there existed a separate model of justice, which saw those in power escape the full extent of the law at the expense and rage of those over whom they governed. Even before the events of Watergate came to light, and Nixon had been implicated in the biggest political scandal in US history, presidents and other politicians had exploited their powerful positions to conduct hidden operations with regard to foreign and domestic policies. Gould writes that: ‘Both [JFK and LBJ] conducted their administration in a manner that rejected the institutional precedents set under Dwight D. Eisenhower’ 2 , indicating that the notion of presidential authority was changing, not always for the best. Rudalevige identifies this change in attitude as symptomatic of an ‘Imperial Presidency’, which he defines as ‘the absolute power of modern presidents but also their relative power, as altered by the office’s predilection for expansion across the constitutional map’. 3 Rudalevige goes on to cite the example of LBJ’s use of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution as a ‘functional equivalent of a declaration of war’ 4 without the facts of the matter being established or the true extent of the engagement being made clear to Congress, and with the intention of escalating US troop levels in the area. There is further evidence for the undercurrent of deceit that ran through Washington prior to Watergate, with Hitchens citing Nixon’s sabotage of the Paris Peace talks, and the subsequent decision by the Democrats to keep it out of the public eye: ‘It would have created a crisis of public confidence in United States institutions. There are some things the voters can’t be trusted to know’. 5 Public opinion about the Vietnam war also helped to further degrade the waning sense of confidence towards government, as Patterson notes: ‘many Americans… believed that the United States had been not only foolish but also morally wrong to engage in that bloody prolonged conflict’. 6 Indeed, Rudalevige argues that ‘Vietnam and Watergate were tightly linked; the latter, at least in its broadest sense, could not have happened without the former’. 7 Kalb notes that the war’s ‘legacy was left to haunt and bewitch the White House’. 8 The Vietnam War therefore played a large role in establishing a malaise of deceit within government which would engender public outrage. It was under Nixon that these revelations would be exhumed, and public confidence in government would reach its nadir. 2 Lewis L. Gould, The Scouring of the Modern Presidency: John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson (University Press of Kansas, 2009), p. 125. 3 Andrew Rudalevige, The New Imperial Presidency: Renewing Presidential Power after Watergate (The University of Michigan Press, 2006), p. 57. 4 Rudalevige, p. 79. 5 Christopher Hitchens, The Trial of Henry Kissinger (Verso, 2001), p. 10. 6 James Patterson, Restless Giant: The United States from Watergate to Bush vs. Gore (Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 5. 7 Rudalevige, p. 5. 8 Deborah Kalb, Haunting Legacy: Vietnam and the American Presidency from Ford to Obama (Brookings Institution Press, 2011), p. 14.
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