40 Years After Watergate, It's Almost Impossible to Hold Government Accountable
is the title of this piece by Michael Winship. I am linking to an Alternet version of the piece.
It is written in the context of a recent conference on Watergate with many important participants present. Winship had himself been a journalist at the time. to give a quick sense of his attitude, let me quote the following:
It is written in the context of a recent conference on Watergate with many important participants present. Winship had himself been a journalist at the time. to give a quick sense of his attitude, let me quote the following:
Yet make no mistake — for all the general hilarity (and remember, to many, Richard Nixon had been the butt of jokes for decades before; Watergate was just the ultimate punchline), this was a true constitutional crisis. The abuse of presidential power was staggering, from the soliciting of illegal corporate campaign contributions used for hush money and delivered by bagmen, to the illicit actions of the aforementioned plumbers — an operation, by the way, that traced its roots all the way back to the early months of Nixon’s first term. Combined with the ongoing tragedy of Vietnam — including the secret bombing of Cambodia and the violent squelching of antiwar protest — Watergate shook the public’s confidence in government as it hadn’t been since the bleakest days of secession and the Civil War.The problem is that we seem forgetful. The efforts made to prevent another such crisis have long been eroded,