Until we have a better relationship between private performance and the public truth, as was demonstrated with Watergate, we as the public are absolutely right to remain suspicious, contemptuous even, of the secrecy and the misinformation which is the digest of our news.
This is a generation weaned on Watergate, and there is no presumption of innocence and no presumption of good intentions. Instead, there is a presumption that, without relentless scrutiny, the government will misbehave.
My mom is a nurse; my dad is a pediatrician. They were born in the 1940s, and they were both inspired to fight against injustice, whether it was the injustices of the Vietnam War or Watergate or children in poverty or oppression of African Americans in Philadelphia where I was growing up.
After the 1970s, when President Nixon’s illegal campaign cash was used as a secret slush fund to pay for the Watergate burglary and cover-up, Americans have demanded to know where the money fueling our elections is coming from.
Suppose Watergate had not been uncovered? I’d still be on the City Desk.
There have been as many investigative reporters on this newspaper working on Clinton’s many problems as I can remember there were working on Watergate.
I almost became a political journalist, having worked as a reporter at the time of Watergate. The proximity to those events motivated me, when I wound up doing philosophy, to try to use it to move the public debate.
I kind of struggled as a 10-year-old to make out what it meant that Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy were killed within two months of each other. I think I was 14 when Watergate happened and a president was impeached. So between my birth and age 14, I just saw a lot of turmoil.
Golf mogul Donald Trump sports an arrangement of hair that is less a comb-over than a ‘do-over, a candy-floss confection of gossamer wisps that comes off as the clumsiest cover-up since Watergate.
Watergate had become the center of the media’s universe, and during the remaining year of my presidency the media tried to force everything else to revolve around it.
The White House tapes, recording Nixon’s nefarious doings from Watergate to the bombing of Vietnam, made frightening reading once made public on the orders of Congress.
Keeping his face clean over Watergate was one of Kissinger’s biggest successes; so was his overall handling of the Yom Kippur War.
I recently read some of the transcripts of Nixon’s Watergate tapes, and they spent hours trying to figure out who was leaking and providing information to Carl and myself.
I believe Watergate shows that the system did work. Particularly the Judiciary and the Congress, and ultimately an independent prosecutor working in the Executive Branch.
Even before Watergate and his resignation, Nixon had inspired conflicting and passionate emotions.
The institution of the presidency was profoundly affected by Watergate.
After Watergate, which happened when I was in college, I became increasingly inspired by journalism as a way to change the world. It sounds corny, but to wake the public up, to serve a higher cause.
I remember being a kid and the Vietnam War was huge and looking at Watergate.
After Watergate, America was a ship without a rudder. Vietnam was left to its own devices, drifting along towards its fate.
I have tender feelings for Nixon because everybody has warm feelings about their childhood. Actually, I didn’t like the Watergate trials ’cause they interrupted ‘The Munsters.’
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