Forgetting about history: Watergate and the Nixonian mind

In my last post, I wrote that David Brooks just didn't get it. Well, David Broder reminds us that he's hardly alone.

In an excellent column in Sunday's Post, Broder reviews recent remarks by Pat Buchanan, a Nixon speechwriter, and Chuck Colson, Nixon's special counsel, both of whom have taken shots at Mark Felt. Where Brooks suggested that the major life lesson of Watergate has to do with Bob Woodward's youthful "frenzy," more or less ignoring Watergate itself, Broder is right on the mark in assessing Watergate's lasting significance:

The great benefit of W. Mark Felt's decision to identify himself as "Deep Throat," the famous Watergate secret source, is that a whole new generation of Americans now has a chance to learn just how perverse were the values that infected the Nixon White House.

Exactly. The main lesson of Watergate involves "the values that infected the Nixon White House," not Woodward's shameless vanity. But Brooks at least had a point -- and one with which I do not necessarily disagree -- and I even suspect that Brooks would agree that those Nixonian "values" were, well, bad. But the Nixonian apologists (and Watergate revisionists) who have emerged to try to discredit Felt, some way out on the conservative fringes, are clearly desperate to undermine Felt's credibility and to do so without addressing Watergate itself. Buchanan's lunacy was the most vivid: "There's nothing heroic about breaking faith with your people, breaking the law, sneaking around in garages, putting stuff from an investigation out to a Nixon-hating Washington Post." And then this: "[W]hat he did was help destroy an enormously popular president and, partly as a consequence of that, what 58,000 Americans died for in Vietnam was poured down the sewer."

What the hell is he talking about? The insane Vietnam comment simply doesn't deserve a response, but I would say that, whatever Felt's motivations, it is heroic to side with truth and justice against the lies and injustice of even "an enormously popular president". After all, lest the Buchanans of the world forget, it was that "enormously popular president" and those who worked for him who are to blame for Watergate, both the burglary and the cover-up, not a couple of diligent reporters who brought the story to light (even when no one believed them), and certainly not the man who pointed them in the right direction along the way. And it was that "enormously popular president" and those who worked for him who so cavalierly brought American democracy to a point of crisis from which it has still not fully recovered. Broder puts it brilliantly:

In these comments, Americans born in the 1970s, '80s and '90s can learn everything they need to know about the dangerous delusions of the Nixon era. The mind-set that created enemies lists, the blind loyalty to a deeply flawed individual, the twisting of historical fact to turn villains into heroes and heroes into villains -- they are all there.

Such tendencies are not unique to one White House; they go with the territory. They must be consciously resisted by men and women of conscience working within an administration and checked by those on the outside -- notably journalists -- whose job it is to monitor the presidency.

That is why excessive official secrecy is always suspect and why the isolation of a president behind a closed circle of advisers can lead to abuse of power.

Mark Felt did what whistle-blowers need to do. He took his information to reporters who diligently dug up the evidence to support his well-founded suspicions. The republic was saved and the public well served. That Colson and Buchanan still don't get it speaks volumes about them.

What is it they say about not learning the lessons of history?