Leonard Garment

Talk of presidential impeachment or resignation is in the air for the first time in 25 years. So tae set up a chat with Leonard Garment, the jazz saxophonist turned lawyer who served as Richard Nixon’s counsel in 1973-74, as the walls came tumbling down.

The Brooklyn-born Garment’s recent memoir, Crazy Rhythm, riffs on such disparate topics as jazz music (Garment played with both Woody Herman and Alan Greenspan), psychoanalysis, and, of course, the thirty-seventh President. A liberal Democrat in the 1960s, Garment befriended former Vice President Richard Nixon when he arrived as the new guy at Garment’s New York law firm. When Nixon returned to the White House as President, Garment served him in capacities both formal and informal: as White House Counsel and sounding board.

Leonard Garment, 74, and still dispensing advice, was interviewed at his Washington law office by tae associate editors Bill Kauffman and John Meroney.

TAE: Nixon once told you, "You’re never going to make it in politics, Len. You just don’t know how to lie." Was Nixon as good a liar as Clinton is?

GARMENT: No. All politicians do a lot of lying. Everybody lies a little bit; cutting verbal corners is part of civilization. But Nixon had trouble lying. Falsification worked against his face—he would sweat, his upper lip would be covered with perspiration, and he was always a very bad physical witness to his own words.

Imagine Nixon perspiring and hemming and hawing and saying the question is what "is" means. I mean, by the end of the day he would be gone. Clinton’s case is really an extraordinary tour de force, or tour de farce, depending upon your ideological point of view.

TAE: Did you eventually become a competent liar?

GARMENT: No, and I’m happy I haven’t become a competent liar. But I don’t just get up there piously, pompously blurting out the truth all the time. There is a time to speak out, a time for silence, a time for gentle semantic evasion because the world does not have square corners. I’m sure I’ve said some things that could be classified as lies, but I think they were justified by the situation.

TAE: Was there ever a hint of sexual scandal involving Nixon?

GARMENT: Well, there were some hints but they were ludicrous. There was some theory that before he became President and when he was travelling abroad in Asia he had a lady friend. Now, I happen to know the situation because a senior partner with whom he was travelling, Bob Guthrie, was master of ceremonies at some social gatherings in Tokyo, and there were a lot of invited women—geishas, what have you—and Nixon fled the premises. He just disappeared.

And I remember Bob Guthrie saying, "I don’t know what’s the matter with that boy, it’s just a little fun."

TAE: Was Nixon ever in analysis?

GARMENT: There’s some evidence that he did have a therapist: Dr. Arnold Hutschnecker, whom he saw from time to time during the years when he was not in the Presidency. He had a common characteristic of people who have immense anxieties and stress: a lot of visceral trouble.

There were pseudo-ulcers and pseudo-colon problems: the internal and very common chaos that’s wrought by stress, by aggressive feelings that have to be mastered and controlled. It was before antidepressants and the whole colony of medications that alleviated these conditions. It might have been quite different if he’d had access to antidepressants. That wouldn’t have changed his basic psychological constitution but might have helped him with these internal struggles.

TAE: Would you call him paranoid?

GARMENT: Everybody has paranoid tendencies. Did he have more than the average amount of suspicions? Probably by the time he was President. He was a politician who had stimulated and solicited anger and reciprocated the anger, and that kind of cycle produces suspicions.

I don’t think you’re so paranoid if you do have enemies.

TAE: Nixon said that had he continued on in his career as a lawyer, he would have been intellectually dead in two years and physically dead in four years. Can you imagine him having any career other than politician?

GARMENT: He wouldn’t have died. He had a very strong urge to live, and he would have been a very successful lawyer. On those two occasions when he argued in the Supreme Court he was the master of his brief. Abe Fortas said he would have been one of the finest advocates in the country.

If he hadn’t become President, he would have had a very intensely political life. He might have become Secretary of State.

TAE: Do you think Nixon would be fascinated with the Clinton scandal?

