A14 EZ RE THE WASHINGTON POST.SUNDAY, JUNE 12 , 2022
ride decisions made by lawmak-
ers on how to spend the govern-
ment’s money. The 1973 War Pow-
ers Resolution, a response to Viet-
nam, was designed to prevent
future presidents from engaging
in military conflicts without hav-
ing consulted Congress in ad-
vance.
But these, too, have proved
ineffective. Presidents have rou-
tinely ignored these require-
ments, and a compliant Congress
has offered minimal resistance.
“Too often, Congress was willing
to basically allow presidents to do
what they have to do in order to
deal with the challenges that are
out there,” Panetta said.
The 1978 Ethics in Government
Act set new financial disclosure
requirements for public officials
and put restrictions on lobbying
by former officials. The act’s Title
VI created the system for the
appointment of special prosecu-
tors by the attorney general to
investigate allegations against ex-
ecutive branch officials.
More broadly, the combination
of the ethics legislation, calls for
more rigorous congressional
oversight and the work of inde-
pendent counsels has carried for-
ward to the present day. “Water-
gate had inaugurated an era of
politics by other means, where
political opponents attempted,
instead of defeating one another’s
arguments, or winning elections,
to oust each other from office by
way of ethics investigations,” his-
torian Jill Lepore wrote in “These
Truths.”
Between 1970 and 1994, ac-
cording to Lepore, federal indict-
ments of public officials went
from “virtually zero to more than
thirteen hundred.” The effect of
all this “also eroded the public’s
faith in the institutions to which
those politicians belonged.”
Of all the efforts to clean up
after Vietnam and Watergate, re-
forms of U.S. intelligence agen-
cies have been generally the most
successful and long-lasting. The
reforms grew in part out of hear-
ings by a select Senate committee
headed by then-Sen. Frank
Church (D-Idaho), which investi-
gated questionable and illegal
covert actions aimed at foreign
leaders and U.S. citizens by the
CIA, the FBI and the National
Security Agency.
Then-Sen. Gary Hart (D-Colo.)
was a member of the committee
and remembers vividly the day
when CIA Director William Colby
came to testify and delivered to
the committee what were known
as the “family jewels,” a compen-
dium of egregious actions by the
agency, including attempts to as-
sassinate Cuban leader Fidel Cas-
tro.
Out of the committee’s find-
ings, Congress established con-
gressional oversight committees
with prescribed rules for consul-
tation for any covert activities
and requirements for presidents
to sign official findings to author-
ize covert activities. “We saved
the CIA,” Hart recalled. “If noth-
ing had been done to rehabilitate
the agency, it would have very
seriously undercut their credibili-
ty.”
John McLaughlin, a former
CIA deputy director and for a
brief time acting director, was a
recruit in training during this
period in the 1970s and described
these changes as appropriately
intrusive.
“I’m a big supporter of over-
sight,” he said, “because without
it, you cannot count on the trust
of the American people for an
institution that has great power
and is asked to do difficult things
by the president. Even at that, it
doesn’t assure that trust or that
confidence, but it’s the closest
thing we have.”
Kathryn Olmsted, a professor
of history at the University of
California at Davis and author of
the 1996 book “Challenging the
Secret Government: The Post-
Watergate Investigations of the
CIA and FBI,” said that the re-
forms “fell short of what Senator
Church wanted.”
“Church thought exposing all
these abuses would restore Amer-
icans’ faith in government,” she
added. Instead, the committee’s
revelations gave rise to more anti-
government conspiracy theories.The impact on
the political parties
Watergate left the Republican
Party decimated, or so it seemed.
“The conventional wisdom
was, oh, the Republicans are done
for a generation,” said Beverly
Gage, a professor of history at
Yale University. “That’s not what
happened. But it is more true if
you said it’s the Nixon wing of the
Republican Party [that is dead].
Watergate was much more devas-
tating to that part of the Republi-
can Party.”
A Republican Party personi-
fied by politicians like Ford, Nel-
son Rockefeller and George Rom-
ney was taken over by a new,
Southern and Sun Belt-based
conservative movement that
viewed government with consid-
erably more hostility. In 1964, this
brand of conservatism, led by
Sen. Barry Goldwater of Arizona,
went down in defeat to Johnson.The aftermath of the Water-
gate scandal opened up the oper-
ations of Congress but also con-
tributed to making the legislative
body less manageable. The scan-
dal helped change the way report-
ers and government officials in-
teracted with one another. A
more adversarial relationship has
existed ever since. The era
spawned reforms that worked
and some that did not, from
campaign finance to intelligence.
Politically, both major parties
were affected. A seemingly bro-
ken Republican Party reconsti-
tuted itself with a more anti-gov-
ernment ideology. Democrats, led
by the big class of 1974, slowly
began a transformation away
from the lunch-pail coalition of
White working-class voters and
toward a more diverse coalition
that now includes highly educat-
ed coastal elites.
