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Watergate

  • Originally published 09/07/2015

    The politics of public memory, from Watergate to Iraq

    Nick Enfield

    Michael Schudson’s book, Watergate in American Memory, is a masterly study of how versions of events can become facts. The Watergate case study shows brilliantly that while facts are important, so are our interpretations and portrayals of those facts.

  • Originally published 06/16/2015

    How Watergate’s E. Howard Hunt Made Me a Better Historian

    David A. Horowitz

    The lessons learned from my encounter with Howard Hunt would penetrate my subsequent scholarship on the 1920s Ku Klux Klan, New Deal opponents, pre-Pearl Harbor noninterventionists, post-World War II anticommunists, 1960s racial segregationists, and latter-day critics of the Washington political class.

  • Originally published 03/17/2015

    A final Watergate scandal uncovered by researcher

    President Richard Nixon stole 4,000 acres from the United States Marine Corps to secretly build his presidential library on a spectacular piece of prime federal real estate and created a new federal bureaucracy to cover up the scheme.

  • Originally published 08/11/2014

    Increasing Number of Americans Think Watergate Was 'Just Politics'

    Which of these two statements comes closest to your own point of view about Watergate — it was a very serious matter because it revealed corruption in the Nixon administration or it was just politics — the kind of thing that both parties engage in?

  • Originally published 08/09/2014

    Why Nixon Matters

    Stanley I. Kutler

    Forty years ago, on August 8, Richard M. Nixon made unprecedented constitutional history when he resigned the presidency amid the disgrace and scandal of Watergate.

  • Originally published 07/22/2014

    Watergate Was the Only Serious Impeachment

    Albert R. Hunt

    The impeachment of President Bill Clinton and the calls to do so for George W. Bush and now Barack Obama are petty and frivolous by comparison.

  • Originally published 06/26/2014

    Howard Baker has died

    Howard H. Baker, Jr., served 18 years in the U.S. Senate starting in 1966, when he became the first Republican to be popularly elected to the Senate from Tennessee.

  • Originally published 08/19/2013

    Geoff Shepard: The Watergate Cover-Up Trial: Justice Denied?

    Watergate remains the greatest political scandal in modern American history. It culminated not only in President Nixon’s announcement of his resignation, 39 years ago Thursday, but in the conviction and imprisonment of his three most senior aides. Attorney General John Mitchell, White House Chief of Staff H.R. Haldeman, and Assistant to the President for Domestic Affairs John Ehrlichman were found guilty of conspiracy, obstruction of justice, and perjury in the three-month Watergate cover-up trial, which ended on January 1, 1975.

  • Originally published 07/08/2013

    National Trust for Historic Preservation moving to Watergate

    WASHINGTON — The National Trust for Historic Preservation was looking for a building with a story to it, and it found one — the Watergate.In February, the trust — a nonprofit organization whose mission is to protect historical buildings — announced that it was selling its Dupont Circle headquarters, which was built in 1917 and once served as a luxury apartment building for the likes of then-Treasury Secretary Andrew W. Mellon.The search began for another historical building in town, and the group announced last month that it had settled on the Watergate office building, home to Washington’s most famous burglary....

  • Originally published 05/23/2013

    Elizabeth Drew: Why Obama Is Not Nixon

    Elizabeth Drew is a regular contributor to The New York Review and the former Washington correspondent of The Atlantic and The New Yorker. She is the author of fourteen books.
 (March 2013)References to Watergate, impeachment, even Richard Nixon, are being tossed around these days as if they were analogous to the current so-called scandals. But the furors over the IRS, Benghazi, and the Justice Department’s sweeping investigation of the Associated Press, don’t begin to rise—or sink—to that level. The wise and pithy Matt Dowd, a former Republican operative, said recently, “We rush to scandal before we settle on stupidity.” Washington just loves scandals; they’re ever so much more exciting than the daily grind of legislation—if there is any—and the tit-for-tat between the president and the congressional Republicans over the budget was becoming tedious. Faux outrage is a specialty here.

