Rosemary Woods, Richard Nixon's secretary from the time he served in the US House of Representatives through the day of his resignation from the presidency in disgrace, died on Saturday evening.
Ironically, her passing in an Ohio nursing home came just hours before the death of former Tonight Show host Johnny Carson, who got so much comedic mileage from a noted act of semi-contortion on Woods' part.
The word that immediately came to mind when I heard of Woods' death was loyal. She was utterly loyal to her boss and therein lies reason for reflection.
During the 1973 investigations into both the Watergate break-in, perpetrated by employees of Nixon's Committee to Re-Elect the President and into the subsequent White House-directed cover-up, presidential aide Alexander Butterworth revealed that the Oval Office was equipped with an audiotaping system. Voice-triggered, the system had, it turned out, recorded hours of Nixon's meetings.
This revelation raised a huge furor. Investigators thought that the tapes would provide definitive evidence of Nixon's involvement in the cover-up.
A tussle ensued, but ultimately Nixon surrendered the tapes to the Senate investigating committee.
That's when a discovery was made. A mysterious 18-1/2-minute gap appeared on the tapes, a gap that occurred in a particular conversation in which investigators had good reason to believe that Nixon had unambiguously implicated himself in criminal activities.
How did the gap occur? Some were certain that Nixon, in spite of being technologically-challenged, had made the crude erasure.
But Rosemary Woods said that she herself had been responsible for about five minutes of the gap. That happened, she asserted, while she made transcripts of the tapes and answered a ringing telephone, her foot still depressing a pedal connected to the tape recorder. The photo taken of her demonstrating how this could have happened has become famous.
To this day, many familiar with the incident doubt Woods' explanation and assume that she was simply being loyal to Nixon.
Loyalty is a good thing. But can one be too loyal?
Nixon himself seemed to say this was possible. In his famous interviews with David Frost, Nixon claimed that much of his Watergate troubles were caused by an excess of loyalty to his subordinates, notably Bob Haldeman, John Ehrlichman, and John Dean. "I was not a butcher," Nixon declared a bit self-righteously. (Okay, a lot self-righteously.) He said this to explain why he hadn't cut these people adrift when he discovered their cover-up and knew the potential consequences to his presidency.
President Harry Truman, it's often suggested, caused himself a boatload of trouble by remaining loyal to old Missouri friends who were using their connections to him for certain advantages.
One of Dwight Eisenhower's missteps as President was his continued, ill-advised loyalty to chief-of-staff Sherman Adams even after certain of his misdeeds became known.
Of course, loyalty has caused much tragedy over the centuries. In the last century, virtually an entire nation remained loyal to its government and military as it systematically killed six-million or more people simply because they were Jewish and as it attempted to conquer Europe. Even those in higher positions of authority, who might have done something to change or blunt these evil policies, offered the simple and ultimately unconvincing defense at the Nuremberg Trials, "We were only following our orders."
Still and all, loyalty undergirds good marriages, strong friendships, effective business relationships, and happy nations. Loyalty is what impels married couples to stick it out when the going gets rough. It's what causes family members to forgive one another even after acrimonious disagreements.
The Old Testament portion of the Bible tells the true story of the friendship between two men, David and Jonathan. Jonathan was the son of the sitting king, Saul. David was a powerful young warrior already designated to become the next king by God's prophet, Samuel.
Saul was ferociously jealous of David, favored by God and celebrated by their fellow countrymen. As time wore on, Saul's paranoia and madness grew and his determination to kill David grew as well.
Saul's attitudes and actions toward David must have created a maelstrom of clashing loyalties within Jonathan. He felt loyalty to his father, for one thing. So strong was that loyalty that Jonathan would ultimately die in battle at his father's side.
But Jonathan also felt loyalty to his noble friend David and to the God Who had chosen David for future kingship.
Several times Jonathan thwarted Saul's murderous intentions toward David, once even causing the paranoid king to accuse Jonathan and David of being homosexual lovers.
After Saul and Jonathan were dead and David had become king, it was learned that Jonathan's son, Mephibosheth, handicapped and spurned by much of society, was still alive. Out of loyalty to his dead friend, David raised the boy as his own son.
From this story, we learn a lot about loyalty: its nobility, its place, and its limits.
We learn, for example, that it's a fine thing to be loyal. But when those to whom we are loyal, either overtly or implicitly, expect us to do things that are wrong or hurtful to others, loyalty must give way to higher concerns.
We learn that in the conflict of loyalties, there must be some higher value to which we defer.
Loyalty doggedly adhered to can make monsters of us, as it did of those who "followed orders" in Nazi Germany.
Loyalty can make us oblivious to the deficiencies of those to whom we are loyal.
Loyalty can also cause us to commit or abet crime, as may have happened with Rosemary Woods.
So, are we best advised to forgo loyalty, keep to ourselves, and simply look out for number one?
The greatest true example of loyalty comes from the God-Man Jesus. In spite of temptations to the contrary, Jesus remained loyal to God the Father and His will for Jesus' life. In spite of the abuse to which the human family subjected Him, Jesus also remained loyal to people. Because of that loyalty, He went to a cross, making Himself the perfect sacrifice for our sin and to become, for all who turn from sin and follow Him, the bridge between God and humanity.
And this leads us probably to the final thing to be said about loyalty: Until our highest loyalty is given to the God we know through Jesus Christ, we live in danger of causing untold damage to ourselves and to others.
Each day, I pray that God will forgive me those times in my past when I've been disloyal to Him and give me help in making Him my ultimate loyalty today and in the future.
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