Workers World, Vol. 17, No. 25, June 20, 1975
June 16 – The German philosopher Hegel once said that a phenomenon is not real unless it divides. The façade of unity which the U.S. ruling class sought to display during the entire period of the Cold War is an example of such a phenomenon. It was unreal precisely because the U.S. capitalist class sought to present itself as a monolith when in reality it was torn by acute contradictions from the very beginning.
Even the most absolute of totalitarian dictatorships can merely drive contradictions underground – it cannot liquidate them.
Under bipartisan sponsorship, the launching of the slogans “containment of communism” and “liberate East Europe,” and the deliberate effort to isolate the People’ Republic of China were all fundamental elements of a policy which seemed to embody the unity and will of the entire ruling class.
But from the very beginning this so-called unity was unreal, weird, and even fantastic in light of the objective it had set for itself, an objective utterly unattainable because it went counter to the entire course of historical development. The objective – world hegemony – was impossible in the epoch of world revolution.
Assassinations, Watergate revealed split
It took a series of disasters and defeats on the world arena before a deep fissure would crack this false unity.
The first Kennedy assassination gave earthshaking evidence that a subterranean and fratricidal struggle existed in the ruling class. Watergate was the confirmation that the fissure had finally broken through and that it was deep and abiding.
Yet Watergate opened up a process of development no less blind than the process it presumably was seeking to arrest.
Watergate was to inaugurate a process of “self-reform” of the state apparatus, a process begun strictly from above. The proclaimed aim was to cleanse the entire governmental apparatus, create safeguards against dangerous excesses, curb the tendency to ever great repression, and above all, create conditions for the inauguration of an era of true democratization.
Now, almost 2 ½ years later, one must of necessity look back to the days when the Watergate crisis was at its pinnacle and the ouster of Nixon was virtually assured. It is especially poignant to do so in light of the recent CIA exposures. The tidal wave of euphoria which swept over such broad sections of the population, particularly the middle class, during the Watergate exposures was of truly historic proportions. This wave of optimism was sedulously cultivated from the beginning by the media and press of the liberal establishment and particularly by its syndicated columnists.
“Our system is working again” – “The people are beginning to have confidence in our government” – “Democracy has triumphed and America has again become the great showpiece of democracy.” Even skeptical European observers were now saying that the U.S. “had taken a long slide toward parliamentary democracy.” Such was the talk of the day.
Jimmy Breslin, in his book “How the Good Guys Finally Won,” aptly summarized in the very title of his book the prevailing mood of the time. Breslin, like the rest of his colleagues in the liberal press, had no trouble at all identifying who the “bad guys” were, but by the time his book appeared he could scarcely identify even one “good guy.”
The dialectic of the situation is such that what was presumably begun as a liberal effort at reform has well-nigh produced its opposite. For as matters stand now, 3 years after the commencement of Watergate, the ouster of Nixon and his small coterie of henchmen and palace guards – Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Ziegler, etc. – has merely changed the surface of things and left wholly unaltered the substance of what was supposed to be reformed. This can be seen by the figures who exercise authority in Washington today.
Most of the same cast
Arthur Burns, the chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, is as firmly entrenched in his position and supported by the bankers as he ever was. Secretary of the Treasury William Simon, an ultra-reactionary in domestic affairs and a bully in foreign economic affairs, still runs the Treasury. Earl Butz, the Secretary of Agriculture, still serves the Wall Street farmers with as much gusto as he ever did and displays the same cynical indifference to the mass of the people, who find the price of food ever higher and in many cases beyond their reach.
Needless to say, James Schlesinger is riding as high in the Pentagon as he ever did. General Haig has merely changed his civilian clothes back to military attire and runs NATO – with special emphasis on Portugal, Southern Europe, and the Middle East. Former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Zumwalt has been retired, but his replacement, General Brown, is even more of an unbridled militarist, notwithstanding that some quarters interpreted his anti-Semitic remarks about “rich Jews” interfering in Mideast policy as a softer stance on the Middle East.
And needless to say, Kissinger is still where he was, in spite of the U.S. debacle in Cambodia and Vietnam.
To this, of course, must be added that Ford, an ultra-conservative by conviction even if he is at odds with the conservative establishment, is the chief executive. And Rockefeller – the Croesus who would also be Caesar – holds the Vice Presidency.
To top it all off, the new Congress that was elected in 1974 with all those “Young Turks” who were out to roll the heads off the reactionary hierarchy in the seniority system has proved to be a complete dud. Even more significant is the fact that Democratic Majority leader Mike Mansfield and Senator Birch Bayh of Indiana, so-called liberal Democrats, are sponsors along with right-wing Republicans of the notorious S-1 bill, a monstrous piece of legislation which is not merely a restriction on the freedom of the press, but is the longest step ever taken to bring McCarthyism back from its grave.
Thus what the liberal establishment presumably began – and we emphasize presumably – as an effort at democratization has ended up with a situation in the government which, at the present time, is in some respects further to the right than it was even in the days of Nixon.
The effort of the ruling class at “self-reform,” of “purging” the state security organs of “excesses,” has ended up precisely in the opposite direction. It affords an extraordinary example of the capability and limitations of the ruling class, in the epoch of imperialist decline, to carry through internal reform of its state apparatus at a time when there has been no independent working class action or bold initiative of measurable significance where the workers utilize the crisis of the ruling class for their own aims.
CIA revelations are phase two
Watergate, however, was only phase one of the agony of the ruling class in crisis. The CIA revelations can be properly called phase two. Like Watergate, the revelations were initiated by the liberal capitalist establishment (in the New York Times last November) and have substantially the same objective. The difference, however, lies in the fact that the revelations come at a time when the U.S. has suffered two powerful blows to the very solar plexus of the ruling class. The defeat inflicted by the Vietnamese and Cambodian revolutions and the deep-going economic crisis both have envenomed clique struggles in the very summits of American finance capital and heightened tensions to an extreme. The widespread unrest in the working class and growing signs of militant resurgence are powerful factors which pull the ruling groups further apart.
Hardly have the CIA exposures begun to take on the proportions of a cleansing operation when they have already been used as a bludgeon against the very liberal establishment and its political leaders which initiated the revelations in the first place. Thus it is not at all surprising that the spotlight will be put more and more on the assassinations carried out during the Kennedy and Eisenhower administrations and focused so as to redound to the benefit of the ultra-right and conservative groupings which the Ford-Rockefeller administration is seeking both to appease as well as to coopt.
The CIA revelations are more than just an election tool to discredit the Kennedys and the Eisenhower liberal Republicans, they also reflect a blind and irrepressible internecine ruling class conflict from which there is no sure and safe exit without disastrous consequences.
None of the CIA revelations to date contain anything of real significance which has not been known abroad and even here at home by the more politically advanced sections of the population. The murder of Lumumba, attempts to murder Premier Castro, and attempts to kill deGaulle are fairly well known to be linked to U.S. government agencies, as are also the countless other assassinations such as those of Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, and even of the Kennedy brothers, which have barely been touched on in the present uproar.
The crisis in the ruling class has ushered in phase one and now phase two of efforts to salvage the system, repair the damage, and prepare new positions for assaults on the global arena. But they will have the effect of deepening the crisis and eventually opening the flood gates of independent mass action of the working class and oppressed in their very own interests.
Last updated: 11 May 2026