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.
This is a key difference between the Watergate hearings and the currently unfolding House select committee hearings on the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the U.S. Capitol. Right now, Donald J. Trump likely does have a strong enough base in Congress for another White House run. As the lawn signs put it, including a few in my hometown: FOREVER TRUMP. What’s that Comden and Green lyric from “Some Other Time?” Even a lifetime isn’t enough.
As with any golden anniversary, the 50th anniversary of the Watergate break-in on June 17 has brought us plenty of documentaries and commemorations of the sleaze that was. Fictionalized history is on view in the entertaining if overextended “Gaslit,” the Starz series about Martha Mitchell (played by Julia Roberts) and her husband, U.S. Attorney General John Mitchell (Sean Penn, somewhere in there among the prosthetic jowls). Folks are taking the Watergate anniversary opportunity to rewatch “All the President’s Men.” Or, for laughs, the 1999 comedy “Dick.”
My father, who died earlier this month, expressed a political opinion only occasionally. We watched a lot of movies together in the ‘70s — comedies, dramas, bleak, paranoid conspiracy thrillers, including the occasional dark gem, “Chinatown” or “The Conversation.” There was something in those movies — a suspicion and a vibe that felt eerie, sensible and right, just as the Watergate hearings felt sensible and right.
Watching Nixon perform his resignation monologue that night in August ‘74, a few weeks before I started high school, I experienced a stealth thrill hearing my dad, the lifelong moderate Republican, muttering gimme a break like a mantra as a corrupt president listed his proudest accomplishments on camera.
He felt similarly about Trump, though he considered him a far more venal and destabilizing influence on America and the world. A few days before my dad died we talked a little about the political state of things, including the stubborn and considerable percentage of his party’s voters clinging to the lie of 2020 election fraud.
“Nearly half, is that right?” my father said. Then: “Yeah, well.”
And that, I thought, was that, because usually it was.
Then he added: “The Republicans are going to have to forget about that half.”
The Watergate hearings turned out to be a ratings winner, restoring some public confidence in government. Is it too much to hope for the same from the Jan. 6 hearings? Or does widespread confidence in our elected officials belong to a time when we could agree on the legitimacy of an election?
The Jan. 6 hearings have this in common with the Watergate hearings: They’re procedurals, and we love a courtroom drama, even one not taking place in an actual courtroom.
The improbable character transformations of the first two days have kept things interesting. With a few short videotaped appearances, onetime Trump lackey William Barr turned into the boy who cried BS, though three months ago, after acknowledging Trump was “responsible” (but not “legally responsible”) for the attack on the Capitol, Barr told NBC News: “Because I believe that the greatest threat to the country is the progressive agenda being pushed by the Democratic Party, it’s inconceivable to me that I wouldn’t vote for the Republican nominee.”
The siege of the U.S. Capitol and failed attempt to prevent a peaceful transfer of power seems to have worked, in the end. The election of 2024 threatens either to be one of two scenarios for two different movies: a revenger’s tragedy or a Civil War reenactment.
To a 12-year-old (well, me, at least) the Watergate hearings came as a reminder that adults who disagreed on virtually everything could set aside their differences in times of constitutional crisis. Nixon was that crisis. We have another now, only the “principle over party” idea hasn’t quite taken this time.
We are a long, long way from what journalist and newscaster Jim Lehrer noted on-air nearly 50 years ago, covering the Watergate hearing, without snark or judgment. “The Republicans,” he said, “seem just as interested as the Democrats in getting at the truth.”
Here’s hoping for a reboot.
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