Watergate’s fallout felt four decades later
Forty years ago, all of America learned the name of a particular condominium, hotel and office complex along the Potomac in the nation’s capital.
Watergate has been irrevocably tattooed on the North American psyche, the story so familiar that only the very young need a primer. For most, the very name Watergate is synonymous with government corruption and the uniquely odd and criminally paranoid 37th president of the United States, Richard M. Nixon.
The Watergate hearings were great TV not only because of the content of the investigation, but also because of the characters. Two consistently spring to mind — Sam Ervin, the colourful North Carolina senator who oversaw the Senate hearings. And Maureen Dean, the gorgeous blond wife of then-White House counsel (and now-ubiquitous) John Dean. Many will confess that the ethereal Mo, who wore her platinum hair pulled back into a tight bun and sat like a sparkling hallucination in a battlefield of wounded men, was as mesmerizing as the testimony.
This past week has been filled with reunions of various remaining characters, including Dean (but, alas, not Mo), and not least, of course, the forever-famous Woodward and Bernstein, (Bob and Carl), the two Washington Post reporters who brought the story to light and whose names have themselves become institutionalized, thanks in part to the movie based on their book, All the President’s Men.
Much debate has centred on the meaning of Watergate. For their part, Woodward and Bernstein, sharing a byline for the first time in more than three decades, recently wrote in the Washington Post that Watergate really represented five overlapping wars that Nixon was conducting — against the anti-Vietnam movement, the news media, Democrats, the judiciary and history itself.
Nixon was a criminal to be sure, even if he never quite saw it that way. He broke the law, was willing to bribe, burgle, wiretap, lie and extort for political gain. Somewhere along his dark path of consuming paranoia, he lost any flicker of light to help him see that he was lost. Woodward and Bernstein say that our allegiance to the adage that the coverup is always worse than the crime is misplaced in Nixon’s case.
Beyond the obvious, Nixon and the Watergate episode did great, perhaps irreparable, harm to the American spirit. A generation already traumatized by a war that ended up killing 58,000 of its brothers, boyfriends, husbands and fathers lost any remaining innocence, as well as trust in authority and faith in governmental institutions. The flag our forefathers raised on the moral high ground looked suddenly shabby and soiled.
When even the president of the United States was willing to burglarize the American people, there was no one left to trust. Adding insult, the entire episode was a cheap suit, sleazy and banal. Could the greatest nation in human history really be driven to a constitutional crisis by a bungled, thirdrate burglary?
Not incidentally, Watergate also created something else of significance — the celebrity journalist and a generation of wannabe Woodwards and Bernsteins. Those of us who found our way to newsrooms all wanted the big story, if not necessarily the movie with attendant fame and fortune.
Given the spoils of what took place on June 17, 1972, at the Watergate office building, Nixon was no petty thief. He was a grand larcenist.
Whether we can recover those stolen goods — nothing less than America’s promise to itself — is Watergate’s true legacy and it is punctuated with a question mark.