SUNDAY, JUNE 12 , 2022. THE WASHINGTON POST EZ RE A
ate.
Gingrich believes the polariza-
tion was building even before
Watergate and points to Reagan
as evidence, describing Reagan,
for all his geniality, as a polarizing
politician. Speaking of Reagan’s
emergence as a national figure in
the 1960s, he said, “You had a
polarization that was beginning
to grow, and Reagan understood
and knew how to deal with it
pleasantly. But he was clearly a
polarizer.”
Gage noted that even before
Watergate, there were many peo-
ple who were arguing that the
country would be better off with
more tightly organized political
parties that would provide clear-
er ideological choices for the vot-
ers. “That’s where we’ve ended up
half a century after Watergate,”
she said. “And it’s turning out to
be a real problem.”The road from Watergate
to Donald Trump
Those who have studied Water-
gate see a line that travels from
that scandal to the Trump presi-
dency. Part of this is because of
the similarities between Nixon
and Trump — the self-pitying
nature of their personalities, the
venality exhibited during their
presidencies, the demonization
of their opponents.
Nixon sought to undermine
the Constitution to assure that he
would win the 1972 election and
then covered it up, for which he
paid the price of forced resigna-
tion. Trump sought to undermine
the Constitution to overturn an
election he had lost in 2020. He
didn’t cover up his efforts, though
exactly what was going on still
hasn’t been told in full. Instead,
he attempted to build his case on
a foundation of lies.
But the parallels are limited in
part because the two presidents
governed in two different eras.
Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.) was a
law student and legislative staffer
to a Democrat on the House
Judiciary Committee during Wa-
tergate. Today she is a member of
the Jan. 6 House panel that is
investigating not just the attack
on the Capitol but the broader
effort to subvert the 2020 vote.
“We are in a political environ-
ment that is more sharply parti-
san than was the case during the
Watergate era,” she said. “And
you’ve also got people who lie
with impunity and feel that
there’s no downside to it. I mean,
when Nixon was caught in lies, he
resigned.”
There was a moment early in
the work of the Ervin committee,
cited in Graff’s history of the
scandal, when White House law-
yers were warning that any offi-
cials called to testify would de-
cline to answer the panel’s ques-
tions. The response from one
committee attorney was to say
that anyone who did that in a
public forum would be ruined.
Trump’s White House routinely
refused to cooperate with con-
gressional investigations and did
so without being held to account
and with the support of Republi-
can lawmakers.
Graff highlighted the conse-
quences of the differences be-
tween the Watergate period and
today. “You see, over the course of
the two years that Watergate
takes to play out, the delicate
ballet and dance of how our
system of checks and balances
works,” he said. “Watergate re-
quires every institution in Wash-
ington to play a specific role and
to do it successfully.”
In the Trump years, that sys-
tem of checks and balances broke
down. “The media played their
role,” Graff said. “The Justice
Department, you know, arguably
played their role. The FBI argu-
ably played their role. But then
when it came to Capitol Hill, the
House and the Senate fell short.
Looking back at Watergate, the
members of Congress in the
House and the Senate on the
Republican side acted first as
members of the coequal legisla-
tive branch. ... What we saw in the
Trump years was the opposite,
which is Republicans on the Hill
acted first as Republicans and
second as members of Congress.”
Trump’s presidency can be
seen as the culmination of what
began with Watergate. Today is a
time of heightened distrust in
government, weakened institu-
tions, a more polarized elector-
ate, greater partisanship, a frac-
tured and more politicized me-
dia, and a Republican Party with
a stronger anti-government
ideology and more ruthless in its
approach.
Trump seized on all of this, and
more, to become president, to
exercise his powers in office and
to try to stay in office after he had
lost to Joe Biden. “I think it’s
pretty clear that he exposed as
president some of the real weak-
nesses and dysfunction of all
these institutions,” Zelizer said,
“from Congress to the media to
other elements of administrative
and executive power. And I think
it’s true that they’re just not
working as well right now as they
had when this whole story start-
ed.”But I think a lot of younger people
learned that the way you get
ahead, just like members [of Con-
gress] learned through oversight,
that the way you get your name in
the papers is by making a splash
and by making accusations of
wrongdoing or corruption. That
culture ... became very, very pow-
erful.”
