Richardson Says Watergate Has Positive Effects

Former U.S. Attorney General Elliot L. Richardson '41, appearing at the Law School Forum Saturday afternoon, said he sees many "encouraging signs in Watergate at this midstream stage" and that he hopes Watergate "will create a new perception of the need to disperse federal power."

Archibald Cox '34, Williston Professor of Law, introduced Richardson to the near-capacity audience at Sanders Theater as a man "with a great sense of justice, integrity, and honor."

The audience applauded at length for the two men, who were together for the first time since before October 20, 1973, when Richardson resigned from office after President Nixon directed him to fire then Watergate special prosecutor Cox. Then acting Attorney General Robert Bork fired Cox the same day.

Responsible

In response to a question from the audience, Richardson said that a president "can be held responsible for the acts of subordinates where he has created an attitude or has used language or given general directives that would have reasonably led them to believe they were doing what he wanted, even if he didn't spell it out."

On the possible impeachment of President Nixon, however, Richardson said he was "suspending judgment" until there was more evidence.

Richardson said that he did not agree with the president's lawyers, who say that only indictable crimes constitute grounds for impeachment. "The question on what is an impeachable offense seems to me to turn on what abuse of authority or what neglect of responsibility is serious enough to justify the removal of the president from his office."

"There has been an impetus to reform, imparted by the revelations of Watergate, that perhaps could not otherwise have occured with so powerful an impact in so short a period," Richardson said. He said that Watergate has reinforced the independence of the law enforcement process, and has increased sensitivity both inside and outside the government to abuses of power.

Richardson said he also finds encouragement in "the evidence that the system is working." He said that Congress, the courts and the press "have been performing the roles that the framers of the Constitution would have envisioned for them in checking the excesses of the executive branch."

However, the most significant "by-product" of Watergate is the realization that we must decentralize the functions of government as much as possible, Richardson said. "An increasing remoteness and impersonality, a kind of opaqueness has grown on the part of government which simultaneously makes us feel shut out, voiceless and incapable of exerting any real impact on the forces that most directly affect our lives," he said.

"If we do not take advantage of the awareness of the need for community and the need for a greater degree of control of our own lives, we are doomed to experience a sense of suffocation and eventual drowning through all of the homogenizing forces of modern society that are submerging individual identity and significance," Richardson added.

Richardson said that Watergate has brought about the "resurgence of a commitment to open politics resting on the awareness that honest politics is good politics." "This society, happily I believe, has demonstrated that it contains within itself the seeds of its own regeneration," he said.

Describing Nixon's outlook, Richardson said, "The president has seen his situation as one, of fighting on behalf of his own survival rather than in terms of the question of what should he be doing in order to rebuild and enhance confidence."

Cox said after the Forum meeting that he agreed with Richardson when he said that he thought that Watergate showed that things were going right in America. "The American public's outcry over Watergate is not understood by most foreigners; American indignation that these things are wrong shows that the nation is basically sound," he said.

Richardson is currently a Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars