Where Have You Gone Howard Baker?

By the time Howard Baker died in 2014 at the ripe-old age of 88, he had served as a Senator from Tennessee for nearly 20 years, as Senate Majority Leader, and as Chief of Staff for President Ronald Reagan. A distinguished career.

But the moment that launched him into the national spotlight came in the summer of 1973 when he was a member of the Senate Select Committee formed to investigate Richard Nixon's Watergate scandal. Baker managed to distill the entire investigation into a single question when he asked: "What did the President know, and when did he know it?"

Baker was a Republican. He didn't want to bring down Richard Nixon's presidency. He had hoped the answer to his question would create some distance between the president himself and Watergate. But he also recognized that Watergate was a serious, republic-threatening breach of the law and the Constitution, and he knew that his question needed an answer.

We are faced now with another republic-threatening set of revelations. A hostile foreign government interfered in substantial and significant ways in our electoral process in order to tip the scales in favor of the Republican presidential candidate and, it appears, in favor of a number of Republican Congressional candidates. As far as we know, nothing like this has ever happened before in the history of the nation.

For his part, Donald Trump has responded in a perfectly Nixonian way, denouncing the messenger while ignoring the message. Rather than acknowledge the existential threat the Russian meddling poses to the integrity of our election, Trump has ordered us all to move on.

Trump seems not to understand the first, most basic principle of democracy: the process is more important than the outcome. The ends do not justify the means, because once you cease to honor and protect the democratic process you are well on your way to losing it altogether.

Nixon didn't understand any of this either. And the Watergate investigations laid bare the fact that he didn't much care. The answer to Howard Baker's question, for those who have forgotten, was that Nixon knew everything about Watergate, and he knew about it from the very beginning.

There is no doubt that the Russian meddling demands an honest and thorough Congressional inquiry. There are a host of important questions that need to be answered, but none more important than: what did the Trump campaign know about this, and when did they know it? There are already troubling hints that the campaign did indeed know something, and months before the election.

Adding to this intrigue, on the same day that the CIA findings about Russian interference became public, the president-elect nominated a man with extensive Russian business dealings and a personal relationship with Russian autocrat Vladimir Putin to be Secretary of State. A lot of thick smoke has gathered - we need to know whether there is a fire here.

Whether we get answers to those questions, of course, depends on the willingness of Congressional Republicans to conduct them. And while thus far they haven't dismissed the idea, they haven't given it the full-throated endorsement we should expect given the seriousness of the allegations and the evidence.

Even if we do get an investigation, I wonder whether a latter-day Howard Baker is likely to emerge. Someone who, despite his party loyalties, understood that he owed a larger obligation to the nation. Those kind of Republicans, politicians who see a difference between party and patriotism, are rare these days. To stand up to Republican partisan loyalty now requires a certain level of courage and today's GOP is not filled with profiles in that.

Baker wasn't the only Republican back in 1973 and 1974 who felt that way in the face of Nixon's high crimes and misdemeanors. When the House Judiciary Committee prepared three articles of impeachment against Nixon, seven Republicans voted in favor of at least one of them, and six voted for two.

Of course, even back then a few Republicans drew a different lesson from Watergate. One of those was Nixon aide Dick Cheney, who was furious that Nixon's authority would be challenged at all, never mind the president's abject abuses of power. He never let go of that partisan anger, and the rest of us have paid the price for it since.

Howard Baker, where have you gone?

Steven Conn is the W. E. Smith Professor of History at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio.