Drawing a line from Watergate to Jan. 6, 2021
Next Friday, June 17, will be the 50th anniversary of the Watergate burglary.
I started college three months later. My freshman counselor was a guy named Garry Trudeau. His strip “Doonesbury” was already in syndication. I had been admiring it in the Hartford Times. He somehow thought it was good idea to live in a dorm room in our entryway.
Garry probably convinced himself this would help him stay in touch with the impudent energy that informed his work, but, in reality, he bought a zoo full of nerds. Science nerds, politics nerds, comic book nerds, jazz nerds.
“Doonesbury” and Watergate were made for each other. A young satirist with a keen eye for foibles and a White House operating as a round-the-clock foible factory.
In the spring of 1973, we were invited up to Trudeau’s quarters. A sign proclaimed: “HALDEMAN ERLICHMAN DEAN KLEINDIENST RESIGN! COME WATCH THE PRESIDENT EXPLAIN WHY — 9 P.M. — TELEVISION AT THE COUNSELORS’ ROOM.” My friend Scott — who turned out to have been preserving our college lives with a zeal that would put many curators to shame — still has a photo of the sign, with that thrillingly sharp-edged lettering you’d recognize anywhere. I’m not sure Garry even knows what a lower-case letter is.
Around the same time, one of Trudeau’s strips was spiked by the Washington Post (of all places!) and several other newspapers. The strip featured Mark Slackmeyer, host of a college radio show, talking about former Nixon administration Attorney General John Mitchell. In the penultimate panel, Mark says, “It would be a disservice to Mr. Mitchell and his character to prejudge the man, but everything known to date could lead one to conclude he’s guilty.”
The last frame found Slackmeyer looking straight out at the reader, his eyes dilated with a rabid, manic glee. “That’s guilty! Guilty, guilty, guilty!”
Too much for the Post. They lowered the boom, with an accompanying column headlined, “A Comic Strip Is Not a Court.” This was a moment when political satire was moving out of cellar comedy clubs and coffee houses and into mainstream media, but it was not yet a comfortable fit. CBS had canceled “The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour” in 1969, for similar reasons.
“Guilty, guilty, guilty!” became probably the most famous single “Doonesbury” strip and the title of one of Trudeau’s collections. Watergate and Nixon essentially strangled the very notion that led to the spiking — that whole idea of White House weasels being entitled to the benefit of the doubt.
By the time we got the tapes and absorbed the full depravity, the idea of errant pols being entitled to anything more than three hots and a cot went out the window.
The great Russell Baker wrote, “Watergate left Washington a city ravaged by honesty.”
The anniversary and the new hearings on Jan. 6 have dovetailed ominously. The old story is still providing a vocabulary and narrative structure for the new. Who will be the John Dean of the hearings? What will be the smoking gun?
Most of the old lessons don’t fit anymore, but one observation, from Michael Schudson’s superb book “Watergate in American Memory” still looms: “Watergate was a story narrated more than an experience lived.” His point was that Americans grasp wars, high prices and gas shortages better
Nothing has changed on that front. What has changed most, of course, is the Republican party.
In 1974, the person who sealed Nixon’s fate was U.S. Sen. Barry Goldwater. Images of Goldwater in the public consciousness toggled between “staunch conservative” and “wildeyed missile-fondling nut.” But he had principles he wasn’t willing to trade in
for the sake of his party. If he lived today, co-presidents-in-exile Trump and Carlson would be calling him a RINO.
The same month Trudeau’s strip got spiked, Goldwater had begun complaining to his friends and colleagues about the stink of the scandal and, especially, the lies. Another 15 months passed before Goldwater took the long walk to the White House to tell Nixon to resign. It wasn’t the only bell tolling doom. All the Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee favored impeachment.
But Goldwater was like Shane. He’d walk alone into the gunfight and ride out of town bleeding, if that’s what it took. I guess you could say Liz Cheney does the same thing nowadays and with a hell of a lot less support from the townsfolk.
Most people can’t summarize Watergate, even those who lived through it. It was worse, more pervasive, than most people remember, but it was a Teletubbies episode compared to what we’re going to be looking at this week. A violent attack on the Capitol, spurred on, countenanced and minimized by one political party.
One of the persistent sayings from Watergate was, “It’s not the crime; it’s the cover-up.” In the days ahead, think: “It’s not the evil-doing; it’s the excusemaking.”
But it’s also the evildoing.