Howard Baker asked what the president knew and why oversight is conservative

Let me tell you what the sixty-four-dollar question of American politics is, and it is a lot older than anybody on cable thinks. It is eleven words long. What did the President know, and when did he know it? Say it at a dinner party and half the table will smile, because the line has been borrowed by every investigator, comedian and columnist since 1973. Few people remember who asked it first, or that he asked it as a friend of the man he was questioning, or that he was a Republican.

His name was Howard Baker, he was a senator from Tennessee, and the story of his question is the best answer I know to a charge you will hear all the time: that a conservative who investigates a president of his own party is a traitor, a RINO or a fool. Baker's career says the opposite. Holding the powerful to account is not a betrayal of conservatism. It is conservatism's oldest job.

A friend of the president

Howard Henry Baker Jr. was born in Huntsville, Tennessee, in 1925, into a political family; his father and his stepmother both served in Congress. In 1966 he became the first Republican popularly elected to the Senate from Tennessee, and he served from 1967 until 1985. He was genial, quick, a gifted storyteller and a keen amateur photographer. And he was close to the Republican White House. He had supported Richard Nixon, and he was not looking for a fight when the Watergate break-in turned from a burglary into a crisis.

That matters for the story. Baker did not come to the investigation as an enemy. When the Senate set up a Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities in February 1973, it was a bipartisan panel, with Senator Sam Ervin of North Carolina, a Democrat and a constitutional scholar of the old school, as chairman. Baker was the ranking Republican. People assumed he would be the White House's man on the committee, a defender in a hearing room. He was expected to protect the President.

The hearings

The televised hearings began in May 1973 and ran through the summer. Millions of Americans watched, day after day. The committee heard from White House aides, campaign officials and, in late June, from John Dean, the former White House counsel, who described what he said had been a cover-up directed from the Oval Office.

That was when Baker asked his question. He put it to witnesses over and over, in different forms, but the core of it was the one you know: what did the President know, and when did he know it? It was the right question because it separated two possibilities. If Nixon knew of the cover-up early, he was a participant. If he learned of it late, he was a man betrayed by his own staff. Everything depended on the answer. And Baker framed it not as an attack but as a fact-finding question, one a fair-minded defender of the President would want answered.

Think about how smart that was. Baker did not announce a verdict. He did not play prosecutor. He stood on the single factual question that mattered and he refused to let go of it. In a polarized age it is worth noticing that the most effective questioner in the room was the one who made it clear he was open to either answer.

The tapes

Then came the discovery that blew up the case. On Friday, July 13, 1973, a White House aide named Alexander Butterfield, interviewed by committee staff, revealed that Nixon had a recording system in the White House. He confirmed it publicly a few days later, on July 16. Suddenly there was a way to answer Baker's question without relying on anyone's memory: listen to the tapes.

The fight over the tapes lasted a year. Nixon resisted subpoenas, citing executive privilege. In October 1973, the so-called Saturday Night Massacre removed Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox, after Nixon ordered him fired, and the Attorney General and Deputy Attorney General resigned rather than carry out the order. The legal battle ended on July 24, 1974, when the Supreme Court decided United States v. Nixon, unanimously (eight justices, since William Rehnquist did not participate), holding that the President's claim of privilege could not defeat a criminal subpoena for evidence. Nixon resigned on August 9, 1974.

If you want those events in order, watergate in twelve dates and the one that finally ended it and Watergate Day by Day and the Republicans Who Told Nixon It Was Over lay out the sequence. For the legal holding, see United States v. Nixon and What the Court Really Said About Executive Privilege.

Why the committee worked

It is worth asking why that committee earned trust when so many investigations since have not. A few design choices stand out.

First, it was bipartisan in structure. Four Democrats and three Republicans sat on it, and the minority had its own counsel and its own right to question. When the minority has real tools, its members have a stake in the process being fair, and the public can tell.

Second, it was public. Gavel-to-gavel television meant that voters judged the witnesses with their own eyes instead of through a leak or a headline. Sunlight is a conservative preference, and it is a cheap one.

Third, it stuck to its charge. Its job was to look at campaign activities in the 1972 election and the cover-up that followed, and it produced a report. It did not wander into whatever was fashionable that month.

Fourth, the people at the center behaved like adults. Ervin, a Democrat who liked to quote the Constitution and the Bible in the same sentence, and Baker, a Republican who liked to tell a joke at the right moment, disagreed about plenty. They did not pretend the other was an enemy. A modern reader might find it quaint. I find it instructive.

None of this made Watergate easy. It made it credible. And credibility, as I keep telling you, is what a political movement is really spending when it picks a side.

Why a conservative should want oversight

Now to the argument. I will put it as numbered premises, because it deserves to be said clearly.

1. Conservatives believe that human beings are fallible and that power corrupts. This is not a new idea. It is the Founders' idea, and it is the reason the Constitution has separate branches that check each other. Madison put it in Federalist 51: ambition must counteract ambition. Madison's Plan for a Government That Fights Itself on Purpose explains the passage, and Madison Built a Government Where Ambition Fights Ambition, and It Works shows how the design works.

1. The executive branch is the largest concentration of power in the government. It writes rules, spends money and enforces law. It is also the branch that is hardest to watch from inside.

1. Therefore Congress, which holds the power of the purse and the power to investigate, has to watch it. That is oversight. It does not depend on which party is in the White House.

