Legacy and lessons of Watergate

Five men are arrested at 2:30 in the morning trying to break into a sixth-floor office suite. The initial Washington Post story says there was "no immediate explanation as to why the five suspects would want to bug the Democratic National Committee offices or whether or not they were working for any other individuals or organizations.'' The White House press secretary describes it as "a third-rate burglary.''

Forty years ago today, the greatest political scandal of the 20th century began to unfold, an episode that would change American politics, transform the way journalism is practiced, alter the relationship between government and the public around the globe, and reshape the English language.

The power of the American press would be enhanced and the power of the presidency would be diminished.

And Richard M. Nixon would be forced from the White House — the only chief executive to resign the office.

This is the Watergate lesson and the Watergate legacy.

For more than two years Watergate left the world both riveted and repelled. Many of the assumptions that were the foundation of the most powerful nation on the globe and the oldest democracy in the world were upended. Seemingly in slow motion, a president who had won the greatest landslide victory in American politics tottered and fell. An entire political culture was rocked, a mighty nation went into paralysis.

"So many layers of lies were needed to protect the layers of secrecy that no one, including the president himself, knew what the truth was anymore,'' wrote biographer Richard Reeves a quarter of a century later. "No one inside the White House knew whom or what to believe. There was a chaos of lies at the top."

A series of disparate episodes — political intrigue, clandestine operations, cover-ups, financial fudging, high-level political shake-ups, court showdowns, secret tapings — came to be known by a three-syllable word that still reverberates across the continent and that raises questions that remain with us still.

Some of these questions are political: Should the people entrusted with enforcing the law live above the law? How does a political system address fundamental questions of integrity? Where does partisan activity end and criminal activity begin? How sturdy is the right of individuals to question and challenge authority?

Some of the questions are broader, going to the heart of humans as individuals: Is it ever permissible to lie, or was Churchill right when he said that there were times when the truth should be attended by a bodyguard of lies? When, if ever, should political adversaries become personal enemies? What is the nature and value of loyalty? Should a record of achievement purchase leniency in the courts or in the public's eye?

Throughout this anniversary season, the sometimes sordid, oftentimes comical, and always startling chronology of this affair — first known as a "caper,'' then a "scandal,'' finally a "constitutional crisis'' — will be relived. These looks over history's shoulder will reveal remarkable arrogance, audacity, and affrontry — and put on display equally remarkable acts of grit, ingenuity, and courage.

And a shorthand was enshrined in the English tongue forever.

It sometimes seems there is no scandal too small to escape being designated with the "-gate'' label. But the endurance of Watergate doesn't end the way those words do, with a suffix.

Watergate cognoscenti live for the moment in which they can describe a calculated and deliberately distracting news leak as a "modified limited hangout.'' The rest of us, unaware that we are using Watergate allusions, speak easily of the need to "follow the money,'' examine public records for "cover-ups,'' watch for the "smoking gun,'' are on the alert for documents or evidence to be "deep-sixed,'' and are not surprised when an expletive is deleted (as so many were in the transcripts of the Nixon tapes) or a source becomes a "Deep Throat."

And we ask a variation of the question that Republican Sen. Howard H. Baker Jr. posed: "What did the president know and when did he know it?"

Watergate wrought great changes in American political culture and the presidency. The financial influence in politics now is well-known. The right of individuals to learn more about how they are governed through freedom-of-information requests and "sunshine'' laws is firmly established.

But a scandal that produced 44 million pages of documents left us with two great, overriding, and enduring legacies.

One is a lingering skepticism of institutions and the individuals who head them, contempt for authority figures of all sorts, distrust of the influence of money in politics, and deep doubts of the schoolboy verities of the civics class, especially the twin notions that nobility resides in government and that noble principles animate those who govern us.

Those schoolboy verities were endangered by Lyndon B. Johnson and his "credibility gap'' and were entombed by Nixon, whom the former New York Times reporter Tom Wicker once described as a man who "seems to have regarded life as a battle, even to have welcomed struggle.''

The other Watergate legacy is an enduring appreciation for those who, with courage and conviction, did their duty.

"If we are to talk about the end of Watergate,'' Jimmy Breslin wrote in How the Good Guys Finally Won, his classic 1975 account of Watergate and the drive to impeach the president, "why don't we take a walk away from the convicts and step into the shafts of sunlight provided by some of the people who worked for their country, rather than against it?''

Today that reminds us of the value of the free flow of information and even prompts an acknowledgment of the ability of the press to shine a light not only on the dark arts of politics but also on the routine functions of government.

Growing out of that is the assumption that, for all the inherent faults of the political class, ethics in government still should not be a contradiction in terms. Forty years later, that assumption, though tested and tattered, remains with us still.