What Watergate Was About

Most of the reporting and analyzing of Watergate “30 years later” has focused on three things: (1) the history and current state of scandals in Washington; (2) the investigative might, genius, and courage of The Washington Post; and (3) the fact that a group of university students in Illinois think Pat Buchanan was “Deep Throat.” Few assessing the current-day impact of Watergate have focused on what we appear not to have learned. In fact, according to a CNN/USA Today/Gallup survey conducted near the June anniversary of the infamous break-in, 44 percent of Americans think Watergate was “just politics.”

But Watergate was not just politics. Forty people went to jail — the president’s lawyers, his chief of staff, the attorney general of the United States, etc. Under the guise of what we now understand to be a manic, self-deluded mission to rid the world of communism and other ills (which for Richard Nixon included Jews, blacks, and any number of other racial, religious, and ethnic minorities), Nixon attempted to create a singularly powerful government run wholly by the president in flagrant contravention of the Constitution’s proscriptions against absolute, unfettered presidential power.