Political Views,

Judith Coburn on the Return of Watergate
by MWC Editor At Large Tom Engelhardt

The recent revelations about the man often seen as the "moral hero" of the Watergate scandal, the Washington Post's Bob Woodward, have the feel of an interment ceremony. Reading press accounts of how Woodward swallowed the first Plame leak for a mere two-plus years without a peep and then went out on the Larry-King circuit to dismiss the significance of Plamegate, what came to mind was the burial ceremony that, in "committing" a body to the ground, goes, in part, "ashes to ashes, dust to dust." If there were a Watergate/Plamegate version of this, those two phrases might be replaced by "Nixon to Bush, Woodward to Woodward."

It's strange, isn't it, that the two great constitutional crises of the last half century are "gated" because the first became public thanks to a two-bit break-in by political thieves at an apartment complex named Watergate. We've been gated ever since. It's no less strange that Bob Woodward's decision to protect a source bookends both crises -- and, though a source may be a source, the differences between the two moments tell us much about the world we've traversed between Richard Nixon's impeachment in 1973 and today.

In both moments, it would not be wrong to say that a small coterie of high officials, a "cabal" (to use the word of Colin Powell's former Chief of Staff Lawrence Wilkerson) took control of the government, intent on pursuing a foreign war (though in Nixon's case, one initiated and escalated by Democratic presidents); intent as well on smearing and destroying presidential enemies, especially antiwar ones, on using "national security" to secure political power, and on removing the Constitutional fetters on the president's ability to pursue any policies he may desire.

In the first of those gate-moments, Bob Woodward, an ambitious, young Washington Post reporter, with his associate Carl Bernstein, protected a source dubbed "Deep Throat" (now known to be FBI second-in-command Mark Felt) for dear life. In that case, what the two of them were protecting was the power of Felt's information to potentially bring down a government deeply mired in every sort of misuse and abuse of power. In the Plamegate moment, Woodward, now a star reporter who has feasted off the Washington elite for decades and (on the theory that you are what you eat) has become one of them, is again protecting a source. We don't know who, though one prime suspect is National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley.

In this case, after a three-decade arc that ended with the Bush administration absorbing parts of the media into its publicity and attack machinery (and cowing much of the rest), Woodward finds himself protecting one of the smearers, a member of the cabal, from exposure for potential misuses and abuses of power of every sort. While the issue -- protecting a source -- seems no different, the stance of the protector has changed radically. For the sake of a new book, Woodward has evidently been willing to protect the American public from various revelations about a government intent on destroying the republic. What a difference a few decades make.

Russ Baker put it this way at Tompaine.com:

"[T]he very definition of an ‘investigative reporter,' as Woodward is labeled these days ad nauseum , is a pretty elastic one. Meeting a source in a parking garage as a way of identifying abuses and high crimes by powerful insiders is one thing. Dining off that for the next three decades while chumming it up with well-placed insiders for their ‘exclusive accounts' is another."

It's no coincidence, nor a passing matter, that each of our great imperial East coast papers, the New York Times and the Washington Post, found itself in these last years promoting to the heights of news glory reporters whose main claim to fame was as stenographers to the powerful; it might be considered a kind of justice that, in the end, each paper, instead of being the manipulator, found itself manipulated by a "star" -- Judy Miller in the case of the Times -- whose primary focus was the worst sort of access-to-power journalism. The eloquent Boston Globe columnist James Carroll put the matter trenchantly when he wrote: "As Watergate was about the war in Vietnam, so the Valerie Plame affair is about the war in Iraq. Woodward turns out to have been just another embedded reporter, doing the war-work of the Bush administration while pretending to be independent of it." The same could certainly be said of Judy Miller (with perhaps even less pretense to independence).

There's a wonderful little ditty by a long-dead English poet, Humbert Wolfe -- pointed out to me by a Tomdispatch reader -- that seems to catch something of this journalistic moment:

You cannot hope to bribe or twist
Thank God! the British journalist
But seeing what the man will do
Unbribed, there's no occasion to.

Judith Coburn, who as a young reporter covered the Vietnam War and the Watergate moment, considers below some of the larger parallels and shifts between the Watergate era and our own. Tom

Worse than Watergate?

The Mother of All Constitutional Crises
By Judith Coburn

On July 31, 1973, while the Vietnam war was still being fought, Representative Robert Drinan, a Massachusetts Democrat, introduced the first impeachment resolution against President Richard Nixon. One of the grounds for indictment Drinan proposed was the secret bombing of Cambodia, ordered by the President. To Drinan, this was a crime at least as great as the domestic scandals which had already come to be known as "Watergate." The fourteen months of massive B-52 "carpet bombings," which killed tens of thousands of Cambodian villagers and an unknown number of Vietnamese communist soldiers in border sanctuaries, were run outside the military's chain of command. They were also kept completely secret from Congress and the public (until exposed by New York Times reporter William Beecher). In recently released transcripts of telephone conversations between Nixon and his closest aides, the President ordered "a massive bombing campaign in Cambodia [using] anything that flies on anything that moves." (The transcript then records an unintelligible comment that "sounded like [General Alexander] Haig laughing.")

The secret bombing of Cambodia involved the same abuse of power and political manipulation of government agencies as Watergate, but only a few Congressional representatives like John Conyers, Elizabeth Holtzman, and Edward Mezvinsky supported Drinan's Cambodia article, which was soundly defeated by the House impeachment committee 26-12.

There are many myths about Watergate -- among them that Woodward and Bernstein rode into Dodge and rescued the republic all by themselves, that the impeachment of Richard Nixon saved American constitutional democracy from destruction, and that the grounds on which Nixon was impeached were a fair reflection of what he and "all the President's men" had actually done. In American mythology, "the system worked."

To most Americans, the slaughter of millions of Cambodians, Vietnamese, and Lao, as well as the destruction of their countries, seem unrelated to "Watergate." Henry Kissinger, one of the architects of the secret bombing of Cambodia, who had ordered his own dissenting staffers and several journalists illegally wiretapped to stop leaks, escaped indictment and would soon be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

Few now remember that it was Indochina, not the burglary of Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate Complex that really set Watergate, the scandal, in motion and led to a pattern of Presidential conduct which seems eerily familiar today. In his 1974 book, Time of Illusion, Jonathan Schell wrote of "the distortions in the conduct of the presidency which deformed national politics in the Vietnam years -- the isolation from reality, the rage against political opposition, the hunger for unconstitutional power, the conspiratorial mindedness, the bent for repressive action." He concluded that three presidents "consistently sacrificed the welfare of the nation at home to what they saw as the demands of foreign affairs."

To recast an infamous Vietnam slogan: They had to destroy American democracy at home in order to save the world for democracy.

Saving the System in the Name of National Security

It would seem little has changed. Rather than "saving the system," Watergate only slowed for a brief period the increasing concentration of power in the White House and the Pentagon, not to speak of its abuse after Ronald Reagan came to power in the name of national security. The now nearly forgotten Iran-Contra scandal during Reagan's reign revealed in a stark way the illegal lengths to which that administration's anti-communist ideologues were willing to go to defy Congress. Using every stealth method at their command, top Reagan officials defied and effectively nullified a Congressional ban on aid to the "Contras," right-wing Nicaraguans who were determined to overthrow the leftist Sandinistas then in power in their country. White House, CIA, State Department, and Pentagon officials schemed to pass along to the Contras profits from the illegal sale of high-tech arms to the fundamentalist Muslim regime of Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran. (Iran was in a desperate war with Saddam Hussein's Iraq, then officially supported by the Reagan Administration.)

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