IMPEACHMENT | July 27 – Judiciary Committee Passes First Article

This day in 1974, the Judiciary Committee of the House of Representatives passed the first of five proposed articles of impeachment of President Richard Nixon. Three were passed. The chronology was as follows:

• 1972 - June – Five men connected with Richard Nixon’s reelection committee, the Committee to Re-elect the President (CREEP), were caught breaking into the Democratic National Committee HQ in the Watergate Hotel in Washington D.C. Investigation revealed illegal activities authorized by senior Nixon staff.
• 1973 - May – The Senate started an investigation into the Watergate scandal. Nixon denied involvement. (In November 1973, he said, “I am not a crook.”) 
• 1974 - April – The Senate requested tapes. Nixon released some, but withheld others, claiming executive privilege.
• July 24 – The Supreme Court rejected executive privilege and ordered Nixon to turn over the remaining tapes. 
• July 27 – Nixon having refused, the Judiciary Committee passed the first of five proposed articles of impeachment against Nixon for obstruction of justice. This article was forwarded to the full House of Representatives, as were two others. This started the process of impeachment, but Nixon was not formally impeached, because:
• August 5 – Nixon released the remaining tapes.
• August 8 – Nixon avoided a full vote on impeachment by the House and then a Senate trial by becoming the first president to resign.

FREE SPEECH | Dec. 3–800 Arrested at UC Berkeley

Mario Savio is arrested, Dec. 7, 1964.

This day in 1964, about 800 student demonstrators were arrested on the campus of the University of California at Berkeley.

The anniversary was marked today by the Writer's Almanac founded by Garrison Keillor, citing a 2014 retrospective NPR article.

At the time, I was employed as an economist by the Federal Reserve Board and was also a Ph.D. student in economics. I wrote an article for a student newspaper about the Berkeley incidents that was sympathetic to the students. But I was assured by several of my elders that the demonstration was surely organized by Communist sympathizers. That was the Cold War state of mind in Washington, D.C. in the mid-1960s.

From today's perspective, the students can be considered to have won their battle on campus, and surely on the specific civil rights issues for which they fought. But they also set in motion a reaction that we still live with...

The activist Berkeley students had spent their summer in the South on drives to enroll more black voters. When they returned to the campus, they set up information tables to tell their fellow students about civil rights issues, collect donations and sign up volunteers.

Berkeley's administrators were distraught about the controversy and shut down the tables. They were within their rights, since the University of California had a system-wide ban on political speeches and fundraising because it was supported by tax dollars. Campus police arrested a graduate student (Jack Weinberg) on October 1 for refusing to show his ID. A spontaneous crowd formed and trapped the campus police car for 32 hours. People climbed on the car to give speeches, including Mario Savio, one of the leaders of what came to be called the Free Speech Movement.

On December 2, an estimated 1,500 students peacefully occupied the main Berkeley administration building, Sproul Hall. Joan Baez sang songs. Some graduate students taught ad hoc classes. Savio proclaimed:

There's a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart that you can't take part, you can't even passively take part, and you've got to put your bodies upon the gears, and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus and you've got to make it stop.

Gov. Pat Brown was under pressure to do something about the lawlessness. At 2 am on Dec. 3 he ordered the building cordoned off. The police, frustrated by days of having their hands tied behind their backs, began vigorously arresting the protestors. Journalists reported seeing them drag some protestors down the stone steps by their feet, with the students' heads banging on every step.

The negative press coverage of the arrests meant that the Free Speechers won hands-down on campus. By the spring, university officials reversed themselves and allowed wider political discussion on campus. Sproul Plaza now hosts informational tables that open up political discussion on the left and the right. The steps of Sproul Hall are now called the Mario Savio Steps, rentable for a speech or a rally.

However, folks, that is not the end of the story. Gov. Brown (father of Jerry Brown, California's present governor since 2011) had defeated an assault on his incumbency by Richard Nixon in 1962 with a surprising 5 percent margin. Nixon had been opposed by a John Birch Society candidate in the GOP primary, and that weakened him. Nixon famously said after his defeat, in his "last press conference":

You won't have Nixon to kick around anymore.

But the Berkeley Free Speech movement and the Civil Rights movement in general can be said to have created so much change that champions from the right were bound to have emerged, and several came to prominence within a year.

Barry Goldwater made an unsuccessful run for President in 1964. One of his supporters was a young Hillary Rodham. Another was...

William Buckley, Jr., founder of National Review in 1955, had already spotted widespread unrest in the ranks of working-class Catholics, upset by changes in the Catholic liturgy (he himself went out of his way to continue attending a Latin Mass). In his well-researched and influential 1965 run for Mayor of New York, unsuccessful like Goldwater's, Buckley predicted correctly that working-class Irish Americans could be peeled away from the Democratic Party as a reaction against too much change. The social conservatives joined in a marriage de convenance with libertarians (who oppose market and social constraints).

