Week of March 5, 2007

It's not the crime, it's the cover-up." Few nuggets of political wisdom circulate more often in Washington. Few are more wrong. The old saw supposedly applies to Richard Nixon and Watergate. But, in Watergate, the crime itself--breaking into the opposing party's headquarters in an effort to subvert a presidential election--was self-evidently criminal and unconstitutional and merited Nixon's impeachment. Covering up only made matters worse. In contrast, during Kenneth Starr and Newt Gingrich's jihad against Bill Clinton, it didn't matter whether the president lied under oath, since his Republicans tormentors had no business asking him about Monica Lewinsky in the first place. (Indeed, a federal judge agreed that Clinton's statements about Lewinsky were immaterial to the sexual harassment case in which they were asked.) There may have been a cover up, but there was no crime.

So it turns out that the crime actually matters more than the cover up.

Is the nation's future too important to be left to presidential candidates?

Given their druthers, the candidates arrayed before us likely would photo-op their way from here to the acceptance speech. Last weekend, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama competed for inheritor of the civil-rights legacy, circa Selma 1965, while Messrs. Giuliani, Romney, Gingrich and five others skipped stones across the surface of conservative conventional wisdom at the CPAC convention.

OK, this is what politicians do. Or this is what they do when the imperatives of the modern presidential campaign require that one run full-tilt boogie toward the office 11 months before the primaries and some 600 days before the nation chooses a new president. But what does any of it have to do with us, with what's going on in the real world outside the cottage industry of our politics? We and they seem to be operating in separate universes just now: they in the beanbag political world as defined by campaign consultants and we in the world defined by al Qaeda, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Kim Jong Il and Vladimir Putin.

Sir, I sit here in Iraq helping to fight a war to help end what you described in your book. I am an African-American Army Officer fighting the war on terror. As an American I cannot help but be appalled by what you described in your book. As a ardent student of history, I find it fascinating that this story was never told to young American students. Can we continue to hold the morale high ground and try and shape the world to our ideals of freedom and democracy when we refuse to face our past? Does America really want to provide equal opportunity for all men and women regardless of race, creed, or religion or has this just become a good soundbite?

Our nation has great potential, but we will never reach that potential if we don't face our past. I think your book should become a must read for students of American history.

V/R,

Mark A. Hitchcock