You may have CNN on in the background while you’re reading or cooking or gaping at reels. I have the Watergate hearings on.
Why?
For morale.
Yes, I’m going to live-blog the State of the Union Address tomorrow night, on the remote chance that over the course of a few hours I might have something useful to say about the political theater or the rhetoric itself.
But in general, I really am working hard to not spend the next eight months listening to cable news people chew amazing amounts of pregame cud about the big mule race in November. Reel-watching is constructive and uplifting by comparison.
Watching the Watergate hearings, on the other hand—it’s bittersweetly nostalgic. Not the best feeling in the world, but a refreshing break from nonstop contempt and anxiety. And better appreciated in large doses in real time than in highlights and recaps. We all know Senate Watergate Committee Vice Chair Howard Baker’s quote, “What did the president know and when did he know it?” And we know how remarkable it was that Republicans and Democrats worked together to investigate the crimes of a Republican White House.
But it’s another thing to watch these partisan pols work together—to see and hear interrogators being patient with witnesses, and witnesses being patient with interrogators. To see no one being obtuse or truculent, almost everyone being polite and measured—to the extent that you can’t even hear, if you’re not watching the screen, whether the questioner is a Republican or a Democrat.
There’s humor, such as during the testimony of Watergate bagman Anthony T. Ulasewicz—such a character from mob/cop central casting that Baker asked, laughing good-naturedly, “Who thought you up?”
”My parents, maybe,” Ulasewicz shrugged with a grin.
There’s an effort to communicate. Asked by genuinely curious senators what had gotten into him and his law-and-order Republican colleagues, Nixon re-elect campaign operative Jeb Magruder explains that Watergate was made psychologically possible by his colleagues’ morally errant belief that anti-war liberals were breaking laws with various forms of civil disobedience, so conservatives needed to break laws as well.
“Let me just say,” Magruder said about the ridiculous crimes he countenanced and helped cover up, “when these subjects came up and although I was aware they were illegal and I am sure the others did, we had be come somewhat inured to using some activities that would help us in accomplishing what we thought was cause, a legitimate cause.” But now, he realized, “two wrongs do not make a right,” and that he and his colleagues had made “an absolutely incorrect decision.”
And to listen to talk like that—however smart or dumb, sincere or craven—and to think of millions Americans at the time, sitting after work drinking coffee and weighing five and six nightly hours of these serious, sober, plodding pundit-free prime-time PBS replays—thoughtfully and searchingly wondering just how far things had gone wrong with this government (and how high up), and what it might take to bring sanity back.
Just the whole goddamn thing, in all its civic humanity—attempted fairness, confessed fear, expressed regret, retained credibility. All of it anchored in a consistently felt assumption that there was some truth to be had, a common set of facts to discover, a reality to be shared, some kind of moral resolution to be found.
And a country still to be saved.
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