|
I don’t want to spoil the party, but while everyone’s celebrating Deep Throat as if he
"solved" Watergate, the real culprit, the perpetrator of the initial crime, the man who actually ordered the Watergate break-in, has escaped.
That would be Richard Nixon, who was driven from office because he covered up the crime of others, not because he ordered the crime himself. In fact, if you accept Nixon’s story at face value, as all too many journalists and historians have—the story Nixon repeated in his memoirs, the one he took to his grave—Nixon didn’t order the Watergate burglary. Indeed, he was deeply shocked when he learned about it in the papers the next day. And he proceeded to sacrifice his Presidency in order to cover up for the overzealous acts (including the burglary) of his loyal subordinates
As Rutgers professor David Greenberg, the author of the valuable study Nixon’s Shadow, wrote in a New York Times op-ed in 2003: "[M]ost historians have absolved him of blame" for ordering the break-in. And so have most journalists. Either that or they try to trivialize the question, as if it didn’t make a difference whether Nixon essentially got away with the crime that started it all—and the lie about his role
This is the real scandal for journalists: Amidst the orgy of nostalgic self-congratulation that the Mark Felt revelation has prompted, it seems to have been forgotten that journalists have abandoned the most basic crime-reporter responsibility—pin down whodunit. As in who ordered it. None of the official investigations, the Senate Watergate Committee, the House Impeachment Committee, the Special Prosecutor’s report were able to pin it directly on Nixon. As a result, as Mr. Greenberg attests, in most mainstream biographies and histories of Nixon and Watergate, Nixon gets a pass. He lied about everything else, but on this one thing—the initiating act of the fall of a government—we should just take his word; he’s telling the whole truth
| |
