The importance of Watergate

Forty years ago, two journalists at the Washington Post started an investigation into a break-in at the Democratic Party headquarters in Washington. Asked about the incident a few days later the White House Press Secretary dismissed it as a “third-rate burglary.”  In fact, it turned out to be the first step into a complex labyrinth of political and criminal mischief undertaken at the behest of the Nixon White House. Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s subsequent revelations about what that president’s aides had done to hide the original crime eventually unseated Nixon and became the classic modern instance of why an independent press is important to a functioning democracy.

With hindsight, Nixon’s contempt for his rivals seems to have set the tone for decades of the paranoid style in American politics. The congressional inquiry into Watergate showed that the White House staff considered entrapping their opponents with prostitutes on a yacht moored off Miami Beach during the Democratic National Convention, leaking tax returns and burgling the Brookings Institution for embarrassing information about President Lyndon Johnson. The casual criminality occasionally went much further. In 1969, angered by a series of leaks, national security adviser Henry Kissinger instructed the FBI to tap the phones of 17 journalists and White House aides – without bothering to seek court approval.  There were also plans to discredit Daniel Ellsberg, source of the sensational Pentagon Papers that were leaked in 1971, by breaking into his psychiatrist’s office to obtain details that could smear him.  “You can’t let the Jew steal that stuff and get away with it,” Nixon told his chief of staff, H R ‘Bob‘ Haldeman, “You understand?”

In one of the infamous tape recordings the President made of these ill-advised schemes, his legal counsel warns him that the Watergate burglars are perjuring themselves to maintain the cover-up and have begun to ask for hush money. To which the president replies: “How much money do you need?” Nixon then talks about the difficulties of supplying cash to the right people, and procuring clemency for the main conspirator. When Haldeman interrupts the conversation, Nixon muses that they could use some of $350,000 secretly stashed in the White House, and considers laundering the money through bookmakers in Las Vegas and New York.

Subsequent administrations learned from these indiscretions but there has never been a shortage of cynical subterfuge for the American press to uncover. From the ‘plausible deniability’ of the Reagan years, to the unashamed lying of the Clinton years, through to the selling of faulty intelligence for the war in Iraq, the cat-and-mouse game the press has played with Washington has always remained lively.

The professional scepticism of an independent press is often more significant than the reflexive criticism of the political opposition.

Consider for example the Obama administration’s willingness to use unmanned drones in Afghanistan – a policy that has claimed hundreds of innocent lives and seriously compromised America’s standing in the region. Far too few Americans know about the consequences of this policy, and what little they know is due mainly to the efforts of a few embattled critics. But if a sustained critique of this folly were left in the hands of Obama’s political rivals, many of whom are constantly looking to burnish their hawkish credentials, there would be a complete silence on the matter.

President Obama’s use of executive privilege earlier this week is another instance of where a dogged press is essential. At the eleventh hour a congressional committee considering whether Attorney General Eric Holder should be cited for contempt found itself stalled by the White House’s decision not to disclose important documents. The matter under investigation is the so-called ‘Fast and Furious’ debacle in which the US Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives in Arizona allowed the sale of illegal weapons to arms traffickers who then sold them to Mexican drug cartels. (Guns transferred in this misconceived operation were later used in a shootout that killed US border agent Brian Terry.) Until the full story is disclosed, with all its attendant embarrassments, the Obama administration will be given no quarter by the American press.  And that is entirely as it should be.

Evidence at the Leveson inquiry in the UK has supplied many striking examples of what goes wrong when the press becomes too arrogant, or too comfortable with politicians. But forty years after Watergate it is also worth remembering that a stubbornly critical press is often the only resort that modern democracies have to correct their worst political errors, and to remind their leaders that the truth always shows up eventually and even the cleverest politicians will one day have to answer for their actions.