It’s fun to discuss public affairs with people who, like me, are old enough to remember history as it unfolded.
A friend of mine and I were talking yesterday about the Chris Christie mess in New Jersey, involving whether the New Jersey governor knew about the closing of lanes on the George Washington Bridge that caused all that traffic havoc on the world’s busiest motor vehicle span.
Christie insists he didn’t know anything in advance. He categorically denies ordering the lanes closed in retaliation against the Democratic mayor’s failure to endorse the Republican governor’s re-election bid in 2013.
My friend and I were recalling Watergate and how this controversy is beginning to resemble the track that the Watergate scandal took in 1972 and into 1973.
http://www.politico.com/story/2014/02/chris-christie-scott-walker-republican-governors-2016-presidential-election-103133.html?hp=t1_3
For those who are too young to remember, here’s a quick primer:
On June 17, 1972, some burglars broke into the Democratic Party headquarters at the Watergate office complex in Washington, D.C. The cops arrested them. The Washington Post covered the event as a crime story. They buried the initial report of the burglary deep inside the paper.
Two young reporters working the Metro desk, Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, were assigned to cover the cop story. But they began to smell a rat. Sources were telling them the burglary was more than what it appeared to be. Big hitters were involved. Bernstein and Woodward believed their snitches and sought more time to work the story. Their editors blew them off, telling them they didn’t think much of their tips. The reporters persisted. Finally, they talked their editors into letting them work their sources more aggressively.
President Richard Nixon was revealed to have ordered the cover-up of the investigation. We learned about enemies lists and we learned about how the president abused his power to cover his own backside. Nixon resigned rather than face certain impeachment.
Is the Chris Christie tracking inevitably toward a similar course? I don’t know. Republican officials think it’s a trumped-up controversy. They claim it’s phony and doesn’t merit the kind of coverage it’s getting in the media. But this kind of thing has a way of developing a life of its own. Officials are coming out of the shadows and saying the governor knew more than he says he did. One trail has led to alleged misuse of Hurricane Sandy relief money by the governor’s office.
I’ll refrain henceforth from attaching the “gate” suffix to this controversy. There’s only real “gate” scandal, but this one just might — perhaps, maybe — end as badly for the person at its center as the Watergate scandal did for the 37th president of the United States.
Stay tuned.