The Lessons of Watergate

By Charles Lewis, The Center for Public Integrity. Posted December 1, 2004.

The tension between power and the press, between spinning and searching for truth, between disinformation and information, is of course endemic to the human condition itself. And in trying times like these, when it occasionally looks like things are going to hell, it is strangely consoling to recall that actually others before us also have traveled on what must have seemed to be the road to perdition.

For example, 33 years ago, a President and his administration were prosecuting a difficult, unpopular war thousands of miles away on foreign soil, keenly attempting without great success to control the media's access to information, particularly of the unfavorable kind. Two newspapers, the New York Times and the Washington Post, each began publishing a leaked, secret Defense Department history of the Vietnam War that dramatically revealed government deception and incompetence. The Nixon administration went into federal court against the two news organizations, separately, and, citing national security and charging treason, managed to halt publication of the "Pentagon Papers" until the U.S. Supreme Court, on June 30, 1971, sided with the First Amendment by a vote of 6-3.

While Washington Post executive editor Ben Bradlee was, among others, understandably exultant and relieved, he also recognized, as Bradlee later recalled in his memoir, A Good Life, that he had just stared into the abyss, "For the first time in the history of the American republic, newspapers had been restrained by the government from publishing a story – a black mark in the history of democracy... What the hell was going on in this country that this could happen?"

Certainly a common refrain among many journalists these days as well, but to finish the flashback, the Pentagon Papers episode obviously was just the beginning. Bradlee at the time did not know the answer to his own question, except that "the Cold War dominated our society, and... the Nixon-Agnew administration was playing hardball." While Vietnam wore on for a few more years, Richard Nixon seethed and the White House siege mentality worsened.

Two days before the historic Supreme Court case, the whistleblower who had leaked the Pentagon Papers, Daniel Ellsberg, was indicted on federal charges of conspiracy, espionage, theft of government property and the unauthorized possession of "documents and writing related to the national defense." The day after the high court decision, White House Special Counsel Charles Colson asked former CIA operative E. Howard Hunt whether "we should go down the line to nail the guy [Ellsberg] cold."

The Pentagon Papers obsession spawned the White House Special Investigations Unit, the infamous "Plumbers" unit, who, among other misadventures, weeks later broke into Ellsberg's psychiatrist's office, looking for dirt. And the poisonous paranoia didn't stop there but extended to other burglaries, including the Democratic Party national headquarters at the Watergate complex, electronic surveillance, misuse of confidential tax return information against perceived political enemies, mail fraud, obstruction of justice and an astonishing array of other illegal government abuses of power, ultimately exposed, prosecuted and culminating in the only resignation of a sitting U.S. president.

The Pentagon Papers case and the Watergate scandal still represent U.S. history's high-water mark in the longstanding struggle between raw political power and democratic values, poignantly affirming the public's right to know about its government. They still represent the bleakest moments and the loftiest triumphs of journalism in contemporary America, an invaluable perspective today as we ponder the future and assess the tectonic damage to our long-cherished freedoms of speech and information in the past three, disquieting years in the wake of the devastating, unimaginable carnage of September 11, 2001.

Suddenly, despite living in the most powerful nation on earth, we all faced a shattering if all-too-familiar realization of our own human vulnerabilities, including the quite palpable fear for our own personal safety, indelibly seared into our collective consciousness. While the Vietnam and Watergate era was quite extraordinary, most Americans, including journalists, never had the sense that their physical wellbeing was potentially at risk. Juxtapose our pervasive sense of insecurity and the patriotic and visceral, survival-related instinct to do anything to thwart "terrorism," with a President and administration which assumed power with a well-documented predisposition to tightly manage and control information, and it is not difficult to understand the current, wholesale assault on openness and government accountability today.

Charles Lewis is the founder and executive director of the Center for Public Integrity, a nonprofit, nonpartisan watchdog organization in Washington that does investigative reporting and research on public policy issues.

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