Carl Bernstein was part of a 35-year retrospective on Watergate today as part of the 2007 Society of Professional Journalists National Convention. The Capitol Hill newspaper, The Hill, reports Carl Bernstein thinks Watergate would have played very differently if it happened today.
Why?
Because, Congressional oversight is more lax now than during Watergate.
“The difference with today is that the system did its job. The press did its job. The court did its job. The Senate committee did its job,” Bernstein said Saturday. “There’s been great reporting on this president. But there’s been no oversight. We have a Democratic Congress now and there’s still no oversight.”
Bernstein also said that “35 years of ideological warfare” could also change how the public would react to such a scandal.
“We live in a very different atmosphere today,” Bernstein said. “With Watergate, eventually the people of this country looked around and decided Nixon was a criminal president. I’m not sure the same chain of events would have taken place today.”
If we had today’s Congress during the Nixon presidency, then I doubt Richard Nixon would have even resigned. Shoot. It is doubtful even Vice President Spiro Agnew would have been forced to resign. Image, if you will, this scene on February 2, 1973. Nixon is before a joint session of Congress for the State of the Union address, and then…
 |
Welcome to 2007 with the same gang of Nixon minions running the U.S. government. Somewhere, Richard M. Nixon is smiling.
21 comments
Skip to comment form
Nixon would have rolled over these punks.
Great Pic, The evil grin on his face is perfect for this piece.
Thanks.
with today’s media- and today’s woodward- nixon would not have resigned…
range of Nixon’s abuses of power, especially the Saturday Night Massacre. I knew he was a liar and rabidly partisan, but his abuses of power seemed so far beyond the pale at the time that I found it hard to believe even a scheming jerk like him would sink that low.
Heh.
20/20 hindsight tells us Tricky Dick was a choirboy compared to the Bush crowd, but in 73-74 his crimes were pretty shocking.
I don’t even want to talk about what Congress has become.
Or Baghdad Bob Woodward.
soon after your essay was posted, my page wasn’t refreshed. I moved the first blockquote I have to make it less of an impact.
but this one, especially… the new elite consensus, formed at the initial meeting of the Trilateral Commission, was doubtless that Nixon had to go because he wasn’t a neoliberal.
Look, Nixon stood far, FAR to the left of where Reagan, Bush I, Clinton, and Bush II were. Who today would impose wage and price controls? Who then would have signed the Welfare Bill?
Bush is doubtless getting away with his crimes because the next President (regardless of whom) wants to commit more of her/ his own. Bush, after all, only tried to legalize what the “National Security State” has been trying to accomplish, illegally, since 1950.
Nixon’s “main crime,” the one he was punished for, was to have organized his own conspiracy alongside the many others operating in the government of his time. Congress cared as little about his illegal bombing of Cambodia (driving the country into the hands of the Khmer Rouge) as it does today about Bush’s numerous crimes against Iraq.
and I hope it gets through to at least some members of Congress. Thanks for the diary.