I miss Watergate.
I miss the hearings, so soothingly devoted to protocol, so revealing in their honest and fully bipartisan effort to ferret out the chief weasels. The patience. The results. Richard M. Nixon’s bizarrely serene and smiling resignation speech, two summers after the break-in. It was an all’s-well ending to a very long movie, though the ending wasn’t really the end. Nixon got his pardon and a partial image makeover after leaving the White House in disgrace. This was the ‘70s. As my friend Eric Lindbom said: “In the ‘70s, before ‘Star Wars,’ if you saw a post-Watergate movie with a happy ending you felt cheated, somehow.”
The Watergate hearings proceeded as a fully bipartisan effort because Nixon’s party didn’t want to be associated with Nixon any longer. In his resignation announcement Nixon explained: “I no longer have a strong enough political base in the Congress” to continue.