GARMENT: Oh my God. He’d say they should have gotten that guy a pair of pants with buttons instead of a zipper. He’d say [launching into a Nixon imitation], "I don’t care what he was doing with her but just bear in mind: What do you do if you get caught? You’re in real trouble. Kennedy was screwing all over the White House—in the Secretary’s office, in the Oval Office, in the swimming pool, in the bedroom, in hotel rooms, wherever. Dozens. Never got caught. The press didn’t bother him. He had that charm. It was a different time. But now, the guy was really doing a high-wire act—and the wire was greased. Give them enough to get you, they’ll get you. But this time the shoe—or the cigar—is on the other foot."

TAE: The Clintonites seem to be designing censure as a fallback position. Was there ever any discussion of censure in the Nixon Administration?

GARMENT: No. I don’t recall any. Censure never made any sense to me. Coming up with solutions that are not written in the Constitution is a bad idea. Everybody gets off the hook. When I hear "We’ll have censure" I think, well, why not get him outside and hit him with rubber paddles? Haze him.

TAE: Some of the Clinton subalterns apparently have taken to trying to expose extramarital dalliances of their Republican opponents.

GARMENT: Dalliance. I love that word. It’s the age of euphemism. The pictures are bad but the words are really quite pleasant.

TAE: How much of this was there in the Nixon White House during Watergate—going after Democratic opponents when your back was to the wall?

GARMENT: Back to the wall? We were trying to figure out how to stand up with our backs against the wall instead of falling to the ground.

During that period of time it was head counting. Do we have enough? Can we hold out until election time?

TAE: So did Nixon base his decision to resign simply on head counting or was there a sense that "this was best for the country"?

GARMENT: Basically it was head counting. It was down two, up two, so-and-so defected; we have to pass this piece of legislation because if we don’t we’re going to lose these people. One of the most amazing things was that the last piece of legislation Nixon signed was the Legal Services Corporation Act—how about that?—when his core support was pleading with him to veto it.

I remember a luncheon meeting. Three or four of us were there—Bill Timmons, Bryce Harlow—and they’re saying, "The sooner it ends the better because it’s such agony." And I said, "Well, I don’t know. Why don’t we take it to the Senate?" They were throwing rolls at me: Get out of here!

Support was going, going, gone. I guess part of that was his sense that there is a time to stay and a time to fight; a time to stay and a time to go. It’s in the mold of Ecclesiastes.

I think it stirred Nixon’s own sense of history, of the country, of his own effort to leave something behind other than scorched earth surrounding the White House. Like 1960, when he lost the presidency by a hair, and had a lot of evidence of illegality in three or four crucial election districts. He had been cheated of his election, and a lot of people advised him to have a recount in Chicago and Texas, in Missouri. But he said no, you can’t have the country in a state of suspended animation while there’s a legal challenge to the presidency, so the hell with it.

You can say that’s good presidential citizenship. It was also his own sense that his political life would end in that kind of recount bitterness.

TAE: In retrospect, do you agree with the House Judiciary Committee that Nixon committed impeachable offenses?

GARMENT: Well, of course. An impeachable offense is what Congress says.

Can they impeach because a President spit on the sidewalk? They would all be carted off to a lunatic asylum. So these things are constrained by political reality. But Nixon wouldn’t have resigned if he didn’t think there was an impeachable offense, and that what Congress had come up with was sufficient that he had lost the confidence of not only the Congress but of the country. That’s an impeachable offense: When a President ceases to be able to govern because so much has been irrefutably produced in the way of evidence and atmosphere. By irrefutable, I mean not necessarily true but it has become accepted, common, conventional, national wisdom.

TAE: Have we reached that point now?

GARMENT: No.

TAE: Do you see us reaching that point?

GARMENT: Don’t know. That’s the beauty of the whole thing, and that’s why impeachment is not a satisfactory process for people who are passionately partisan. Because it does its work through a complicated conversation among the people, local legislators, the media, the Congress, all of that. It goes on gradually and it takes time.

