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:
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, as I might add the way the media had been able to inform the public not only about Watergate but also the ongoing war in Vietnam has also been eroded - by secrecy, by better military control of access to information, by concentration of media in hands of corporations more interested in profits than in meaningfully informing the public, and by the many corruptions of our political process, by money to be sure, but also by those with an agenda not conducive to the ongoing health of a democratic republic.
I am not going to do a long and detailed analysis of the piece by Winship. You should read it.
What he makes clear is that many actors were involved in bringing people to account - the press to be sure, but also the Courts - from John Scirica to the Supreme Court; Congress - remember that there were Republicans who decided Nixon and his cronies had to be held accountable, people like Bill Cohen, Howard Baker, Lowell Weicker, Caldwell Butler. Remember that the Supreme Court slapped down Nixon on several issues - the Pentagon Papers as well as the White House Tapes. Quoting from the article,
As Fred Wertheimer of the reform group Democracy 21 remarked at the conference, “The Supreme Court understood that citizens had a constitutional right to protect their democracy from corruption.”
The paragraph that immediately follows is key:
People went to jail, lots of them — even the former attorney general of the United States, John Mitchell. Think about that. Many of them did hard time. Today, we couldn’t even get miscreant bankers to resign in exchange for their billions in bailouts, much less prosecute them for criminal behavior.
One thing that is clear is that people have lost a lot of faith in the institutions that are supposed to make sure that our government functions as we were taught - from Press to Congress to the Executive Branch to the highest Court in the land. You are reading these words on a website where these issues are addressed regularly: many here do not need a conference of aging participants in a previous crisis to understand what is happening. We saw our nation taken into an illegal war on false grounds. We saw a Congress surrendering its responsibilities to be a check on an imperial presidency, a process that despite political bloviations from Republicans for purely political purposes has largely continued unabated into the current administration. Yes, during the Reagan administration and Iran-Contra the process we should have expected was debased and devalued. Then in the first Bush administration we saw the use of pardons to reestablish some corrupt players back into the system. We saw appointment of people to the Judiciary who seemed dedicated to ensuring there be no further controls on power, be they executive or corporate, and who were not dedicated to protecting the rights of the people. The most powerful tool available to the Congress, impeachment, was debased in the partisan attack on Bill Clinton - whose approval rating went up because the American people, as disgusted as they may have been by his personal behavior, understood that it was irrelevant to his performance as President.
So where are we now? With drone strikes, with no accountability for the atrocities of the last administration, with corporate and financiers totally immersed in malfeasance political as well as economic not charged or fined, with a broken political system, with the will of the people being ignored because of a conventional wisdom influenced by the desperate desire for campaign contributions and an even greater desire to hold on to political office merely to occupy it rather than to stand for anything?
Winship framed his piece by describing the conference as being like the tour of Mookie Wilson and Bill Buckner reliving the famous ground ball through Buckner's legs that changed the outcome of a World Series. Now read his final paragraph:
But the Lessons of Watergate are lessons learned and lost. We’ve got to organize, get our government back and make it accountable. Many believe it will take another scandal the size of Watergate, or worse, to get us back on track. Let’s hope not. Instead, four decades in the future, let there be changes for the good America can celebrate, so we don’t wind up like those old ballplayers on the road, reliving an unforced error, again and again.