Critics of the press believe that
this has helped to color and coars-
en political discourse ever since,
that the DNA of journalism be-
came strictly adversarial and
that, despite the societal value of
accountability reporting, it has
had deleterious side effects on
politics and governance.
“Everyone wanted to kind of
have a pelt on the wall,” Perlstein
said. “Every reporter wanted
their own kind of scandal. And
one of the consequences was a
tendency to elevate peccadilloes
to the status of scandals.”
The counter to this is that, by
holding government officials ac-
countable, vigorous and intrusive
journalism leads to more effec-
tive and responsive government.
Without the probing eye of
journalists, corruption and mal-
feasance would be even greater
than it otherwise would be. The
decline of local newspapers,
caused by the technological dis-
ruptions of the past few decades,
has provided real-time examples
of the absence of accountability
journalism in cities and state
capitals.
Leonard Downie Jr., who edit-
ed many of the Watergate stories
at The Post in the 1970s and later
succeeded Benjamin C. Bradlee
as executive editor, acknowl-
edged that as investigative re-
porting spread throughout the
industry, “some corners were cut”
by some investigative reporters.
“Not everybody could bring down
a president,” he said. “Not every-
body could get somebody to re-
sign or go to prison.”
That, he said, does not out-
weigh the fact that investigative
journalism is now one of the most
important roles of the American
news media. “Holding power —
all forms of power — accountable
to American citizens is a good
thing. And I just don’t worry
about this adversarial aspect. I
think that’s fine. I do not see a
downside.”The rise of polarization
Scholars and politicians de-
bate when the extreme partisan-
ship and polarization that defines
today’s political climate really
took root.
Though there was partisanship
around the Watergate investiga-
tion, in the end, the conclusions
were bipartisan, with a handful of
Republicans joining Democrats
on the House Judiciary Commit-
tee to vote for articles of impeach-
ment and Republican elders go-
ing to the White House in the
final days to tell Nixon it was time
to go.
The 1976 presidential race be-
tween Ford and Jimmy Carter
featured two relatively moderate
politicians. In Congress, with the
parties far less homogenized than
today, Democrats and Republi-
cans did work together on issues.
By today’s standards, it was a far
more genteel era.
Many analysts point to the
Republican victories in 1994 and
the elevation of Gingrich to the
speakership as the moment when
the current era of polarization
and partisanship took hold. Oth-
ers say the partisanship was
building during the 1980s, with
Gingrich and GOP backbenchers
using different tactics to attack
the entrenched Democrats, even
as Reagan and O’Neill enjoyed a
cordial relationship despite theirBy 1980, with the election of
Ronald Reagan, the era of New
Deal liberalism had been blunted
by a conservatism that would
hold sway in the party and the
country for decades.
Schulman, who wrote “The
Seventies: The Great Shift in
American Culture, Society and
Politics,” said that, while it is an
oversimplification to say that
Reagan’s election was a response
to Watergate, the reaction to the
scandal nonetheless provided fer-
tile ground for the conservative,
anti-government ideology Rea-
gan championed.
“You have to remember that for
most of the post-World War II
period, liberalism, for better and
worse, had really been the reign-
ing public philosophy in the Unit-
ed States,” Schulman said. “One of
the ways that Watergate is very
important is in the transforma-
tion of the Republican Party into
a conservative party. ... And after
1980, it was, by all effects, really a
conservative party.”
Zelizer noted, “When Reagan
in 1980 is lashing out against
government, I just think there’s
more support at some level for
the kind of arguments he’s mak-
ing, because people have a Rich-
ard M. Nixon, even though he is a
Republican, they have a Richard
M. Nixon in their mind.”
Reagan was one of Nixon’s
staunchest defenders. He de-
scribed the hearings before the
Senate Watergate committee
chaired by Sen. Sam Ervin
(D-N.C.) in the summer of 1973 as
a “lynching” and praised the pres-
ident so consistently that, accord-
ing to Perlstein, the columnists
Rowland Evans and Robert No-
vak reported that some Reagan
advisers worried that his support
for Nixon had the potential to
hurt him politically.