The Founders understood the workings of human beings. Perhaps they didn’t call it therapy then but they understood that there are certain civil processes that are designed to help people get well from the illness of wrath and emotional anger and to maintain civil peace. Impeachment is the Founders’ version of constitutional therapy. It’s a way for people to gradually come to an understanding and then through the Congress act on that understanding.

TAE: Clinton got fawning press the first couple of years, despite the fact that these people knew that he liked to sleep around. What he was doing with Lewinsky was really no different than what he had been doing for years; why now does the hammer come down?

GARMENT: Because it was unavoidable. Because there was a strange marriage between a very determined civil suitor named Paula Jones and an independent counsel investigating an entirely different set of matters named Kenneth Starr.

TAE: Who was more immoral, Richard Nixon or Bill Clinton?

GARMENT: I don’t believe in moral relativism.

TAE: Were either of them immoral?

GARMENT: The moral Presidents are truly catastrophic in handling the government’s business, which is to do difficult things in a dangerous and immoral world: people like Jimmy Carter and Woodrow Wilson and others who would be custodians of national morality.

TAE: Just as there were obsessive Nixon haters, so, too, there are obsessive Clinton haters. What about these two men inspire such loathing?

GARMENT: Well, they are the symbols of the nation.

TAE: But nobody really hated Bush or Carter.

GARMENT: Nixon is a powerful figure of an era: the Nixon Era. Alger Hiss to Vietnam. Clinton is the 1960s writ large.

TAE: Have you ever felt hatred toward a politician?

GARMENT: I really can’t stand politicians with big mouths like Joe Biden. But I’m not a big hater. I have too much fun.

TAE: What was your reaction to the film Nixon by Oliver Stone?

GARMENT: There’s a man I really dislike, because of a personal thing that I can’t go into that happened between him and me. In my first viewing of the film, which I could hardly look at because I disliked him so much, I was disturbed by the intermingling of Stone’s own self-hatred, hatred of the country, and hatred of his subject: a real creative hater.

But very good art can come out of hatred, produced by internal violence. I saw the movie again and thought it was pretty good. It wasn’t true, but it was interesting.

TAE: What was Nixon’s relationship with the arts and artists? Under Nixon, in no small part due to you, the National Endowment for the Arts flourished. Did he have favorite painters, favorite writers?

GARMENT: He had an appreciation of culture, but he was a good politician.

He loved classical music, more of the 19th Century romantic: Beethoven, Tchaikovsky. Richard Rodgers’ "Victory at Sea." He was very close to conductor Eugene Ormandy.

Occasionally I’d get a call from his secretary: "The President wants you to go with him to the symphony." We’d get in the car and go, listen and talk a little bit. Pleasant. And he enjoyed it. He’d go on nights when there wasn’t anything in particular happening. So it wasn’t a black-tie performance.

As for the nea, I knew that Nixon was looking for things that would soften up the homeland a little bit. The central problem was the withdrawal from Vietnam: how to get out slowly without the country coming apart, without having a political revolution.

So I said the nea is a good thing: it’s good on the merits, it’s good politically—hit ’em where they ain’t. Just as hypocrisy is the price that virtue pays to vice, the nea was the price we paid to liberals in order to get them to calm down a little bit.

TAE: Do you have a certain sympathy for Clinton as a fellow saxophonist?

GARMENT: I appreciate the fact that he does like jazz. I went to the Lionel Hampton party at the White House, and Clinton played the saxophone. He played "My Funny Valentine."

The sound was okay. He had the tune okay. The problem he had was swing. There’s an Old Duke Ellington song, "It Don’t Mean a Thing if It Ain’t Got that Swing," and I was startled because Hampton’s brilliant rhythm section managed to stay with [Clinton’s] six beats to a bar—which is not the way you swing. So maybe that’s his fundamental problem: that he doesn’t swing.