Watergate's Clearest Lesson

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After its bleak, interminable passage, Watergate seemed to issue forth into the sunburst of a civics lesson. But what exactly was the content of the lesson? If Watergate was a morality play the question, then as now, was what moral to draw from it The drama transfixed Americans. Mostly, it bewildered foreigners. Moscow believed it was a trick to destroy detente. The rest of the world had difficulty grasping what all of the agony was about. Foreigners tended to watch the spectacle in the way that an agnostic beholds a believer who is suffering a bout of spiritual anguish; the ordeal seems impressive, perhaps, but unnecessary, odd and even self-indulgent. "The French never understood why the Americans got so upset over Watergate,' French Historian François Furet said last week. "The French in particular and Europeans in general do not have a moral conception of politics." An English political columnist ruminating on Watergate sounds as if he were discussing an odd tribal custom: "That's true. The Americans take democracy very seriously " Many Europeans admired Richard Nixon as a statesman the last strong American President in the field of foreign policy. To them, Watergate was a profligate waste of superior leadership. It weakened America's force in the world.

How does Watergate seem to Americans now? How did it change them? History since Watergate has, in some ways, bent opinion toward the French view of the affair. Watergate has always been a sort of conundrum of the disproportionate. How could such a trivial event as a midnight break-in at the Democratic National Committee, an idiotic little piece of ineptitude by five stooges, end by destroying the leader of the most powerful nation in the world? The break-in itself was, said Presidential Press Secretary Ron Ziegler, "a third-rate burglary attempt." The cause (a moment of incompetent political espionage) did not seem commensurate with the effect (the resignation of the President), not in the usual Newtonian laws of action and reaction. Watergate was more like an event in quantum physics. A particle of history as minuscule as an atom produced a cataclysm.

That sense of disproportion has skewed judgments about Watergate ever since, has left an impression in many minds that Watergate was essentially an injustice to the Nixon Administration. That is certainly Nixon's own official opinion. In a 1978 appearance at the Oxford Union in England, Nixon put Watergate into the context of his successes in foreign policy. "It was these little things that I failed in," he said. Watergate, he has suggested all along, amounted to little more than an unfortunate series of low-level mistakes and stupidities that he was too busy to notice and correct.

Nixon knew enough about the rhythms of American opinion to predict, accurately, that his status would change. Indeed, his reputation has gained by a process of historical comparison and the sheer passage of time. Since he boarded his helicopter on the White House Lawn for the last time in August 1974, the impression of Watergate on the public mind has been blurred in several ways: