No one died in Watergate!

The conservative world has come up with a new phrase as a talking point in their relentless pursuit of the Benghazi event that they are trying to blow up into a scandal. They are trying to make us believe that simply because no one died in the Watergate scandal, that Benghazi is a bigger event.

I lived through Watergate as an American citizen and as a Republican political activist in my home state of Illinois. We had graduated from Southern Illinois University at Carbondale with a degree in government which has since been relabled political science so we knew something about the workings of government. But we must say that we got a complete and thorough education in what could go on in the real world by what the Nixon administration put us and every one else through from early 1973 until Nixon’s resignation in August of 1974.

Much of what went on during Watergate was surreal to say the least.

We remember being in the nation’s capital in January of 1974 at a convention when Richard Nixon appeared in person at the group that we were there with. The scandal was well under way by that time and Nixon was losing ground by the month, the week and the day. Nixon seemed like such a pathetic and beleaguered figure when he came to the hotel that we were at that day. It was a Young Republican event held annually and the Young Republicans were among the president’s most rabid defenders. Some of the people there tried to reach out physically to Nixon but there seemed to be a gulf between even them and him that could simply not be breeched in any possible way.

Nixon seemed to place barriers of all kinds between himself and the truth!

Richard Nixon had been isolated by circumstances and events for a very long time. It had begun with his Checkers speech that saved his political career under Eisenhower and had greatly advanced with his very narrow loss to John Kennedy in the fall of 1960. Nixon was damaged goods by the time that he finally took his seat in the Oval Office in January of 1969. To be very blunt about it, Nixon thought that people, particularly the press, were out to get him. He had thought that for a very long time but his political beginnings where he defeated a California liberal political icon for the senate seat using some very questionable tactics established that his relationship with the liberal press would not be good for the rest of his career. Certainly his loss in 1962 in the California gubernatorial race did not help either his image or his self esteem any at all. It was after that loss that he made the famous statement that they wouldn’t “have Nixon to kick around anymore.�

It was during the 1968 ejections that we began to see glimmers of what Nixon would become when he ordered his campaign staff to put the equivalent of hired thugs in so many of the precinct locations around the city of Chicago to make sure that mayor Richard Daly did not steal the election from him once again.

There is an isolation that can set in around the president and Nixon was certainly subject to that sort of thing. The president can not go out and do things for all sorts of reasons and so he must depend on those around him to accomplish what he wants to get done. Nixon did not pick good people to surround himself with and, in the end, several of them spent time in jail because of what Gerald Ford pardoned him for.

Any comparisons between Richard Nixon and Barack Obama suffer from a few problems. One is the fact that Barack Obama has never lost a major election in his life so he does not suffer from the emotional scarring that happened to Nixon. Another is the fact that Barack Obama is simply a far different kind of person than Nixon was. Obama reaches out to people on a regular basis where Nixon compiled a list of his political enemies. If any president deserves to be paranoid it would be Barack Obama. Nixon was hated by his enemies but it did not begin to reach the level or racial hate and bigotry that this presidents opponents shower down on him on a regular basis. Nixon was an attorney and Obama has a background in the law mainly on a constitutional basis. But Obama has a grasp of history and how people have been treated who have sat at his desk that Nixon could never comprehend. Obama constantly thinks about Abraham Lincoln and how the radical democrats and their radical press treated him during his time in office. But possibly the biggest difference between Nixon and Obama is simply the fact that Obama is a black man from Hawaii with a forward looking attitude while Nixon was a cursing Quaker from the golden state of California who could not help but be held captive to his own past.

We will never know for sure if anyone died during Watergate because of that scandal due to the secrecy surrounding so much of it but we can be very sure that the inadvertent deaths of four Americans in service to their country in an area of the world that this nation knew less about than so many others was not sanctioned by a president who was greatly disturbed that they had died at all. Barack Obama takes death personally and he shows that he does in the compassion that he shows to those that he calls to console them on behalf of the nation that he so ably represents. It is a compassion that Abraham Lincoln had when he pardoned so many young soldiers that had been condemned to death. And it is not a compassion that the president’s political enemies have for either him or others that they feel that he represents. Just as Lincoln faced a divided nation for his entire presidency so does Barack Obama face the same sort of circumstance today. But there is a difference between Obama and Nixon that we will end this piece with. Barack Obama is trying to heal deep divisions within the nation while Nixon created the very divisions that brought his presidency down. Watergate, to us, became a national nightmare that we thought would never end. And we believe that something died in the national body politic by the actions that took place during and after Watergate ended. So, just perhaps, the collective death that occurred because of Watergate was so huge that it still cannot be comprehended.

And, there is one other thing to think about when considering the president’s role in the Benghazi affair. And, that is the neoconservative role in the destruction of this nation’s safety net that so many depend on for their very existence in a world that the neoconservatives have created that has passed so many by. How many have already died quiet deaths from the madness in the halls of power and obstruction that is so far removed from their simple lives? And how many die daily from the absence of beneficial gun laws that might save so many lives? The neocons are right in one respect. This march of death is much larger than Watergate but not in the way that they think. If they think at all!

IOVHO,

Regards,

Joe

To say that "God exists" is the greatest understatement ever made across space and time.