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Wednesday, June 19, 2019 The Nugget Newspaper, Sisters, Oregon
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The blast crater
of Watergate
By Jim Cornelius
Editor in Chief
Letters to the Editor…
The Nugget welcomes contributions from its readers, which must include the writer9s name, address and phone number. Let-
ters to the Editor is an open forum for the community and contains unsolicited opinions not necessarily shared by the Editor.
The Nugget reserves the right to edit, omit, respond or ask for a response to letters submitted to the Editor. Letters should be
no longer than 300 words. Unpublished items are not acknowledged or returned. The deadline for all letters is noon Monday.
To the Editor:
T. Lee Brown9s column of June 5 entitled <The
Old Ways= leaves her hoisted by her own petard.
Her anger, discomfort, and judgment stem-
ming from a conversation she overheard a few
years ago at Sisters Coffee hinges on a word
or phrase, redacted for publication, that readers
are led to conclude was an ethnic pejorative.
Ms. Brown is quick to establish that the conver-
sation was among <white men= and is equally
quick to speculate unkindly about them. I won-
der, would the remark have been less offensive
had it been spoken by an Asian teen? A Middle
Eastern woman? An African-American child?
If not, why even mention the race and age of
the speakers?
Camo, guns, the Great Emboldening 4
through a chance encounter in a coffeehouse,
Ms. Brown evokes stereotypical negative
imagery to paint these men with a broad and
ugly brush.
The column brought to mind my own very
different experience at Sisters Coffee a few
years back.
During the summer of 2015, my husband and
I spent several weeks in Central Oregon. We9re
native Midwesterners and had lived the past
10 years in St. Louis. For reasons that intrigue
social scientists, St. Louis has remained one
of the most segregated, racially volatile cities
in the U.S. During summer and early autumn
of 2014, the city garnered national attention
when, in separate incidents less than 90 days
apart, two black teenagers were shot and killed
by police officers. Riots erupted throughout the
city, including our neighborhood, and violent
unrest continued until winter. As the anniver-
sary of the first shooting approached and addi-
tional violence was anticipated, we were more
than happy to be elsewhere.
One morning in early August, we snagged
a table near the (much-missed) upright piano.
See LETTERS on page 21
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The House Judiciary
Committee indulged in
some bizarre (and lame) the-
atrics in bringing Watergate
co-conspirator-turned-star-
witness John Dean to <tes-
tify= on the <historical con-
text= of the Mueller Report
earlier this month.
The mere fact that 4 47
years after the break-in at
the Democratic National
Committee offices in
the Watergate Hotel in
Washington, DC 4 we
reflexively attach the suffix
<gate= to scandals of every
stripe is sufficient evidence
that we are living in the
long shadow of the events
of 1972-74.
Dean9s appearance was
a bit of personal synchron-
icity for me, because I had
just spent about six hours of
travel time on a deep dive
into Watergate with a variety
of podcasts and documenta-
ries. Why? Can9t really say
4 except that I was nagged
by a sense that the faultlines
which have become a chasm
in our political culture were
first ripped open by the
interrelated calamities of the
Vietnam War and Watergate.
And I didn9t feel like I knew
enough about it.
Watergate loomed like
a toxic grey shadow in my
childhood. I was too young
to have any grasp of the
events, but I remember
Nixon9s resignation, which
happened when I was eight
years old. I remember my
parents 4 particularly my
mother 4 being utterly dis-
mayed. For about a decade
after Watergate, she insisted
that Lyndon Johnson had
done worse (probably true)
and that Nixon had been
persecuted by <the liberals=
and the press. Well&
It wasn9t until a tranche
of Oval Office tapes were
released in 1987 that
showed Nixon in his own
words to be foul-mouthed,
petty, antisemitic, a crook
and a liar, that she acknowl-
edged that pushing him out
of office was the right and
necessary thing.
The tragedy is that Nixon
was probably the best-pre-
pared and most qualified
man to ever hold the office.
He9d served in the military,
had practiced law, served as
a congressman, a senator,
a governor of a major state
and as Vice President of the
United States. He was, by
all accounts, truly brilliant
in his ability to suss out
geopolitical and strategic
trends, and his <opening to
China= and détente with the
Soviet Union were signifi-
cant and lasting triumphs.
He also carried around
a super-sized chip on his
shoulder because he wasn9t
cool like Kennedy, was
mean as a rick of rattle-
snakes, and had a para-
noid streak as wide as a
California interstate. His
morose self-pity wasn9t just
grotesque 4 it was a major
character flaw and it helped
to bring him down.
At every turn in the
Watergate scandal, he chose
to do the wrong thing.
Character is fate.
The Watergate para-
digm is all over the current
circus in Washington, DC.
Trumpster Roger Stone has
a tattoo of Nixon9s face
on his back. Seriously.
The President himself has
Twitter instead of tapes, and
a Nixonian tangle of charac-
ter flaws without the com-
pensating brilliance. For
their part, the Democratic
Party wanted so badly for
the Mueller Report to set
the table for a Watergate-
style takedown of Donald
Trump that they were gob-
smacked when they discov-
ered that the special counsel
wasn9t going to hand them a
<smoking gun.=
Many in the media would
love nothing more than to
be in on the kill, but they
lack the journalistic chops
of Bob Woodward and Carl
Bernstein 4 and they don9t
understand that bloviating in
cable TV panel discussions
isn9t the same thing as the
careful, unglamorous work
Woodward and Bernstein
and other reporters did back
in the 970s.
The spectacle gives cre-
dence to Karl Marx9s old
saw that history repeats
itself <first as tragedy, then
as farce.=
Watergate looms gigantic
4 yet it is little understood.
It9s well worth taking some
time to dig into the story,
because we9re living in the
blast crater of that third-
rate burglary and shabby
coverup right now, and will
likely be for decades to
come.
Opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the writer and
are not necessarily shared by the Editor or The Nugget Newspaper.
