by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2018 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I watched the third episode
of the History Channel’s Watergate show, which covered the period from the “Saturday Night Massacre” in
October 1973 to Richard Nixon’s resignation as President in August 1974 and
Gerald Ford’s controversial pardon of him a month later. One of the
interviewees was Jill Wine-Banks from special prosecutor Leon Jaworski’s staff
(then she was known as Jill Volner), who viscerally recalled her revulsion at
Nixon’s pardon and her belief that it established that Presidents are above the law after all. A lot of people who
opposed the pardon originally later came around to the logic Ford gave for
issuing it in the first place — that it was necessary to “put Watergate
bPhiehind us” and start healing the divisions in the country — but Our Jill
isn’t one of them (and she’s continued frequent appearances on MS-NBC comparing
Donald Trump’s multiple corruptions to Watergate). The show depicted the House
Judiciary Committee’s deliberations on Nixon’s impeachment and relied largely
on the recollections of New York Congressmember Elizabeth Holtzman, one of the
few committee members who’s still alive, though it stressed that committee
chair Peter Rodino was determined to get some Republicans on board to make sure
that the impeachment would not be seen as a partisan affair. It’s indicative of
how polarized our politics have become — and how much the former norms and
courtesies of Congress, which used to make the minority party a sort of junior
partner in power instead of being frozen out completely, have either eroded or
been outright trashed — that the next time the House of Representatives seriously considered a Presidential
impeachment, the Republicans in charge of the 1998-1999 effort to impeach and
remove Bill Clinton couldn’t have cared less about whether they had any support
from Democratic House members: they were determined to impeach Clinton because
they were the majority and they could. (They were also hoping that enough Senate Democrats would be so
disgusted by Clinton’s conduct with Monica Lewinsky and the other “bimbos” they
would vote to remove him from office — and had a Republican Congress gone after
a Democratic President in the “#MeToo” era they might have been right, but in
the late 1990’s it was the Democrats who successfully cried “witch hunt” and
got to keep their man in office.) As I’ve pointed out with regard to the other
two episodes, the most dramatic point made by Watergate is just how much overall standards of political
decorum and decency have declined since the Nixon era: the profanities and
vicious insults Richard Nixon spoke behind the closed doors of his offices with
his closest aides are the daily currency of Donald Trump, who says them out
loud in front of audiences of tens of thousands of people and by now has
repeated them so often the audience members themselves chant them like crowds
at a Rolling Stones concert singing along with “Satisfaction.”
