In today NY Times, David Brooks, unable to bring himself to jump on the Mark Felt attack bandwagon, but at the same time also unable to remove his lips from the Bush Administration's posterior, finds the true lesson of Watergate is......
Networking
The most interesting part of this Deep Throat business is Bob Woodward's description, in Thursday's Washington Post, of the state he was in when he met Mark Felt. He had graduated from Yale and was finishing a tour in the Navy, but he had no idea of what he wanted to do with his life. He was plagued by "angst and a sense of drift," and stricken by "considerable anxiety."
Bob Woodward, in other words, was in the midst of the starting-gate frenzy.
More below the jump.
That's right, Watergate isn't about the break-in, the "plumbers", the cover-up and destruction of evidence or crimes committed by the Nixon adminstration. No, its about Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate sitting at the bottom of that swimming pool:
For that is the purpose of Watergate in today's culture. It isn't about Nixon and the cover-up anymore. It's about Woodward and Bernstein. Watergate has become a modern Horatio Alger story, a real-life fairy tale, an inspiring ode for mediacentric college types - about the two young men who found exciting and challenging jobs, who slew the dragon, who became rich and famous by doing good and who were played by Redford and Hoffman in the movie version.
Woodward was nervous once, like you.
Yes, David, that's EXACTLY the lesson young people draw today from Watergate. Because it sure couldn't be the hackery of the punditocracy, could it?