1. If oversight is only for the opposition party's President, it becomes a partisan tool, and the public will treat it as one. If oversight is for every President, including your own, it carries moral weight.

1. A party that protects its own President from scrutiny when he is guilty of wrongdoing will lose the public's trust, and eventually lose the argument for every policy it cares about.

The conclusion is that oversight of your own party's President is a conservative act, not a liberal one. It enforces the rule that nobody is above the law, which is the foundation of everything else. Equal Under the Law Means the Rule Applies to the People in Charge makes the case in full.

The steelman and the answer

The best argument against what I just wrote goes like this. Investigations can be abused. Committees hold fishing expeditions, leak selectively and wreck reputations for the sake of publicity. A party that has just won an election has a mandate to govern, and a partisan investigation is an attempt to undo the voters' decision. These concerns are real, and every party has indulged them when it suited.

The answer is that the abuse of a tool is a reason to use it carefully, not to throw it away. And Baker's own conduct is the model. He kept his questions factual. He asked for evidence. He did not pre-judge. When the facts came in, he followed them. A committee that behaves like Baker's is not a mob, and a committee that does not behave like Baker's should be criticized, whatever its party. A standard has to work for both sides or it is not a standard.

The Panama Canal Treaties

Baker's reputation for independent judgment did not end with Watergate. In 1978, as Senate Minority Leader, he took a position that cost him with many conservatives. The Senate was considering the Panama Canal Treaties, the agreements negotiated under President Jimmy Carter that would transfer control of the canal to Panama by the end of 1999 while giving the United States the right to defend its neutrality. Treaties require a two-thirds vote in the Senate, 67 of 100, and the votes were not there without some Republicans.

Baker, after a long personal review, concluded that the treaties served American interests and worked to bring other Republicans along. The Senate approved the treaties in the spring of 1978, with margins only a vote or so above the required two-thirds. Ronald Reagan and many conservatives bitterly opposed the treaties, and Baker's support likely cost him when he sought the 1980 Republican presidential nomination, which he did not win. I mention it for two reasons. It shows a man who treated the Senate's role in foreign affairs as serious business, and it shows the kind of political courage that oversight sometimes demands. If you want to read about a different Republican on treaties, Lodge in 1919 and Vandenberg in 1948 gave two Republican answers on treaties covers the long tradition.

You do not have to agree with his vote. Plenty of serious conservatives still think the treaties were a mistake. The point is how he made the decision: by studying the facts, rather than by checking which way the crowd was leaning.

Leader of the Senate, then Reagan's chief of staff

Baker became Minority Leader in 1977 and Majority Leader in 1981, when Republicans took the Senate in the Reagan election, holding the post until he left in January 1985. He was known as the Great Conciliator, a man who could move a stubborn chamber without bruising egos. He ran for President in 1980, lost and returned to the Senate to lead it.

Then history called again. In November 1986 the Iran-Contra affair broke open: a covert plan to sell arms to Iran and funnel some of the proceeds to the Contra rebels in Nicaragua, at a time when Congress had restricted aid to the Contras. A review board, the Tower Commission, reported in February 1987. The White House was in trouble and Reagan needed a steady hand. On February 27, 1987, Baker became his chief of staff, replacing Donald Regan, and stayed until July 1988.

Look at what that means. The man who asked the sharpest question about Nixon's knowledge was the man Reagan trusted to run the White House when his own administration was under investigation. That is not an accident. Reagan wanted someone who understood Congress, respected the facts and would not pretend a crisis did not exist. The record I would point you to is that Baker steadied the White House and the administration's later years went better than its middle ones. Check the details yourself; the point is the judgment, not the headlines.

Baker later served as ambassador to Japan, appointed by George W. Bush, from 2001 to 2005. He died on June 26, 2014.

What Baker teaches the rest of us

The lesson is not that Republicans should hunt for scandals. It is that Republicans should stand for a principle that outlasts any one administration. Let me turn that into plain verdicts.

Verdict one: the question matters more than the verdict. Baker's question was neutral and factual. Ask neutral, factual questions about every President, and you will earn the right to be believed.

Verdict two: loyalty to a person is not loyalty to a country, or to a party. Baker was a friend of Nixon's, and he was loyal to something larger.

Verdict three: you do not need to hate the other side to hold your own side accountable. He was courteous with Ervin, a Democrat, and the two ran a hearing that earned respect from both sides.

Verdict four: a conservative's trust in institutions includes the duty to keep them working. A President who is never questioned is a President nobody can defend.

Here is the objection you will hear: "Why give the other side a stick to beat us with?" My answer is that they will find the stick anyway, and it will do far more damage if you refused to hold it first. The party that polices itself keeps the moral high ground. The party that doesn't hands it away. And when the other party holds the White House, you will want the precedent of honest oversight on your side. Gerald Ford pardoned Richard Nixon and paid for it at the ballot box shows what the aftermath cost one decent man who tried to move on.

The bottom line

• Oversight is a conservative duty because conservatives distrust concentrated power, whoever holds it.
• Ask neutral, factual questions of every President, and hold your own side to the same standard you apply to the other.
• Read the text of United States v. Nixon, which is short and clear, and see how the Court weighed privilege against the need for evidence.
• Support representatives who ask hard questions in public hearings, whatever party the President belongs to.
• Remember Baker: be a friend to your President, and a servant of the truth first.