Watergate revisited

Once, on a trip to Our Nation's Capitol, I dropped by the Watergate Hotel, where a penny-ante political stunt eventually brought down a president.

 At the time of my visit to the DC landmark (which looked stodgy yet oddly futuristic in a Disney World kind of way), I was not long out of college. 

I "wrote for the newspaper," as my mother proudly put it. I had neither the stomach nor working style for political reporting, but I admired me some Woodward and Bernstein, the Washington Post reporters who did. With a printing press and an unnamed source, those men dethroned Richard  Nixon.  Richard Fucking Nixon.

Sadly, we learned nothing, says analyst Charles P. Pierce.

"The lasting "lesson" of Watergate, it appears, is that self-government was too dangerous, that the perils of it outweigh its values, and that the obligations of citizenship, beyond those which are purely ceremonial, are too heavy for citizens to bear. Between now and 2014, there are going to be lots of 40-year anniversaries marking the various episodes in the grand pageant of Watergate, and all the usual suspects will deal in all the customary banalities. Good Lord willing and the creek don't rise, the blog will be around to mark them all as well, because Watergate really did mean something at the time. There was a moment, pure and fleeting, where it looked as though another way really was possible."

Sadly, I think Pierce is right.

Above: Carl Bernstein (left) and Bob Woodward.
Below: Me in a newsroom circa 1992.