Top 75 Watergate Quotes

I was unknown because I came to Washington from the West. I started covering Watergate. Immodestly, I’d say I did it pretty well, in part because it was hard to go wrong.

The possibility of collusion between Trump’s allies and Russian intelligence is much more serious than Watergate. It is a constitutional crisis. It represents a violation of our republic’s most sacred trust.

We’re not going to have another Watergate in our lifetime. I’m sure.

I was very young, and I remember this heated, passionate argument and trying to figure out some place called Vietnam, something called a Watergate, and some guy named Gerald Ford who my dad knew who had just become president, and how all these things fit together.

Gerald R. Ford was a decent and honorable man. Under his steady hand, the nation began the process of recovering from the terrible trauma of Watergate – the lies, distortions, cover-ups, misuses of federal agencies to exact political revenge, illegal wiretapping, burglaries.

The American Dream has run out of gas. The car has stopped. It no longer supplies the world with its images, its dreams, its fantasies. No more. It’s over. It supplies the world with its nightmares now: the Kennedy assassination, Watergate, Vietnam.

Some of the things I have written about are a way of connecting with my father – I know he knew who Idi Amin was, and I know he knew who Longford was. And I know he knew who Nixon was, because shortly before he died, I talked to him about Watergate.

Presidential power was overruled by the high bench in July 1974, when President Nixon was ordered to turn over some audio tapes of his White House conversations, including the ‘smoking gun’ tape of June 23, 1972, that revealing the Watergate cover up.

My 1974 album ‘Mind Over Matter’ was a detailed thing about Watergate. I always had some righteous indignation.

The Watergate reforms did work well for many years, and if improved and broadened, these reforms can have real and major impact on the system today.

The facts of Watergate have been wildly exaggerated.

I believe that President Nixon was right in what he did at Watergate. Lack of respect for authority and things like socialism are turning this into a weak, effeminate country.

I didn’t really see a way to make a living on the farm. I always loved writing. I was the guy who won the D.A.R. essay contest and things like that, and it was the era of Watergate, and I decided I would be the next Woodward and Bernstein, and then retire to the farm.

I think there are periods in this country when behavior is abhorrent: McCarthy, Watergate, Bill Clinton. It’s just a question of how the checks and balances in the American system work and how leaders stand up to it or don’t stand up to it.

The fact of the Watergate cover-up is not nearly as interesting as the step into making the cover-up. And when you understand the step, you understand that Richard Nixon lied. That he was a criminal.

I grew up a child of Watergate. It gave me a good dose of skepticism about authority. One of my favorite movies is ‘All the President’s Men.’ Woodward and Bernstein, those guys were my heroes. I have a degree in journalism.

Watergate enabled the Democrats to cut off all aid to South Vietnam and ensure American defeat in a war their party entered and had effectively lost, before Nixon salvaged a non-Communist South Vietnam while effecting a complete American withdrawal.

Watergate is an immensely complicated scandal with a cast of characters as varied as a Tolstoy novel.

Reagan won because he was real. He believed in America. He told people he was gonna make it great again coming out of a disastrous four years of Jimmy Carter and Watergate before that.

I contend that, in spite of all that might be said about Watergate, Richard Nixon was good for the poor people of America.

I have very vivid memories of my parents talking about Nixon, my mom watching Watergate on the black-and-white set in the living room. The mayor at the time in Philadelphia was a guy named Frank Rizzo – a Democrat, a real bully, a racist.

I grew up during Watergate. I was enamored of the study of that.

Way before Watergate, senior administration officials hid behind anonymity.

The big moment for me was making ‘All the President’s Men’. It was not about Watergate or President Nixon. I wanted to focus on something I thought not many people knew about: How do journalists get the story?

Watergate got us to think of leaders as mere mortals. America began to think of itself in a very different way – I would say a salutary way – and Reagan was most important in shifting the grand dynamic thrust of the American historical process by ending that.

I’ve often wondered what it would have been like if we’d had cable news during the Vietnam War and Watergate.

You’re not a baby boomer if you don’t have a visceral recollection of a Kennedy and a King assassination, a Beatles breakup, a U.S. defeat in Vietnam, and a Watergate.

I sat next to Carl Bernstein throughout Watergate, and Woodward would come over, and they would argue everything out, so I was really tuned into what happened.

After Nixon resigned in 1974, he engaged in a very aggressive war with history, attempting to wipe out the Watergate stain and memory. Happily, history won, largely because of Nixon’s tapes.

There may yet be another Watergate book. I have thought a book about the aftermath of Watergate and its impact could be done, perhaps by me or someone else.

I’m still friendly with Dean. He still calls me on the phone from time to time. John Dean was fired and later ended up spending some time in prison for his role in Watergate.

From Watergate we learned what generations before us have known; our Constitution works. And during Watergate years it was interpreted again so as to reaffirm that no one – absolutely no one – is above the law.

I hope you will respond to the crisis of confidence that Watergate has created by opening up your administration and reaching out to people in a more magnanimous spirit.

There were no dead bodies in Watergate.

If the many allegations made to this date are true, then the burglars who broke into the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee at the Watergate were, in effect, breaking into the home of every citizen.

This story, I predict, will grow to be worse than Watergate. The American people need to have the answers.

Back in the ’90s, whenever we were having ’70s nostalgia, you could take the good with the bad. Like yeah, sure, Nixon happened, Watergate happened, but we also had bell bottoms and ABBA and ‘The Brady Bunch.’

The underlying crime in Watergate was a clumsy, third-rate burglary in an election campaign that turned out to be a landslide.

The biggest rap on me is that I don’t find a Watergate every couple of years. Well, Watergate was unique. It’s not something Carl Bernstein, I, or the Washington Post caused.

Kennedy is remembered as a success mainly because of what came after: Johnson and Vietnam. Nixon and Watergate.

Watergate was a third-rate burglary. It was purely domestic in nature.

The official version of Watergate is as wrong as a Flat Earth Society pamphlet.

In 1974, Democrats gained 49 House seats and four Senate seats. It wasn’t just the Watergate scandal that drove Democratic wins, but the sense that Republicans had defended corruption and criminality in the White House.

Vice President Dick Cheney reportedly has been disturbed over what he sees as the erosion of presidential powers since the Watergate scandal and has urged Bush to take a stronger stand against what Cheney sees as congressional intrusions into the executive branch.

I was never for Richard Nixon until Watergate.

Before Watergate and Viet Nam, the American public, as a whole, believed everything it was told, and since then it doesn’t believe anything, and both of those extremes hurt us because they prevent us from recognizing the truth.

Nixon was a crook, but he was our crook. He didn’t have the KGB do the Watergate job.

The great thing about Watergate is, is that the system worked. The American system worked. The press did its job. We did what we were supposed to do.

The French were mystified about the Watergate scandal.

I was raised – professionally – in the Public Integrity Section. I started in 1976, stayed there for 12 years. It was formed after Watergate by then-head of the Criminal Division Dick Thornburgh, who ultimately became Attorney General.

Because of Watergate in part, I am kind of a magnet for calls and information and suggestions.

Like most Americans of my age, I was very impressed by the dynamic capacities of the law, demonstrated by the Civil Rights Movement and then Watergate, animated by Sam Ervin’s mantra that no person is above the law.

I suspect there have been a number of conspiracies that never were described or leaked out. But I suspect none of the magnitude and sweep of Watergate.

Watergate was a constitutional crisis of the highest order.

Voters who disregarded Richard Nixon’s involvement in the questionable ethics issue that led to his Checkers speech should not have been surprised when he orchestrated the Watergate cover-up as president.