Ramifications of Watergate

In July, 1995, more than 20 years later, one of many hearings based on those reforms was in full swing. A special Senate Whitewater Committee was making modest headlines with efforts to connect the suicide of President Bill Clinton's childhood friend and legal counsel, Vince Foster, with irregularities in the president and First Lady's business dealings back in Arkansas. Vince Foster's death was undoubtedly a tragedy. Questions raised by the Whitewater investigation are another chapter in continuing questions about Bill Clinton's character that have been current since before he was elected president. But, in the two years that Whitewater has been a legal issue, while it does not exactly go away, it has hardly caught fire. As political theater, the Whitewater hearings were something of a yawn. They lacked the compelling drama that kept the nation tuned to the Watergate investigation a generation ago.

Perceived as a Constitutional crisis as the O.J. Simpson trial was perceived as a crisis in racism, the televised hearings created their own folk heros. From the homespun humor of its chairman, Sen. Sam Ervin of Nort

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over, but hardly the speculation about it. For the most part, analysts can only speculate about what Watergate meant to the ordinary citizen at the time. In Washington, of course, no event was bigger, as one former official remembered, Washington residents remember where they were when they heard about the Saturday night massacre just as a decade earlier most Americans remembered where they were when they heard that Kennedy was shot. But, despite deep personal interest throughout the country, most observers agree that the person in the street, the non-Washingtonian, was also worried about rising prices, the gas crunch and the winding down of the Vietnam War. Most commentators agreed that the citizens who had voted overwhelmingly for Richard Nixon in November of 1972 were glad to see the struggle end in 1974. As Gerald Ford put it--before he pardoned Nixon and created another controversy--"our long national nightmare is over." The trauma of Watergate had succeeded the trauma of the 1960s. Those two "smoking guns," the real rifle (or rifles) that shot John F. Kennedy in 1963 and the metaphoric revolver that ended the presidency of Richard Nixon just over a decade later, bracketed a tumultuous time in American history. The co
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