

Euphemisms are to the tongue what novocain is to the gums. In the hearings, criminality is given scores of numbing disguises. For "intelligence-gathering operations" read "breaking and entering," for "plumbers" read "burglars," for "stroking" read "cheap flattery," for "puffing" read "expensive flattery," for "White House horrors" read "Government-sponsored crimes." The roster seems endless: "dirty tricks," "laundered money," "telephone anomalies"--all perform the same function: the separation of words from truth.

Sometimes the resonances are poignant: McCord's use of the familiar "game plan" or young Odle's attempt to "make a couple of things perfectly clear." Occasionally they are mystifying, as in the characterization of CBS Newsman Daniel Schorr as "a real media enemy"--as opposed, perhaps, to an unreal media enemy. Often, however, they are terrifying be cause they illuminate just how much ignorance the functionaries had--not only of the law but of themselves.

To the Ervin committee, for example, Ehrlichman released a clandestine tape recording of a conversation he had had with Herbert Kalmbach. It contains a dazzling example of self-deception. Kalmbach is asked to testify that he spoke to Ehrlichman in California, when in fact the conversation took place in Washington. "I wouldn't ask you to lie," says the former presidential aide.

It was this recording that prompted Mary McCarthy to speculate in the London Observer: "[The tape shows Ehrlichman demanding that his friend commit perjury. That is the only way it can be read. Perhaps this is illuminating. If Ehrlichman cannot realize what his taped voice says in plain English, perhaps Nixon cannot either, and so his own battery of tapes may be produced after all."

Whether or not the President can comprehend plain English, it is certain that many on his staff could not or would not. In their obfuscations they were not alone. Long before the Nixon Administration took office, the military had its "pacification" and "fragging." Radical critics led their own assaults on the English language with the substitution of "offing" for killing, the prating of "fascism" every time an obstacle was encountered. At the same time, business gave its own donation at the office, with the computer talk of "inputs," "software" and "print-outs."

Indeed, every sector has its private jargon meant to mystify the outsider, frequently at the cost of undermining the speaker. Yet, all these linguistic abuses have paled beside the rhetorical revelations of Watergate. With that special gift of hindsight so praised by committeemen and witnesses, the spectator can now perceive that the seeds of the affair were planted long ago, in the first days of Nixon's tenure. Once upon a point in time, Administration spokesmen instructed commentators: "Don't judge us by what we say but by what we do." As the world now realizes, verb and act are in the deepest sense inseparable.

In his classic essay, Politics and the English Language, George Orwell spoke for all time: "If thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought." Yet even with his innate pessimism, Orwell offered a solution--a method more applicable today than it was in the holocaust of the '40s. "One ought to recognize," he wrote, "that the present political chaos is connected with the decay of language, and that one can probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end."

It takes no feminist to see how much the nation owes its mother tongue. If that tongue is to speak again with clarity and force, alterations have to begin, not in the spirit of litigation but in its opposite: the defense of values. The Watergate evasions will have to be swept away with those who mouth them. Honest politics will not miraculously reappear. But in the absence of bromides and shibboleths, Americans may once again be able to put in some good words for their Government. And vice versa.

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