Not everything that has hap-
pened since Watergate is directly
attributable to the scandal itself.
Some changes in society and poli-
tics were already beginning to be
felt before burglars were arrested
early on the morning of June 17,
1972, after breaking into the
Democratic National Committee
headquarters at the Watergate
building. But subsequent investi-
gations; the indictments and con-
victions of Nixon administration
officials; the impeachment arti-
cles passed in the House Judici-
ary Committee; and Nixon’s resig-
nation combined into an event
that shattered the confidence and
idealism of previous decades.
Garrett M. Graff, author of the
book “Watergate: A New History,”
describes Watergate as a dividing
line in history — the event that
moved Washington from a sleepy
capital dominated by segrega-
tionists, veterans of World War I
and print newspaper deadlines to
a capital ruled by a new breed of
politicians, a more adversarial
media now in the digital age and
a country deeply skeptical of gov-
ernment and politicians.
“The Vietnam War, the Penta-
gon Papers and Watergate ... fun-
damentally rewrote the relation-
ship between the American peo-
ple and their government,” Graff
said, “and caused a collapse in the
public’s faith in those institutions
that our nation’s leaders are still
struggling with today.”
As William Galston of the
Brookings Institution put it, “We
have been living for nearly half a
century in the world that Water-
gate made.”
The shattering of trust
in government
The Pew Research Center has a
graphic on its website that charts
the decline of trust between citi-
zens and government. It is a vivid
illustration of the world that Wa-
tergate helped to make.
The graphic begins in 1958,
near the end of the presidency of
Dwight D. Eisenhower, when 73
percent of Americans — majori-
ties of both Democrats and Re-
publicans — said they trusted the
government to do what is right
“just about always” or “most of
the time.” In the fall of 1964,
despite the assassination of Presi-
dent John F. Kennedy a year
earlier, which some people see as
the moment when the idealism of
the period was broken, trust
peaks at 77 percent.
By 1968 and the end of the
presidency of Lyndon B. Johnson,
with Americans violently divided
over Vietnam and shaken by the
assassinations of Martin Luther
King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy,
the line on the chart heads down-
ward, but still with a majority
expressing trust. From there, it
begins to fall farther. By late 1974,
after Nixon left office, just 36
percent of Americans say they
trust their government.
“The trust has never really
rebounded to the pre-Watergate
levels,” said Joycelyn Kiley, Pew’s
associate director of research.
The decline in trust affected
virtually every institution over
time. “One way of thinking about
it is that Americans ceased to
trust the men in suits — whether
those men in suits were lawyers,
university professors, the press
and especially, especially, the gov-
ernment,” said Bruce Schulman, a
professor of history at Boston
University.
Kiley said more than just the
Watergate scandal has caused all
this. But her point about the lack
of a rebound was underscored by
Pew’s latest measurement, re-
leased last week, which found
that today, just 20 percent of
Americans say they trust their
government to do the right thing
all or most of the time. At the
same time, Americans see a con-
tinued role for government and
say that government is not doing
enough for several groups of peo-
ple.
One irony of the decline at the
time of Watergate is that democ-
racy had worked, from the ac-
tions of government institutions
to the public’s response. “It’s real-
ly important to understand that
the process that took down Nixon
was driven by an extraordinary
level of civic engagement,” said
WATERGATE FROM A
by the scandal.
In 1974, Congress amended
campaign finance laws after rev-
elations about the abuses of mon-
ey by Nixon’s reelection commit-
tee — thousands of dollars stuffed
in safes and used for hush money,
and illegal contributions solicited
from major corporations. The
new law put caps on how much
people could contribute to candi-
dates and how much federal can-
didates could spend, created par-
tial public financing through
matching funds in presidential
campaigns and established the
Federal Election Commission.
Over time, the reforms were
weakened both by Supreme
Court rulings and by work-
arounds campaign lawyers de-
vised. A major change came in
2010, when the high court gave
corporations and other outside
groups the authority to spend
unlimited amounts of money to
influence campaigns. The Citi-
zens United v. Federal Election
Commission decision resulted in
a proliferation of so-called super
PACs and independent commit-
tees and the use of “dark money”
(funds in which donors are not
disclosed), leading advocates to
say that a decades-long effort to
reform campaign finance had
failed.
Watergate set off fresh discus-
sion about the balance of power
between Congress and the execu-
tive branch amid concerns about
an imperial presidency. This led
to new laws designed to whittle
away at the powers of the presi-
dent.
In 1974, Congress approved the
Congressional Budget and Im-
poundment Control Act, which
established a new process for
federal budgeting by lawmakers,
created the Congressional Budget
Office and sought to limit the
power of the president to over-vated to do so, the ability to
frustrate leadership. That is an
offshoot of what started in the
1970 s.