“They say [in the column] the
people who want to make Ronald
Reagan president are terrified
that he won’t let go of his support
for Richard M. Nixon and this is
going to destroy his career,” Perl-
stein said. “And of course, the
irony is, and this is kind of my
argument, that it didn’t destroy
his career. It was the foundation
for his political rise.”
Meanwhile, the Democrats
were to undergo their own trans-
formation, thanks in part to the
infusion of new members of Con-
gress beginning with the 1974
election. “They tended to be more
educated, more professional than
previous tranches of Democrats,
less connected to the working
class, more interested in issues
that weren’t within the four cor-
ners of meat and potatoes,” Gal-
ston said.
As Perlstein said, “It’s not the
beer-and-a-shot, lunch-pail Dem-
ocratic Party anymore.”
No one more typified the new
breed than Hart, who was elected
to the Senate after managing
George McGovern’s 1972 presi-
dent campaign that ended in a
landslide loss to Nixon. “I was so
angry at Watergate and the fact
that it had not had the impact on
the ‘72 campaign that it should
have had and eventually did
have,” Hart said in explaining
why he ran in 1974.
Hart helped lead the party in
new directions, and his eventual
challenge to — and near-victory
over — former vice president
Walter Mondale in the 1984 Dem-
ocratic presidential nomination
contest pitted the old Democratic
Party, tied to powerful labor
unions, against a newer Demo-
cratic Party more oriented to
rising forces of technology and to
issues such as the environment
and globalization.
The debate over what kind of
party the Democrats should be,
which was aired out that year,
continues to echo today, as the
Democrats wrestle with the de-
mands of a more vigorous liberal
wing and the desire to win back
some of the White working-class
voters who defected to the Re-
publicans starting in the Reagan
years.
The adversarial press
Watergate didn’t just change
politics; it also changed journal-
ism. Watergate made journalism
glamorous. Post reporters Bob
Woodward and Carl Bernstein
became celebrities. Investigative
journalism expanded into all cor-
ners of the news media.
In the same way that the public
was losing trust in institutions,
journalists were losing trust in
government officials. After the
lies about progress in Vietnam
and the lies from the Nixon White
House, reporters brought a more
skeptical eye to the statements of
government officials.
Gone were the cozy days when
a reporter could play poker in the
Oval Office with a president or
when the private lives of politi-
cians were considered off-limits
to reporting (as reporters did in
turning a blind eye to John F.
Kennedy’s philandering) unless it
affected public responsibilities.
“A lot of journalism prior to
that time was very deferential to
political leaders,” Lawrence said.
“You didn’t say certain things,
and that wasn’t so good either.
ship,” he said, “because they en-
abled people who otherwise
might have been blocked from
playing a more political or more
public role in the more tradition-
al management of the House —
they gave them platforms to do
so.”ideological differences.
Lawrence, the historian of the
Class of 1974, believes the reforms
those freshman members of Con-
gress helped to force through the
legislative branch were responsi-
ble. “Some of these reforms actu-
ally facilitated a rise in partisan-Nixon also shares in the blame.
Though on domestic issues he
was, by today’s standards, rela-
tively liberal, his campaign style
in 1968 and 1972 was divisive and
polarizing, using race, law and
order, and cultural wedge issues
to create cleavages in the elector-ASSOCIATED PRESSASSOCIATED PRESSDAVID HUME KENNERLY/GETTY IMAGESERIK S. LESSER FOR THE WASHINGTON POST
FROM TOP: Republican presidential candidate Ronald Reagan and running mate George H.W. Bush
are seen in Detroit at the 1980 Republican National Convention. N ixon on April 29, 1974, points to
tape transcripts he planned to turn over to House investigators, after refusing to provide them.
Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward, left, and Carl Bernstein, right, in Washington on March 1,1974. House Speaker Newt Gingrich speaks to supporters in R oswell, Ga., in 1998. Four years earlier,
he helped drive Democrats from control in the House for the first time in 40 years.