Conservatives Without Conscience

position the U.S. Supreme Court took when it declared anti-miscegenation laws unconstitutional in the case of Loving v. Virginia.” Peggy Pascoe, “Why the Ugly Rhetoric Against Gay Marriage Is Familiar to This Historian of Miscegenation,” History News Network (April 19, 2004) at http://hnn.us/articles/4708.html.

83.

Bramwell, “Defining Conservatism Down,” 7.

84.

David Horowitz, Radical Son: A Generational Odyssey (New York: Touchstone, 1998), 396.

85.

David Horowitz, “A Conservative Hope” (undated, but according to the new footnotes, post-1996) at http://www.discoverthenetwork.org/guideDesc.asp?catid=156&type=issue.

86.

David Nather and Seth Stern, “Classic Conservative Creed Supplanted,” Congressional Quarterly (March 28, 2005), 778.

Chapter Two: Conservatives Without Conscience

1.

Stanley Milgram, Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View (New York: Harper Perennial, 1969), 1.

2.

Ibid., 205. (When reviewing his experiments, Milgram did not identify any particular types of temperaments as corresponding with obedience or disobedience, for science at that time had not progressed sufficiently. Milgram, however, offered social psychologists one major lesson based on his study: “[O]ften, it is not so much the kind of person a man is as the kind of situation in which he finds himself that determines how he will act.”)

3.

As requested by Dr. Milgram, I discussed my work at the White House, including how I had taken direction from superiors, but protested and foiled Colson’s plan to “firebomb the Brookings Institution.” When I had learned of Liddy’s illegal intelligence plans, I objected to my superior and did my best to foil those plans as well, but they were approved without my knowledge. Out of loyalty I went along with the initial Watergate cover-up, but when I realized that the illegality of the cover-up was becoming more serious than the matters being covered up, I tried from within to end it. When that failed I broke rank, after telling all my White House colleagues, including a key member of the White House staff, exactly what I was going to do. These are subjects I have addressed at length in testimony and in two books. See U.S. Senate, “Presidential Campaign Activities of 1972: Senate Resolution 60,” Hearings Before the Senate Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities, U.S. Senate, 93rd Cong., 1st Sess., Books 3 and 4 (June 25–29, 1973); John W. Dean, Blind Ambition (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1976) and John W. Dean, Lost Honor (Los Angeles: Stratford Press, 1982).

I knew long before Milgram’s conference that I am not one who is easily inclined to simply go along with others. My notes from this conference show that I discussed two specific incidents that were probably revealing of my nature. One related to a favorite prank of the cadets at prep school, a collective act of defiance designed purely to annoy faculty members on duty as proctor during evening study hours. It was known as a “door slam.” At dinner, or before the study period commenced, the word was passed in hushed whispers throughout the dormitory that at a given time every person in the dorm would open his door and then slam it shut. I thought these drills senseless and juvenile, and disruptive of study time, so I refused to participate despite great peer pressure. In fact, I repeatedly told organizers of door slams that if asked, I would not protect them.

Until that conference I had forgotten about what had occurred when I was pledging a college fraternity. One evening I witnessed one of the upperclassmen, a little fellow who was drunk, taking great joy out of paddling a pledge brother twice his size until his bottom was bloody. The next day, when the upperclassman was sober, I told him that if I witnessed such senseless hazing again, I would leave the pledge class and try to take the entire pledge class with me. When he threatened to paddle me for my insolence, I told him to grow up, for this was just between us. He quickly backed down, but a few days later he was at it again, beating one pledge after another for invented infractions of impossible pledge rules (like failure to recite the Greek alphabet both forward and backward, flawlessly). After this incident I told the president of the fraternity that it was either the upperclassman or us, for by then I had the entire pledge class ready to walk. To cut to the end of the story, the hazing rules were changed.

4.

Milgram, Obedience to Authority, 5.

5.

Stanley L. Kutler, Abuse of Power: The New Nixon Tapes (New York: Free Press, 1997), 3, 6, 8, 10, 13, 17. (Repeatedly in the remarkable conversations Nixon demands a break-in at the Brookings Institution.)

6.

G. Gordon Liddy, Will (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1980), 77 (regarding black-bag jobs), 157–69 (Liddy describes how he concocted the plan to break into Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office, noting that he “was forbidden to participate directly in the mission,” but despite his orders, he did so, claiming he “was the only game in town”), 255. Liddy explains that, contrary to his orders and his promise to his superiors that his activities would not be linked to him or anyone with whom he was associated, he used the head of security for the Nixon reelection campaign, James McCord, as part of his burglary team at the Watergate, because “McCord was the only game in town.”

7.

George Lakoff and John Jost radio interviews, “The Science of Conservatism,” WBAI-FM (November 12,