Watergate's Clearest Lesson

Ten years later, the point remains: Not even a President is above the law

A few weeks ago, a handful of survivors of the Titanic came together in a Philadelphia hotel to observe the 70th anniversary of the sinking. They fetched out their memories of that night and passed them around like photographs. They gazed at a few forlorn relics of the voyage: Mrs. John Jacob Astor's life jacket, a battered deck chair, other odds and ends from the unsinkable "Floating Palace" before it went down.

It will be ten years next week since a security guard named Frank Wills discovered a piece of tape on the latch of a door in the Watergate complex in Washington. He called the police, and thereby began the destruction of Richard Nixon's presidency. The survivors of Watergate will not be holding reunions. No one died at Watergate, of course, as the bumper stickers say—meaning, rather heavily, that Chappaquiddick was worse. But 25 people went to jail, and Nixon became the first President in Amen can history to leave the White House one step ahead of impeachment.

That kind of disgrace does not encourage nostalgia. In an interview last week with Diane Sawyer of CBS, Nixon said, "Remember Lot's wife. Never look back!" He suggested that those who obsessively revisit Watergate may suffer from "Narcissus complexes." Nixon and the others from his crew (most of whom he threw overboard at the last moment, the captain struggling to be the last to go) will never gather at some hotel in, say, San Clemente, to share memories and souvenirs—enemies lists, voice-activated taping systems, smoking guns, the moral compasses that they lost.

Watergate was an American morality play. The Constitution was the hero. That was Watergate's simplest and purest dimension. But it was fascinatingly more than that. It was one of the nation's most complicated psychological and cultural experiences. The multiple levels and facets of it (somewhat like the levels and intricacies of Nixon's character) give Watergate an almost inexhaustible interest.

"The fall of great personages from high places," the critic George Steiner has written, "gave to medieval politics their festive and brutal character. [Such cases] made explicit the universal drama of the fall of man." Watergate had both its grubbiness and its universality. It was a quagmire and a catharsis. It was a mystery story with splendidly bizarre obscurities of plot. It was a national psychodrama, a spectacle of immense power that the Senate committee hearings dramatized as a daytime soap. (Viewers actually called in to the television networks to suggest changes of script or pace, as though they were indeed watching a political serial.)