Like many young people, Watergate inspired me to become a journalist. But unlike some of my contemporaries, I was lucky enough to find myself reporting on how Watergate affected the Congressional representation in my own hometown, while still a college student. Before I tell this serendipitous tale, I’d like to point you toward a very thoughtful essay by Dan Balz, the chief correspondent of the Washington Post, about how Watergate led directly to the era of Trump and his demagogic efforts to overturn a legitimate Presidential election. Watergate ushered in not only a new level of mistrust in government (from which we’ve never fully recovered), but it also changed the Republican party in ways that presaged the current sharp partisan divide we’re experiencing now, Balz says. In addition, Watergate introduced a more adversarial form of journalism to the American polity. Before Watergate, reporters were a lot more deferential to political leaders. Not only might “a reporter play poker with the president in the Oval Office,” Balz says, but the private lives of politicians were considered off-limits.
That is obviously no longer true, a reality I would applaud, since this more robust reporting eventually led to the #MeToo movement, which exposed the misdeeds of the rich and powerful along with those of political kingpins. And of course the growing diversity of the journalistic corps made room for reporters who were not just white men allowed into the sanctum of the President’s office to play poker. And that change has been beneficial. As Balz himself notes:
By holding government officials accountable, vigorous and intrusive journalism leads to more effective and responsive government. Without the probing eye of journalists, corruption and malfeasance would be even greater than it otherwise would be.
None of this, of course, was on my mind when, as a naive college student in 1973, I accepted a friend’s invitation to accompany him to Washington, D.C. We both worked for a small daily newspaper in Bucks County, PA, and my friend was traveling to Washington to check out Georgetown Law School. He suggested I come along and interview our local Congressman, Ed Biester, about the gathering political storm over Watergate. As I write in my memoir, Brassy Broad: How one journalist helped pave the way to #MeToo:
That summer, President Nixon was being bombarded by press coverage accusing his administration of orchestrating a cover-up of the Watergate burglary. An increasing number of Congressional representatives had even begun to talk about impeachment. Biester, a moderate Republican, was one of the few who hadn’t come out for or against President Nixon.
My editor at the Today’s Spirit loved the idea, so off I went to D.C. I relate the whole story in my book, but suffice it to say, Ed Biester thought he was in for a softball interview with an inexperienced student and he became outraged when I would not stop asking him about Watergate and Nixon. He lost his temper and I gained a front-page story for the next day’s paper. Rather than intimidate me, as Biester surely intended, that experience was what was sold me on becoming a journalist. (Biester finally came out in favor of impeachment and decided not to run again a few years later).
Fast forward to 2022 and the ongoing Congressional hearings on the Jan. 6 insurrection. The legislators holding the hearings are calling what happened an attempted coup that was instigated by Trump. While Nixon may not have ordered the Watergate break-in, he was certainly involved in the cover-up and that is what led to his downfall. The difference is that Nixon resigned before he was about to be impeached, while Trump refused to step down even after he was impeached twice. It took a Presidential election to remove Trump from office and even then he tried to subvert the democratic process. As Balz explains, what happened on Jan. 6 all started with Watergate:
Trump’s presidency can be seen as the culmination of what began with Watergate. Today is a time of heightened distrust in government, weakened institutions, a more polarized electorate, greater partisanship, a fractured and more politicized media, and a Republican Party with a stronger anti-government ideology and more ruthless in its approach. Trump seized on all of this, and more, to become president, to exercise his powers in office and to try to stay in office after he had lost to Joe Biden.
“I think it’s pretty clear that he exposed as president some of the real weaknesses and dysfunction of all these institutions,” said [Julian] Zelizer, [a historian and professor at Princeton University]. “From Congress to the media to other elements of administrative and executive power. And I think it’s true that they’re just not working as well right now as they had when this whole story started.”
Those are scary words indeed. That’s why we need to pay attention to the Jan. 6 hearings — to ensure that our democracy survives.
This blog is also posted on medium.com.