Ronald Reagan rode the law-and-order issue into the governorship of California in the 1966 election,

Richard Nixon into the White House in 1968, and in due course Reagan and George H. W. Bush into the White House in 1980...

TRANSITIONS | Lessons for Obama

Nov. 27, 2008–I was dipping back into a book by Carl M. Brauer, Presidential Transitions: Eisenhower through Reagan (Oxford University Press, 1986) and found much information that might be useful to the Obama transition. The last chapter, "Conclusions: Historical Patterns and Lessons," concentrates all the book's earlier stories and comparisons into a dense guide for any transition staff that has time to look up from the resumes they are reviewing.

Here's one rule Brauer gleans from all of the transitions his book covers:

Relations between outgoing and incoming Presidential administrations have usually been civil... but rarely productive or educational (p. 258).

A common experience is for outgoing staff to prepare themselves for a debriefing, never to be asked for it. I know that in New York City many a briefing book for the next administration has been unopened.

Instead of gleaning as much information as possible from the outgoing administration at every level, incoming Presidents

frequently overreact to a perceived flaw in their predecessor. In reaction to Truman, Eisenhower was too anti-political. In reaction to Eisenhower, Kennedy was too anti-organizational. In reaction to Nixon, Carter was too "anti-imperial." In reaction to Carter, Reagan was too ideological.

Nixon did not overreact in this way, but he did not foresee, says Brauer, how Johnson's war in Vietnam would become his war. This illustrates a general point that

new Presidents and those around them, buoyed by their recent electoral victory, tend to believe that bad things cannot happen to them. But bad things do happen. Some Presidents are reelected, but all Presidents leave office with significant amounts of scar tissue... [A]ll Presidents have made decisions at the start of their administrations that they later regarded as serious mistakes or should have so regarded (p. 258).

Brauer believes that Presidents need to damp down "excessive optimism" and too much faith in the potential from "organizational reform".

Obama Fundraising a First, Says Election Commission Chairman

Thanks to Congressional Quarterly for noting today ("Obama’s Operation May Become the Model of Fundraising") the comments of former Federal Election Commission Chairman Bradley A. Smith in a Washington Post op-ed piece a week before the election.

Brad Smith was commenting on the fact that the campaigns of both Barack Obama and John McCain had exceeded $800 million in combined spending two weeks before Election Day. The CQ story emphasizes that "It’s not just the amount of money that was spent but also the way it was raised — much of it online, in small chunks and, in Obama’s case, completely independent of the public financing system for the first time in the post-Watergate era."

Smith, in his op-ed, says: "I’ve studied all the great fundraisers of the past, from William McKinley to Richard Nixon to George W. Bush. American politics has never seen anything remotely like this before.”

Smith is overtly partisan - he was a Republican appointee. The online discussion of Obama's citizen "juggernaut" is all the more interesting. He thinks the system has worked, even though his candidate was losing. Here are some excerpts.

Arlington, Va.: Just to counter some of the paranoid posts -- I'm one of those small donors that you fear so much. In <> early September I became so disgusted with the McCain/Palin campaign that I went to Obama's Web site and made a donation. I since have made two additional donations. All three were responses to something that was said by the McCain/Palin campaign. In all I've given less than $100. I was born in the U.S. and have lived here all my life, and despite various Republican's claims I'm not a communist or anti-American. I'm just a regular person who has every right to vote and to support a candidate with my time and money.

Bradley A. Smith: I wish more people thought like you -- not your support for Obama ;-), but regarding your motives for supporting Obama and your willingness to back up your beliefs.

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Reston, Va.: McCain keeps saying that Obama is trying to buy the election. Isn't it more like the citizens are? They're the ones contributing the money.

Bradley A. Smith: Right on!

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Wilmington, N.C.: "Former FEC chairman." Given your obvious political leanings, I must say I find that very disturbing. Is that a partisan political post? Should it be?

Bradley A. Smith: The FEC has six commissioners, with no more than three from any one political party. Four votes are needed for most action. So one party can't dictate outcomes. I found that the Commission worked pretty well. But you've really hit the nail on the head -- how can you maintain over time a truly unbiased political police? That's why I generally would deregulate the system, or at least start in that direction. We need separation of campaigns and state, you might say.

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Maryland: The other day a friend and I were having a friendly argument. He was saying there should be more rules to limit how much a campaign can spend because $200 million is outrageous. I said "$200 million is rock-bottom cheap for a good presidential administration!" It's just a fifth of a billion dollars -- compare that to the cost of the Iraq war. Just saying.

Bradley A. Smith: You are right. Political spending needs to be kept in perspective. Americans will spend about $12 billion on potato chips this cycle. Coca-Cola will spend more on advertising this year than will be spent by all the candidates who have run for president combined. Auto makers will spend more than twice as much this year advertising cars as all political spending for federal office. It cost money to communicate, whether you are talking about cars, cola or politicians.