Watergate's Clearest Lesson

(6 of 7)

What has Watergate done to the institution of the presidency? The authority of the office has more to do with the man who occupies it than with the ideas that compete for its attention. Still, Watergate has weakened the presidency somewhat. And that may be part of a longer process. None of the past five Presidents have completed two full terms. That is disquieting. Assassinations and forced retirements inject an odd sense of foreboding into presidential politics. There is the ghost of a thought that Americans are growing so impatient and unleadable that they insist on ritually disposing of the President every four years or less. The pat tern need not be inevitable, but in moments of depression, Americans may imagine that the procession of somehow foreshortened presidential terms makes the U.S. like the late Roman Empire: an ungovernable mess with a short attention span, restlessly chucking its leaders.

So a certain cynicism, a lack of expectation, lingers. It is encouraged by the spectacle of the rewards bestowed after the fall. Some of the miscreants of Watergate have profited handsomely. But of John they have had all of those legal fees to cover. John Dean commands $2,000 to $3,500 on the lecture platform. He sometimes shares the stage with Bob Woodward. But if the soci ety bestows fame and wealth upon people forced out of government in disgrace, what virtues are being proclaimed? How do we then say that the system worked? The phenomenon is comparable to noting that, in an economic sense, Japan and Germany emerged as the winners of World War II.

Watergate is such an elaborate masterpiece of irony (by taping himself, Nixon provided virtually all the evidence that destroyed his presidency) that too many people forget its clearest lesson. The deepest significance of Watergate, the only important meaning to be extracted from all of that wreckage and squalor, penetrates to the innermost American idea. To say, as many Americans did after Watergate, that the "system works" is only partly true: the constitutional system, in this case, with a lot of luck, did work. The important lesson that Watergate established is that no President is above the law. It is a banality, a cliché, but it is a point on which many Americans, possibly including Richard Nixon himself, seem confused.

It is perhaps a natural mistake, but the entire meaning of democracy depends upon correcting it whenever the powerful slip into that delusion. Napoleon once wrote: "They charge me with the commission of great crimes. Men of my stamp do not commit crimes." Richard Nixon evidently had some such Napoleonic conception of his exemptions. In his interview with David Frost in 1977, Nixon stated his basic mistake: "Well, when the President does it, that means it is not illegal." If it had no other purpose or consequence, the agony of Watergate would have accomplished something if it succeeded in teaching Richard Nixon a fundamental American civics lesson. On the evidence so far, that wisdom may be lost on him. The rest of the nation seems to have absorbed it reasonably well.