Today is a big day in the annals of American political history and no one is giving it any attention.
Well, almost no one.
Forty-one years ago today – on June 17, 1972 – a band of burglars broke into an office at the Watergate Hotel in Washington and pilfered some papers from the Democratic National Committee. What would transpire over the course of the next two years would rip the nation’s political structure apart. But as it turned out, we got through it and emerged in good shape on the other side.
Watergate has become part of our nation’s political jargon. It defines scandals. Part of that word – “gate” – has been used countless times since to label subsequent political scandals and even minor dust-ups. Watergate stands on its own.
The burglars got caught. The Washington Post, after some time had elapsed, began looking deeply into what actually happened, who ordered it, who sought to cover it up and who eventually was responsible. The trail led eventually into the Oval Office, which was occupied at the time by President Richard Nixon.
The president, the nation would learn in a stunning surprise about a year later during congressional hearings, tape-recorded conversations. One of those recordings would reveal that President Nixon ordered the cover-up.
Bad call, Mr. President.
It would not end well for Richard Nixon’s presidency. The U.S. House Judiciary Committee approved articles of impeachment, setting the stage for the full House of Representatives to follow suit, which would have resulted in a Senate trial and – in my view – the likely conviction of the president. Nixon got ahead of the train and quit the presidency on Aug. 9, 1974.
A lot of individuals who dislike the current president, Barack Obama, now are saying the controversies that are nipping at his flanks rank right up there with Watergate. Some of my fellow travelers say, for example, that “no one died” from the Watergate scandal, unlike those who died in the Benghazi, Libya firefight this past September. That, they say, makes the Benghazi matter worse.
Tragic as the Benghazi consulate disaster was, it doesn’t yet rise to the kind of abuse of power revealed in the Watergate investigation. Back then a president ordered the CIA to get involved in stopping a criminal probe and worked diligently to keep the truth from the public. President Nixon clearly committed an “impeachable offense.”
But the good news is that we survived. Our nation healed, thanks in part to the decency that came to the White House when Gerald R. Ford took the oath as the nation’s 38th president.
I call attention to this date not so much to herald the misdeeds, but to salute the strength of the system of government that serves us.
As President Ford said when he addressed the nation after taking office, “The Constitution works.”