"People in the White House believed they were entitled to do things differently, to suspend the rules, because they were fulfilling a mission; that was the only important thing, the mission."
The thoughts of Hugh Sloan, as reported in All the President's Men, by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein

Barry Sussman, an editor at the Washington Post during the days of Watergate, spent an inordinate amount of times studying the Teapot Dome scandal of the Warren Harding administration. He believed that somewhere in the texts of history he might find a reason for the astonishingly arrogant and unprincipled actions of Richard Nixon and his buddies.

Not unlike Sussman, in the last couple months I've studied the Gulf of Tonkin incident, the Spanish-American War, Teapot Dome, Watergate and Iran-Contra in hopes of understanding just what the hell is going on in the White House these days. There are a few similarities.

We all "remember the Maine," of course, and it has been widely claimed that the press goaded William McKinley into war. In truth, the instigators were then-Secretary of the Navy Theodore Roosevelt and other war-crazy dingbats within the McKinley administration who stoked the flames. Sure, newspaper magnates like William Randolph Hearst jumped on the bandwagon and backed the administration to the hilt, but to say newspapers piloted the war drive is getting things a wee bit backward.

Same goes for the most recent Iraq war. Even Fox News, which didn't hold back in its support of hostilities and its contempt for anyone who dared share anything less than full advocacy of whacking Saddam Hussein, didn't start the drive to war. That act lies deep within the White House. My guess is that our Vice President, Big Dick Cheney, provided most of the spark, but it could have been just about anyone. There are plenty of folks whose lips are permanently affixed to the ear of the president who could have planted the seeds for the march to Baghdad.

Teapot Dome is the name given to the vast corruption of many cabinet officials in the Harding Cabinet. Charlie Forbes, the first secretary of what would later become the Veterans Administration looted the treasury and even the hapless veterans themselves. Estimates of his graft go well past $2 million in 1925 dollars, a staggering sum. Harding intimate and (not coincidentally) Attorney General Harry Daugherty accepted nearly that much in bribes for all sorts of favors. And then there was Teapot Dome itself, a scheme to essentially give away oil reserves controlled by the Navy. Interior Secretary Albert Fall had his hands all over the bribes, but the dirty money touched many others in government. Harding himself died just before Teapot Dome broke, so he didn't have to live to see his administration snuffed.

While I don't think it likely that many Bush Administration officials were walking around with their hands out--rich politicians are rarely motivated by money in small bills--the concept of using government holdings to secure big contracts for businesses friendly with the president smells suspiciously familiar. Can anyone say Halliburton?

The Gulf of Tonkin is the most interesting and ambiguous case of the bunch. On the night of August 4, 1964, Lyndon Johnson reported that the North Vietnamese had attacked us in the Gulf of Tonkin (and not the other way around, as was normally the case) and thus it was time for us to fight back. Bombing began in earnest, and the Indonesian conflict finally became the Vietnam War. There's only one problem: There was no incident in the Gulf of Tonkin. Yes, American planes dropped a lot of bombs into the water, but they didn't hit anything. This was because there were no North Vietnamese boats anywhere near the U.S. destroyers that night. "For all I know, our Navy was shooting at whales out there," Johnson admitted a year later. This isn't to say that we weren't already shooting at the North Vietnamese--we were--or that they weren't shooting at us--they were as well. It's just that the spark which caused Congress to give Johnson a blank check for Vietnam never happened.

Weapons of mass destruction, anyone?

I think the true lesson of Watergate is what Hugh Sloan perceived during his time with the Committee to Re-Elect the President. Some people are convinced not only of their infallibility but their necessity. Time after time, Nixon's strongest supporters said that the President must remain in office, that he was the only man who could solve all of America's problems, both foreign and domestic. No single person is that smart or capable. And no mission is so important that it must be justified by lies and accomplished by breaking the law.

I think that speaks for itself. If you're going to establish a principle of justified pre-emptive war, you ought to at least play with a straight deck.

The same logic applies to Iran-Contra, that sad little affair whereby people in the Reagan Administration used the CIA to sell guns to the Iranians (despite a public pledge to not "negotiate with terrorists") to raise money for the Contras in their guerrilla war against the Sandinista government in Nicaragua. The entire enterprise was ill-conceived and accomplished very little except for the release of a few hostages in the Middle East. I'm not trying to make light of that last fact, except to say that Reagan should have been up front about his actions, if not before then afterward. No one ever "came clean" about Iran-Contra, which left a serious taint on a certain George Herbert Bush.

His son, George Herbert Walker Bush, continues to cling to a defense of "darned good intelligence" when asked about the increasingly questionable grounds for war with Iraq. I think that if he'd just come right out and explain the real reasons for the war, then most people would calm down and forget the whole thing. We won, right? But he won't, and so this thing is gonna fester. How painful a wound this might become is hard to say, but it does have all the hallmarks of a classic presidential scandal.

Jon Worley reads way too much for his own good.