The HBO television series, “White House Plumbers,” has raised the 50-year-old legacy of the Watergate scandal. Although I was only a child at the time, images from that era are etched on my mind: a police photo here, a prison photo there, as dozens of high-ranking men in that administration were hauled off to jail.
One of my best memories, however, was of the nature of the times. No one was able to successfully maintain, with a straight face, that Nixon’s men went to jail because of a “liberal plot.” What gives the lie to that is the truth that they went to jail because so many life-long Republicans, prosecutors and judges, were shocked at what they learned.
What a contrast to today, in which nothing Trump does shocks anybody anymore, and so no-one cares.
But the moment from the HBO series that sticks with me is in Part 3, on the eve of the break-in, when Nixon is shown addressing Congress and the nation about historic agreements reached with Russia and China.
Not everything he did was good. Certainly the Vietnam War was botched, because the expansion of the war into Laos and Cambodia did nothing but delay the end of the war and cost tens of thousands of American lives. But — Vietnam and Watergate — aside, the remarkable thing is that Nixon did quite a few good things (such as sign the EPA Act).
The ultimate irony is that Nixon ended up winning 49 states and so had absolutely no need to sanction all the dirty tricks of the Plumber’s Unit. (He at least knew of their existence and approved of it.) The image that sticks in my mind is that of Nixon telling the nation that thanks to his agreements with Russia and China, we finally could live in a world that might be free of the threat of nuclear annihilation.
But most impressive of all, is that you could read on his face that Nixon, a Quaker, after all, really did feel joy that he’d done something of great good for humanity.