“I believe that over time, it
reduced the ability to get to a
decision, which I would argue is
one of the compelling issues in
government today,” Sharp said.
“Ultimately, democracy must
prove not that it’s open, it has to
prove that ... it can actually make
a decision on something of signif-
icance.”
“For a legislator and particu-
larly for a leader, your goal is to
pass legislation,” said John A.
Lawrence, author of the book,
“The Class of ’74: Congress After
Watergate and the Roots of Parti-
sanship” and a former chief of
staff to House Speaker Nancy
Pelosi (D-Calif.). “And it becomes
harder when you honor transpar-
ency over effectiveness.”
Then-House Speaker Thomas
P. “Tip” O’Neill Jr. (D-Mass.),
among others, had worried about
too much openness, especially
the decision that would allow
C-SPAN to begin to televise House
floor proceedings in 1979. “They
understood that the more public
the system was, the less power the
old order would have,” said for-
mer speaker Newt Gingrich
(R-Ga.).
Elected in 1978, Gingrich said
he found the institution “aston-
ishingly open” to newcomers on a
mission, like himself. He used the
levers available in a more open
institution — from television in
the House to new ethics rules —
to chart a rise to power that in
1994 would drive Democrats
from control in the House for the
first time in 40 years.The explosion of reform
The post-Watergate years of
the 1970s saw a flurry of new laws
designed to address issues raisederates and conservatives but
many liberals. They shared a pas-
sion for reform. “The collective
sense was that it was time to
change the seniority system,” said
Tom Downey, who was elected to
the House as a Democrat from
New York at age 25. “We wanted
this to be a more accountable
institution.”
Leon Panetta, who had come to
Capitol Hill in 1966 as a staffer
and was elected as a Democrat to
the House in 1976 representing
California, said, “You really had a
sense that you had been empow-
ered by the American people to
straighten out Washington and to
implement reforms and to really
do things different in a way that
would hopefully restore trust.”
“There were so many new
members that the old guys
couldn’t come and encircle them
and try to convince them that
they should be quiet for the first
10 years and stay out the way,”
said former congresswoman Pat
Schroeder, a Democrat from Col-
orado who was elected in 1972.
The new class helped oust
three powerful committee chair-
men, something unheard of at the
time. Other reforms redistributed
power in the House. “We had
opportunities that no new mem-
bers had historically — to speak,
to negotiate, to assert our power,”
said Phil Sharp, elected to the
House as a Democrat from Indi-
ana in 1974. He added, “It really
meant we had more influence in
the subcommittee, we had more
influence on the House floor, we
had more influence in the confer-
ence committees.”
The result was a more open
and transparent House, but also a
more cumbersome legislative
body. Today, every member of
Congress is an independent actor
with access to the media and
many to big money and, if moti-Rick Perlstein, a historian who
has written multiple volumes
about the history of the 1960s and
1970 s. “The response was not this
kind of nihilistic response we
would see now.”
But while the institutions
worked, the revelations about the
vastness of the Watergate con-
spiracy painted an ugly portrait
of the use and abuse of power
during Nixon’s presidency. “The
courts, the Senate, the Congress,
the House Judiciary Committee,
the press. Everything worked the
way it’s supposed to. But people
ended up with a very bad taste in
their mouth,” said Jim Blanchard,
who was elected to the House in
1974 as a Democrat from Michi-
gan and later served as governor.
Coupled with the governmen-
tal lying about Vietnam, exposed
most vividly with the publication
of the Pentagon Papers first by
the New York Times and later by
The Washington Post, govern-
ment was under attack from both
the left and the right, though for
different reasons.
“It’s amazing how fast we shift-
ed from the post-World War II
trust mode, which lasted for about
20 years, into the post-Vietnam,
post-Watergate mistrust mode,”
Galston said. “Once we lost that
trust, we never regained it.”The ‘Watergate babies’ come
to Washington
Three months after Nixon re-
signed and two months after he
was pardoned by President Ger-
ald Ford, the 1974 midterm elec-
tions dealt a seemingly devastat-
ing blow to the Republican Party.
The election produced a huge
new class of lawmakers, more
than 90 in all, including 76 Demo-
crats in the House who became
known as the Watergate babies.
These Democrats were diverse
in their ideologies — some mod-HULTON ARCHIVE/GETTY IMAGES
TOP: Tourists read newspapers near the White House on Aug. 8, 1974, hours before President Richard M. Nixon resigned from the
presidency. The Watergate scandal shattered much of the trust that U.S. citizens had for the government and altered the dynamics of
Congress. ABOVE: R eporters watch Nixon on TV on April 30, 1973, as he told the nation of the White House’s involvement in the scandal.
Journalists took on a new role in holding government leaders accountable during and in the aftermath of the scandal.Watergate ushered in more skepticismof government, a new age of politicsBETTMANN ARCHIVE