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[ThatHawaiiGuy]

30 Summers Later, We Need To Remember The Lessons Of Watergate

By WARREN GOLDSTEIN
Published on 8/3/2003

This summer marks the thirtieth anniversary of the Watergate hearings, the riveting televised spectacle in which a series of aides and former aides to President Richard Nixon testified before the Senate Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities about the Administration's wholesale attack on the American political system.

I lived in Washington that summer, and I loved Watergate. I couldn't wait to get the Washington Post each morning hoping for yet another biting, outraged column by Nicholas von Hoffman. Like everyone else, I hung on every minute of John Dean's week-long revelations of wrongdoing in the Oval Office. And I watched, fascinated, as the web slowly began to close in on Richard Nixon.

“What did the President know, and when did he know it?” U.S. Sen. Howard Baker asked of each witness. And once the tapes surfaced, the possibility of a “smoking gun” appeared—the key piece of evidence that would prove the President guilty.

Watergate has become the defining frame for all subsequent scandals; “-gate” even gets tacked onto such unlikely nouns as “Monica” or “travel.” But happy as I was that Watergate drove Richard Nixon from office, we can now see how we missed an opportunity to learn valuable lessons from the scandal.

For the real point of Watergate was not the final “smoking gun.” Nor was it Presidential approval of a bag man and hush money scheme worthy of Oliver Hardy, or Oliver North.

Watergate revealed the way the Nixon Administration targeted political opponents and put them on an “enemies list,” treating them like traitors or criminals. It exposed the Committee to Re-elect the President (remember CREEP?), which made campaign “dirty tricks” a way of life. It showed us how the Administration (not just Nixon) used the FBI and the IRS (and made the CIA violate its own charter) to harass American citizens exercising their constitutional rights.

In other words, Watergate revealed patterns of abuse of governmental power that were far more threatening to American democracy than the President's (or his henchmen's) lies. While the possibility of high-level corruption by a President or a Vice-president (which also happened in the Nixon Administration) gives us a special thrill, a government only becomes truly dangerous to its people when it engages in what the Declaration of Independence called “repeated injuries and usurpations.”

But most of us missed the forest for the biggest tree, and Americans still have difficulty thinking systemically. In crime as well as politics, we focus on individual guilt or innocence: Did O.J. do it or not? Did Bill Clinton do it or not? Who was “responsible” for those 16 words in President Bush's speech?

Because we still ask echoes of Sen. Baker's old question, though, we focus on a mystery, when the key issues are usually out in the open. The scandal in this administration is not who knew what when—it's the way our leaders remake reality all the time, and simply ignore inconvenient or contradictory facts.

For months they terrified us about Saddam's weapons of mass destruction, including his nuclear program. No weapons? Whatever. Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld refuses to accept the “G-word” (guerilla war) or the “Q-word” (quagmire)—as though his vocabulary can change the reality of American soldiers being killed in twos or threes every day. The “rebuilding” contract with the Vice-President's old firm Halliburton? No conflict of interest—not even the appearance of a conflict of interest. Because we say there isn't. After 9/11, The President and his advisors wanted to go to war, period, and would say anything to convince the rest of us. The smoking guns are in Iraq, in plain sight.

For all the fun I had with Watergate, I think my own delight in watching Nixon's men go to jail—and I know I had lots of company—exacted too high a price. Fortunately, not everyone missed the Watergate boat. The late Representative Barbara Jordan understood what was at stake when she spoke at the House Judiciary Committee considering the impeachment of President Nixon. “My faith in the Constitution is whole, it is complete, it is total,” she told the entire country, after having first pointed out that as an African-American woman, she was not included in the “We the People” of the original Preamble. Nevertheless, she declared, “I am not going to sit here and be an idle spectator to the diminution, the subversion, the destruction of the Constitution.”

She saw the pattern, and she named it. We could use her in Congress today.

Warre Goldstein teaches American history at the University of Hartford. His biography of William Sloane Coffin Jr. will be published next year by Yale University Press.


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