Musing on Watergate

Mark Felt's confession that he was Deep Throat impelled me to read Theodore White's account of Watergate, Breach of Faith, which unfortunately is out of print. I heartily recommend it. Published a year after Nixon resigned, it reflects the spirit of those times quite well, recalling memories of watching the president make his public pronouncements about the scandal, Sam Ervin and his committee peel away the layers that concealed the actions of the president and his minions, and the House Judiciary Committee come to their reluctant, but necessary judgement.

White, an insightful journalist, perhaps the best of those who covered American politics through the 1960s, put the events of those times in context. Naturally, his analysis invites comparision with today. Then as now the country was polarized. The two parties, as White saw them, stood on differents sides of a cultural divide. Sound familiar? the division then, of course, was between the those who looked approvingly at the counterculture and those who were more traditional in outlook. We define the division differently today, but the roots of todays partisanship have their basis in the same difference in outlook. Indeed, one of the elements of Bush's past that is a key to undestanding him was his aversion to the liberal and radical forces that ruled students and faculty at Yale when he went there. He is, in some respects, the counter-counterculture president.

As stark as the divisions of the early 1970s were in White's eyes, they pale before what we have now. In his account of the proceedings of the House Judiciary Committee, he describes the moderate Republicans who leaned toward impeachment and the conservative Democrats who leaned against it. Where are these creatures now? Each party has comfortably walled itself up in a strong fortress manned by the like-minded.

Few have done that more clearly than the president himself. Those who do not speak as the president thinks have short lives in the centers of power in Washington. This is a tendency that has increased as the administration has developed, to judge by the cabinet appointments made for the second term. Nixon had some of this tendency himself but, partly as a result of Watergate, was unable to follow it to the same degree.

Nixon, too, like Bush, tried to centralize power in the presidency. Both felt the need to make the bureaucracies of the Executive Branch speak and act as one. However, whereas Bush has done seems to have done this effectively, Watergate aborted Nixon's efforts to do so.

Let the reader think that I am trying to paint Bush in the same colors as Nixon, however, let it be noted that he lacks Nixon's paranoia and meanness. Nor is he a schemer, and his moral compass seems more firmly set.

He is not, therefore, prone to approach his political problems in an underhanded, illegal manner as Nixon did. Let this entry end with a warning, however, that the drama of Watergate suggests may be apposite. Nixon made his fatal errors in an almost offhand manner. This was not an evil man who planned to cross the line into illegality. Rather, he stepped across it almost casually, without realizing that he had done so. Bush has surrounded himself with people, like Karl Rove, who approach the line of legality as receivers in football approach the sideline--they know exactly where it is and what it means to cross it. Should this small circle around the president miscalculate, they may lead him to disaster, and there is no one of a different mind to tell him no. Let us hope that they, and he, are wiser than that.