WATERGATE, 42 YEARS LATER...
June 17th, 1972 the Watergate burglars were arrested for breaking into the Democratic National Committee offices in the Watergate Hotel in Washington DC.
The special Senate Watergate investigation committee chaired by Senator Sam Ervin, D, NC (in center of the picture) revealed that President Richard M. Nixon was personally involved in the "cover-up" of the break-in and other illegal activities via the so-called Plumbers Unit that included political espionage carried out against Senator Edmund Muskie (D, Me) who at the time was the leading candidate for the Democratic nomination.
What few people to this day fail to understand is that Watergate was more than a "dirty tricks" campaign but a frontal assault on the right of the loyal opposition party to function as an independent political entity as a fundamental part of our checks and balances system. Nixon and his administration tried to discredit his "enemies" by spying on them - including members of Congress, journalists and academics who were critical of the administration's War in Vietnam and civil rights record. This established a precedent which exists to this day of administrations being paranoid and justifying spying on Americans and others.
On July 29th and 30th, 1974 - two years after Nixon's landslide defeat of Senator George McGovern (D, SD) - the House Judiciary Committee approved articles of impeachment charging Nixon with abuse of powers, obstruction of justice and defying the Judiciary Committee's subpoenas of the Watergate tapes which proved Nixon had been involved in the cover-up from the beginning providing the so-called "smoking gun" which ended his presidency. To avoid inevitable impeachment Nixon resigned August 9th, 1974 - the day my wife and our one year old son, arrived in Portland to begin my career at Pacific!
Many have said Nixon's resignation proved that our system of checks and balances worked. My conclusion is less reassuring - yes it worked over an agonizing two year political constitutional crisis but the accretion of power by an incumbent President claiming to be "above the law" is actually a failure of the system in light of the fact that such abuse of presidential power was not unique to Watergate but has happened in many presidencies before and after Nixon. One cannot be sanguine about the pitfalls inherent to the American political system.
Other Presidential "high crimes and misdemeanors" - ?
Lincoln preserved the Union while violating the Constitution;
FDR interned 120,000 Japanese-Americans in WW II;
Truman presided over the creation of the national security state;
Eisenhower allowed McCarthyism to run rampant;
JFK and LBJ took us into the unconstitutional Vietnam War;
Reagan via the Iran-Contra scandal created a secret security state;
and lest we forget -
George W. Bush led us into the Iraq War using the big lie of WMDs.
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