![[what I read in 2002]](/images/review_banner.gif)
All the President’s Men ::
I feel that being born in 1976 puts me at a significant disadvantage to those who were born a generation earlier. I don’t have any firsthand memories of the Civil Rights Movement, the anti-Vietnam movement, or the political climate of the 60’s. I don’t remember Watergate. The result is not only that those events mean less to me, but also that I don’t really know exactly what happened.
Let’s use Watergate as an example. I knew Watergate was a hotel, and that there was a break-in there. Those who broke into the hotel had direct connections to the office of the president. As a result, Richard M. Nixon resigned his office. Both he, and the office of the presidency, changed dramatically in the eyes of the American people.
What I didn’t realize was how far-reaching the conspiracy was. Nor did I understand how demented almost everyone in the Nixon White House was. It seemed that everyone there was swept away by a desperately power-hungry need to not only maintain their positions, but also beat back any possible challengers. They beat the hell out of the Democrats who, at the time, were hardly a danger to them (I mean, I wasn’t even around for the 1972 election, and I know how naive and politically incapable of getting elected president McGovern was). And all of it stemmed from a mentality in which, to paraphrase of the Nixon staffers, “if there was an ethically right way to do things and an ethically wrong way, we did it the wrong way, every time.”
But for all the corruption and insanity that the story told, there was also a positive side. Bernstein and Woodward took massive risks to get the truth of the story, and the used their positions outside the government structure to probe for information and get at the truth of what happened at Watergate and how involved Nixon’s White House was in the conspiracy. In doing so, both reporters nearly lost their jobs, and their work precipitated a Constitutional and governmental crisis the likes of which have not been seen since then. And as awful as those events were, the United States would be significantly more damaged had Nixon and his men succeeded in squelching out the story.
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