Watergate's Clearest Lesson

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The conduct of the press after Woodward and Bernstein could only help Nixon's side of the argument. Watergate beatified the press; it gave reporters a model and an ambition. It made them zealous, fierce to expose, hungry to bring back trophies. A certain bloodlust went through the profession. Public officials, even the most obscure, knew that young reporters would go over their lives like flesh-eating birds. That knowledge has served to deplete the ranks of men and women willing to serve in government. Watergate helped to destroy the boundary between public and private life. Says University of Chicago Political Scientist Norman Nie: "Fear of exposure in their personal, financial, social and emotional lives is going to discourage competent people from going into government."

Watergate has performed its elaborate series of cultural cancellations, like the wakes of four or five different ships mingling and neutralizing one another. The suspicion lingers in many minds that the whole affair will eventually fade, enduring only as a kind of 1970s cultural period piece, with no more moral significance than, say, a vicuna coat or a deep freezer. Even now, says Washington Political Analyst Richard Scammon, "Watergate does not have much impact on anyone any more. Fact and fiction are so interwoven that people don't know which is which. They don't remember the Saturday Night Massacre. They do remember the Texas Chainsaw Massacre that they saw on the late TV movie."

But certain effects have found their way into law as a result of Watergate. Congress established the Freedom of Information Act, for example. Watergate brought both the FBI and the CIA under tighter control, although lately the Reagan Administration has moved to give back more secretive autonomy to both agencies. It has provided for public financing of political campaigns. Both the Senate and House established ethics committees as a result of Watergate.

Watergate undoubtedly functioned as a kind of massive cautionary tale. It is impossible to know, of course, how much corruption may have been prevented by the Watergate prosecutions. They surely had at least an inhibiting effect upon the powerful and tempted. In any event, the affair may have been even more important as a reassertion of official American morals after all the moral contaminations associated with the war in Viet Nam. Wisconsin Governor Lee Dreyfus was president of the University of Wisconsin's Stevens Point campus at the height of Watergate. "In the early seventies," he remembers, "we had a group on cam pus weaned on the milk of dissent, convinced that the system had been subverted. Watergate was what turned them around. It proved to us all how incredibly strong our system is."