  • Originally published 04/24/2013

    Beverly Gage: Unanswered Questions About Watergate

    Beverly Gage, a Yale history professor, is the author of The Day Wall Street Exploded.The title of Robert Redford’s new documentary, which aired on the Discovery Channel last night, is All the President’s Men Revisited. At times, it seems more like All the President’s Men Repeated. Though created to coincide with the 40th anniversary of Watergate, the first half of the film contains little that could not be found in Alan J. Pakula’s 1976 political thriller starring Redford and Dustin Hoffman. You know the story: A pair of scrappy young reporters named Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein stick to their guns when nobody else will, and their reporting helps to bring down a president.

  • Originally published 03/28/2013

    Conrad Black: The Truth about Bob Woodward

    Conrad Black is the author of Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Champion of Freedom, Richard M. Nixon: A Life in Full, and the recently published A Matter of Principle. He can be reached at cbletters@gmail.com.Gradually, inexorably, the great Watergate fraud is unraveling. The Knights of Revelation, 40 years onward, are being exposed, in the light of analysis unclouded by cant and emotionalism, as the myth-makers they always were. Bob Woodward, unable to resist the temptation to try again and again to be at the forefront of investigative journalism, is being steadily exposed as a chronically dishonest myth-maker. Carl Bernstein, his Watergate partner, is at least cautious enough not to tempt the fates with a regime of endless returns to the well of public gratitude for spurious and destructive exposés. Though there is no sign that he is conscious of the proportions of their original Mt. Rushmore–sized canard, he has been relatively uncontroversial these intervening decades, sheltering in the greasy slick Vanity Fair.

  • Originally published 03/07/2013

    George F. Will: Watergate Reminds Us that D.C. Has Been Worse

    George F. Will is a columnist for the Washington Post.“When I first met Richard Nixon,” Robert Bork says in the book he completed a few weeks before his death in December, “I could see in his expression the conviction that someone had blundered badly.” With the dry wit that, together with his mastery of the dry martini, made him delightful company, Bork says the president, who “almost visibly recoiled,” evidently considered his red beard emblematic of Ivy League left-wingery. Nixon probably thought the barbarians were within the gates.They were. On Nixon’s staff.

  • Originally published 03/04/2013

    Max Holland: Woodward Obama story "only the latest in a long list of [Woodward's] prevarications"

    The week's developments include a pope emeritus for the first time in six centuries, federal budget cuts seemingly designed by Sweeney Todd, and the visit by one of the NBA's all-time rebounders (Dennis Rodman) to the son of one of the world's greatest sportsmen (that would be North Korean dictator Kim Jung Un, whose late father claimed to have shot five holes-in-one on his very first golf outing).And yet somehow, legendary Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward thrust himself at the center of the news with his claim that he had been menaced by an unnamed White House official. That's serious stuff. Woodward has been getting under the skins of presidential administrations for four decades now....One close Woodward observer has little tolerance for this latest episode."Woodward was caught out in a lie when he represented Sperling's admonition as a threat," said Max Holland, author of Leak: Why Mark Felt Became Deep Throat."But that misrepresentation is only the latest in a long list of prevarications that go all the way back to Watergate and the fabled Deep Throat. No other journalist would be allowed to get away with this kind of serial behavior."It's a self-inflicted wound. A great reporter Woodward may well still be. But his behavior has called into question his standing as a reliable narrator.

  • Originally published 12/20/2008

    Deep Throat

    The debut of Deep Throat. Not the movie. The Watergate source for Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein.

  • Originally published 01/19/2016

    Watergate was a Big Deal

    Steve Hochstadt

    Every political scandal gets compared to Watergate. But no political scandal since then can compare with a President authorizing burglaries by White House staff in order to win re-election, then lying about his administration’s cover-up.

  • Originally published 12/14/2014

    Dick Cheney’s David Frost Moment

    Mark Byrnes's Facing Backwards

    “I'm more concerned with bad guys who got out and released than I am with a few that, in fact, were innocent.”--Dick Cheney on Meet the Press