Crumbling doesn’t stop

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A VIEW FROM THE BRIDGE

This week marks the fiftieth anniversary of one of the most peculiar events in American history.
In time, it would be seen as the mere opening of a tiny crack in a far greater problem, and it would ultimately cost our 37th president his job.
A nighttime security guard at the Watergate office building in Washington, DC, spotted a piece of tape holding open a door latch.
It’s an unremarkable discovery, in its own little way. I’m sure we’ve all seen doors held open or latches temporarily prevented from closing in various offices, somewhere, some time in our lives.
The fact that the Watergate was a prestigious office building with high-profile clients made it an issue of some concern. The fact that the Democratic Party election campaign headquarters were housed in some of those offices made it even more remarkable.
Once the alarm had been raised, a small team of would-be burglars rounded up and handcuffed, one might have thought it’d be the end of the episode. Clearly far from professional, clearly incompetent, and clearly unfamiliar with exactly whose office was where, the men made up a shifty group of what appeared at the outset to be opportunists.
Had one of them not admitted to being formerly employed by the CIA, the matter would have gone so far below the radar as not even to be picked up by the news media of the day.
An investigation into their activity in the darkened building revealed they had been trying to place bugging equipment in the party headquarters.
The aforementioned ex-CIA operative had the White House telephone number of one of the president’s closest aides in his wallet.
Now, as we all know quite well, bugging the DNC was not the first of the White House’s dirty tricks, and it was by no means the last. It might not even have been the most absurd, a title that may belong to attempts at hiring so-called high-class prostitutes in order to compromise members of the opposing political party. But it stands out today as the moment at which the complex web of supports began seriously to crumble under Richard Nixon’s feet, and if you’ve ever watched anything crumble you’ll know that crumbling doesn’t stop until it becomes collapse. One part will crumble into the next, and on it will go.
One by one, the president’s barefaced lies were exposed. Hush money was paid and revealed. Opponents were blacklisted or fired from their jobs. The White House became a circus tent of the grotesque, the flailing misfits, all struggling to climb above the dissolving masonry.
You can’t stop the crumble. Oh, you may try. You may think you’re bigger or stronger than the crumble, but the crumble will always reach you in the end.
Can we say today that the very fiber of our nation’s core was tested in those two final years of Nixon’s second term? Can we say that lessons in how to protect the Constitution, the establishment, the power of the executive office, were learned and used advantageously in the decades to come?
For the most part, I’d say that they had. I’d say the presidency was preserved and the authority of government prevailed, and most importantly that the integrity of office was upheld again and respected again.
For a while, at least.
They say that history does not really repeat itself. Of course it doesn’t. That’s not possible.
But people do.