I was in my early 20s when five men were caught breaking into the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee at the Watergate office complex in Washington, D.C. (So you’d think it would have beefed up its security by 2016, no?) Of course, when the break-in occurred, most of America was totally unaware of what had happened and what the political ramifications would be. It took time and the hard work of a healthy media to bring to light the criminal activities of the Nixon administration.
Before the internet and C-SPAN, we relied on the news media to keep us informed, via daily newspapers, weekly news magazines, broadcast evening news, and, most notably, PBS, which broadcast most of the Watergate hearings. Some in the media, like Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, did a yeoman’s job; the rest at least reported fact as fact and fiction as fiction.
In addition, there was the plethora of books written about Watergate, beginning with All The President’s Men, The Imperial Presidency, The Final Days, and Blind Ambition. I often thought that the best of the books was written not by a journalist or a historian, but by Nixon himself. Or, rather, the publication of his words as transcribed and rushed into print by The Washington Post, with commentary by Post reporters, including Woodward and Bernstein.
Reading the conversations that Nixon surreptitiously recorded was fascinating. Much of it was boring, and some was confusing, the transcripts peppered with the words “inaudible” and “unintelligible,” as the reel-to-reel tape system was incapable of clearly recording the voices of those who were distant from the microphones hidden in the Oval Office, the Cabinet room, and even Nixon’s office in the EEOB. And of course, much of it was redacted with the notorious phrase “expletive deleted.” (I got a kick out of the Republicans who found President Obama in shirtsleeves to be disrespectful of the Oval Office, when Nixon’s speech was littered with expletives that needed to be deleted.)