Watergate's Clearest Lesson

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Watergate passed itself memorably into American myth. Books by almost everyone involved came tumbling off the presses. The movie All the President's Men and TV miniseries like those based on John Dean's Blind Ambition and John Ehrlichman's novel The Company turned the history into the sort of instant legend in which fact and fabrication become indistinguishable. Watergate created its own rich vocabulary—of "stonewalling" and "twisting slowly slowly in the wind," of the "limited hangout" and expletives deleted." Haldeman, Ehrlichman and "the Big Enchilada,' as they called Attorney General John Mitchell, spoke a language of breezily menacing bonhomie.

Watergate produced strange, wonderful double-entendre evasion. White House Lawyer J. Fred Buzhardt Jr. referred to the famous 18½-min. gap on one tape as an "obliteration of the intelligence." Alexander Haig told Judge John Sirica that the gap might have been caused by "some sinister force."

The cast of characters was utterly right, a collection that Dickens would have imagined if he had been a late 20th century American Nixon himself was a masterpiece of internal disharmonies, with a face—the discomfited scowl, the sudden stabbingly inappropriate smile—like five cats and a bitter Calvinist thrown into a Hefty bag. There was G. Gordon Liddy, the wild hair Nietzsche who held his hand in candle flames. There was Martha Mitchell, the Aunt Pittypat embarrassment and midnight telephone dipso who turned into an oracle.

For 784 days, Watergate led Americans through a dark, tx wildering forest, through thickets of paranoia, past caves from which they heard voices—intimate, vengeful, disconcerting. The Oval Office transcripts lifted a rock. The tapes that Nixon accumulated and, inexplicably, never burned, seemed almost deliberately calculated to record the drama of his own unworthiness. It was as if the height of his life's success must produce some penance, some immense undoing, some terrible self-inflicted vengeance.

"I don't give a shit what happens," said the President of the United States. " want you all to stonewall it, let them plead the Fifth Amendment, cover-up or anything else, if it'll save it, save the plan." The statesman, the architect of detente and the opening to China, talks in these moments like a don organizing the rackets in Brooklyn: the leader of the free world as a paranoid thug. Watergate was a large and shadowy kingdom. At least some of its landscape came at last to seem a portrait of the darkling mind of Nixon himself. The House Judiciary Committee made a long, pained bipartisan examination of that countryside and adopted articles of impeachment that sounded with a resonant sadness: "In all of this, Richard M. Nixon has acted in a manner contrary to his trust as President and subversive of constitutional government, to the great prejudice of the cause of law and justice and to the manifest injury of the people of the United States."