CHAPTER TWO
CONSERVATIVES WITHOUT CONSCIENCE
ANSWERS TO QUESTIONS such as why so many conservatives are hostile and mean-spirited, why they embrace false history, and why they take on a cause like attempting to impeach President Clinton despite public opposition to the undertaking are not found in any traditional conservative philosophy—however that attitude might be defined or described. Nor does conservatism explain the truly radical policies and governing of the Bush and Cheney administration. It certainly does not explain conservatives’ engaging in conspicuously unconscionable activities. I am not referring here to their practice of defaming perceived enemies, or to the corruption that has infected the K Street to Congress corridor. Rather, I have in mind more consequential activities, like taking America to war in Iraq on false pretenses, and the blatant law breaking by countless executive branch departments and agencies that, directed by the president or with his approval, torture our perceived enemies or spy on millions of Americans to look for terrorists. These activities have been acquiesced to by the Republican-controlled Congress, and by millions of conservatives who are tolerating, if not encouraging, this behavior.
Why is this happening? How can young American men and women working for the CIA or armed forces ignore their consciences to carry out orders that defy well-known international laws? How do employees who go to work every morning at the National Security Agency, the most powerful electronic spying machine in the world, illicitly turn their awesome surveillance powers on fellow Americans? Is it merely a matter of dutifully following the president’s instructions? What was going through the heads of Justice Department lawyers as they sifted through the law to create dubious arguments justifying torture of our enemies? Where are the consciences of the conservatives who are now running the government, and where are the consciences of the countless conservative voters who tolerate, and in many cases actively support, this behavior? Or are these activities, in fact, reflective of their consciences?
I found answers to these and many other questions primarily in two places. During the years following Watergate, when I was looking for explanations of what had gone so wrong with Nixon’s presidency, I encountered the work of Stanley Milgram. Later, when writing this book, I discovered the research of Bob Altemeyer. Both have conducted studies so important that it is dangerous to ignore their findings.
In the aftermath of Watergate a significant number of studies were undertaken by political and social psychologists, in fields of inquiry with which I was not familiar but which I found extremely revealing. Many seemed right on the mark and were helpful in understanding the dynamics of what had transpired. Some of these studies examined the mind-set within the Nixon White House that produced Watergate, and to assist in them I frequently shared my insider knowledge. One such study resulted in my encountering the classic experiments developed by social psychologist Stanley Milgram, who invited me to be the featured speaker at a gathering of psychologists in New York not long after I had published my book about Watergate, Blind Ambition. The purpose of the conference was to discuss Watergate as it related to Milgram’s pioneering work on obedience to authority.
Obedience is “the psychological mechanism that links individual action to political purposes,” Milgram explained, and he called it “the dispositional cement that binds men to systems of authority.”[1] Without it many organizations simply would not work; with it, they could also run amuck. Because I had witnessed obedience facilitate both good and bad in government, I believed Milgram’s work was both relevant and important. Today I think the implications of that research should be known by everyone working in Washington, if not in governments everywhere.
To his surprise, and to the amazement and dismay of others, Milgram’s classic experiments revealed that 65 percent of seemingly ordinary people were willing to subject what they believed to be protesting victims to painful, if not lethal, electric shocks (450 volts of electricity). They did so simply because they were instructed to by a scientist dressed in a gray lab coat in the setting of a scientific laboratory. This apparent authority figure ordered that the jolts of electricity be administered to determine if the “learner” would memorize word pairings faster if punished with increasingly painful electric shocks when he failed to accomplish the task. Actually, this experiment was designed to test not learning but rather the willingness of those administering the electric shocks to obey the authority figure. The subjects were not told of the ruse—that the “learner” was only pretending to experience pain and, in fact, was not being shocked—until the end of the experiment.[2]
When Milgram invited me to speak at his conference, he explained that it was because the Watergate probes had established that I was not a person who blindly followed the commands of authority figures. To the contrary, I had disobeyed an ultimate and powerful authority figure, the president of the United States, as well as his senior aides. Milgram noted that my breaking ranks and testifying about the Watergate cover-up placed me at the opposite end of the spectrum from people like Gordon Liddy and Chuck Colson, who compulsively obeyed authority. The conference proved to be a learning experience for me, because I discovered things about myself I had not really thought about.[3] More importantly, Milgram’s work provided a compelling explanation for why many people obey or disobey authority figures, and the role of conscience in their behavior.
Milgram described conscience as our inner inhibitory system—part nature, part nurture, and necessary to the survival of our species.[*] Conscience checks the unfettered expression of impulses. It is a self-regulating inhibitor that prevents us from taking actions against our own kind. Because of conscience, Milgram says, “most men, as civilians, will not hurt, maim, or kill others in the normal course of the day.” Conscience changes, however, when the individual becomes part of a group, with the individual’s conscience often becoming subordinated to that of the group, or to that of its leader. In an organizational setting few people assess directions given by a higher authority against their own internal standards of moral judgment. Thus, “a person who is usually decent and courteous [may act] with severity against another person…because conscience, which regulates impulsive aggressive action, is per force diminished at the point of entering the hierarchical structure.” Those who submit to an authoritarian order, and who adopt the conscience of the authority figure that issues the order, are in what Milgram called an “agentic state.” They have become an agent of the authority figure’s conscience.
Milgram devised various methods to test and measure points of individual resistance to authoritative commands. He discovered that most people who resist those commands go through a series of reactions, until they finally reach the point of disobeying. The decision of whether to follow an order is not a matter of judging it right or wrong, he learned, but rather a response to the unpleasantness of “strain” (a natural reaction, for example, to the moaning and eventual screams of a putative victim). When “a person acting under authority performs actions that seem to violate his standards of conscience, it would not be true to say that he loses his moral sense,” Milgram concluded. Rather, that person simply places his moral views aside. His “moral concern shifts to a consideration of how well he is living up to the expectations of the authority figure.”
1.
Stanley Milgram,
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,
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.
*
I have provided only a brief summary of Milgram’s key thoughts on conscience. See Stanley Milgram,