This might be a good time for folks to get a copy of
All The President's Men, Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward's book on their investigation of Watergate. It gives sense of how long it took from when the burglary happened (June 17, 1972) until Nixon resigned (August 8, 1974) and what all happened in between. It chronicles how these two reporters had to fight skepticism, how their editor had to protect them, and how public opinion slowly came around.
The details will be different, the timing will be different, but the same forces will be (are) in tension:
- president versus the media;
- the pressure to publish now versus the risk of losing credibility because there isn't enough publishable evidence;
- people's belief systems versus facts that challenge those beliefs;
- the pressure on the Republicans to protect their president and their power versus doing what's right for the country.
Some details are eerily similar.
Nixon was brought down by Republicans breaking into the Democratic National Headquarters in the Watergate complex. The burglars were caught because an observant 24 year old security guard, Frank Wills, saw that there was tape that covered the latch on a door that kept the door from locking. The burglars were caught that night. Then Woodward and Bernstein had to follow the trail that led from the burglars to the oval office.
Today an electronic burglary at the Democratic National Committee is at the center of Trump's problems. And as with Watergate, the thieves were identified before the election, but Trump won nevertheless. Today, too, journalists are pursuing the question of the connection to the Oval Office.
There are significant differences between the two periods as well. Nixon had a long list of accomplishments from the Clean Water Act, Affirmative Action, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Privacy Act, opening relations with China. But he was being dragged down by the Vietnam War and the anti-war protests. The break-in at the Democratic National Headquarters happened during the campaign for his second term. In 1972, Nixon's a
pproval ratings were at 50% after his China trip and would climb to almost 70% after the Paris Peace accords were signed in 1973. But then his ratings began to plunge to just under 30% by the end of 1973.
Trump's big achievements include:
- failing in his immediate push to ban Muslims from the US (I'm using Trump's campaign rhetoric here, just as the judges have when they blocked the the orders)
- failing to overturn Obamacare
- dismantling regulations whose whose ultimate impacts are yet to be known, but won’t be pretty
- huge conflicts of interest over his business holdings
And he comes into office far less popular. His approval ratings
according to Gallup are already at 36%, in only his third month in office.
So who will be the next Woodward and Bernstein? Who knows? The quest to uncover Trump’s illegal actions has been taken up by many media outlets. Including internet media that didn’t exist.
Trump is helping spur the investigative reporters by
blocking key media from White House press briefings, sending them out to do real investigative reporting and the White House loses control of the agenda. And while Trump's tweets do get significant attention, they don't set the kind of agenda those around Trump want set.
The Washington Post (Woodward and Bernstein's paper), the
New York Times,
The New Yorker, CNN, and even the
Wall Street Journal are bringing stories to print on a regular basis. Social media are spreading those stories and finding their own.
Woodward and Bernstein were blessed with a high level informant who they dubbed Deep Throat after the first pornographic movie to be shown in regular theaters.
Their informant only outed himself thirty years later. Woodward had cultivated him as a source in 1970 and they basically used him to confirm information they had gathered in other ways.
I suspect this time around, a lot of different reporters and media will be contributing important stories and events may well move faster now because social media speeds up the spread of news so dramatically.
But I'm guessing there are reporters now who, over drinks, are contemplating who will play them in the movie.
Reading the book or watching the movie will allow those who weren’t there to get some guidance in how these things work. But, of course, expect some new zigs and zags we didn’t see in the early 1970s. Republicans on the Watergate Committee, for example, while not allowing Democrats to make any cheap shots, didn’t block the exposure of damaging evidence as it was uncovered.
People who would rather watch the movie (with Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman), it's available as a Netflix DVD and probably in your public library.