There are certain advantages to being a little older. For one thing, I remember something most Americans today can’t — watching a 34-year-old lawyer named John Dean, a thin, balding man with thick round glasses, appear before the Senate Watergate Committee, reading a long document in a monotone. He didn’t need inflection to shock the nation.
But shock it he did. Dean, who had been the President of the United States’ White House counsel less than two months before, said that Richard Nixon and his attorney general, John Mitchell, had been directly involved in the cover-up of the break-in and attempted bugging of Democratic National Headquarters at the Watergate hotel. He said that Nixon hinted that he knew how to get a million dollars, if necessary, in hush money to keep people quiet.
The hearings were explosive. Ratings were extremely high. Millions watched as I, then a 21-year-old college student, did on my black-and-white TV. Whether you loved Nixon or hated him, it was hard to believe that a President of the United States would approve of, let alone orchestrate, the cover-up of a tawdry small-time political prank.
Besides, it made no sense. Nixon was well on his way to being reelected by a landslide when that Watergate break-in happened; in the end, he became the first man ever to win 49 out of the 50 states. Even if you were inclined to believe Dean, there was no proof.
It was one lawyer’s word against the President’s. Nobody thought this would be much more than a summer sideshow, until three weeks later when a White House official named Alexander Butterfield revealed that Nixon had been bugging himself.
Tapes existed of Dean’s conversations with Nixon, and we know how all that ended.
Well, now, as the late Yogi Berra might have said, it is déjà vu all over again, another President’s former lawyer sitting before a Congressional committee, implicating the nation’s leader in lies, cover-ups and bad behavior, some of it on a scale the severely repressed Nixon could probably not even imagine. Except there’s one big difference:
Does anybody who has been paying attention have any doubt that Michael Cohen is essentially telling the truth? John Dean took us into a world we hadn’t known existed. Cohen is merely collaborating things we’ve suspected and mostly known forever.
He took the Congress, and us, though that world of crooked business deals and payoffs to women, and told us that the President is, in Cohen’s words, “a racist, a con man and a cheat.” None of these charges were especially new.
None were hard to believe for anyone who has been paying attention. Pulitzer-Prize winning reporter David Cay Johnston provided strong evidence of all that in his book, The Making of Donald Trump, published shortly before the last election.
How all this will play out remains to be seen, and awaits the appearance at long last of the Mueller report. But the question we need to ask is — how did somebody like this come to be nominated by one of the major parties and then get elected, despite all the warning signs?
Edward R. Murrow, at the end of his famous program looking at the demagogue Joe McCarthy sixty-five years ago, may have said it best: “Whose fault is that? Not really his. He didn’t create this situation … he merely exploited it, and rather successfully. Cassius was right: “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.’”
Then the great newsman closed by saying “Good night and good luck.” We need more than a little of that luck today.
