On July 31, 1973, while the Vietnam war was still being fought, Representative Robert Drinan, a Massachusetts Democrat, introduced the first impeachment resolution against President Richard Nixon. One of the grounds for indictment Drinan proposed was the secret bombing of Cambodia, ordered by the President. To Drinan, this was a crime at least as great as the domestic scandals which had already come to be known as "Watergate."

The fourteen months of massive B-52 "carpet bombings," which killed tens of thousands of Cambodian villagers and an unknown number of Vietnamese communist soldiers in border sanctuaries, were run outside the military's chain of command. They were also kept completely secret from Congress and the public (until exposed by New York Times reporter William Beecher). In recently released transcripts of telephone conversations between Nixon and his closest aides, the President ordered "a massive bombing campaign in Cambodia [using] anything that flies on anything that moves." (The transcript then records an unintelligible comment that "sounded like [General Alexander] Haig laughing.")

The secret bombing of Cambodia involved the same abuse of power and political manipulation of government agencies as Watergate, but only a few Congressional representatives like John Conyers, Elizabeth Holtzman, and Edward Mezvinsky supported Drinan's Cambodia article, which was soundly defeated by the House impeachment committee 26-12.

There are many myths about Watergate -- among them that Woodward and Bernstein rode into Dodge and rescued the republic all by themselves, that the impeachment of Richard Nixon saved American constitutional democracy from destruction, and that the grounds on which Nixon was impeached were a fair reflection of what he and "all the President's men" had actually done. In American mythology, "the system worked."

To most Americans, the slaughter of millions of Cambodians, Vietnamese, and Lao, as well as the destruction of their countries, seem unrelated to "Watergate." Henry Kissinger, one of the architects of the secret bombing of Cambodia, who had ordered his own dissenting staffers and several journalists illegally wiretapped to stop leaks, escaped indictment and would soon be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

Few now remember that it was Indochina, not the burglary of Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate Complex that really set Watergate, the scandal, in motion and led to a pattern of Presidential conduct which seems eerily familiar today.

To recast an infamous Vietnam slogan: They had to destroy American democracy at home in order to save the world for democracy.

Saving the System in the Name of National Security

It would seem little has changed. Rather than "saving the system," Watergate only slowed for a brief period the increasing concentration of power in the White House and the Pentagon, not to speak of its abuse after Ronald Reagan came to power in the name of national security. The now nearly forgotten Iran-Contra scandal during Reagan's reign revealed in a stark way the illegal lengths to which that administration's anti-communist ideologues were willing to go to defy Congress.

Using every stealth method at their command, top Reagan officials defied and effectively nullified a Congressional ban on aid to the "Contras," right-wing Nicaraguans who were determined to overthrow the leftist Sandinistas then in power in their country. White House, CIA, State Department, and Pentagon officials schemed to pass along to the Contras profits from the illegal sale of high-tech arms to the fundamentalist Muslim regime of Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran. (Iran was in a desperate war with Saddam Hussein's Iraq, then officially supported by the Reagan Administration.)

Now, once again, ideologues -- this time formerly anti-communist neoconservatives -- have taken America into another foreign war, whose pretext was as flimsy as the fabricated North Vietnamese attack on American destroyers in the Tonkin Gulf that led to Lyndon Johnson's decision to send combat troops to Vietnam. This latest war is being run by an administration at least as isolated, enraged, obsessed with secrecy, and abusive of power as Richard Nixon's. Americans are as obsessed by

Just as during Watergate and Iran-Contragate, the machinations of Beltway leakers -- in this case in the Plame affair -- carry more weight politically than life-and-death issues like the legalization of torture, the creation of secret, offshore CIA "black" prisons, the administration's campaign to suspend the constitutional rights of defendants and the protections of the Geneva Conventions, not to speak of the administration's drive to create a presidency of unfettered power. Revelations of war crimes by American GIs and CIA operatives have been quickly dismissed by picking a few low-ranking scapegoats like Lyndie England while higher ups go unpunished, just as the chain of responsibility for the My Lai massacres in Vietnam stopped with Lt. William Calley. Secret agent Valerie Plame in her Jackie O shades, posing for Vanity Fair with her whistleblowing husband Joe Wilson, becomes the celebrity du jour standing in for Daniel Ellsberg, leaker of the Pentagon Papers, the secret history of the Vietnam war, who was photographed by the radically chic Richard Avedon.

The Genuine Articles

But are things simply the same as in the 1970s (and again the Reagan era) or is our present situation actually "worse than Watergate," as former Nixon White House counsel John Dean, who turned on the President and his comrades to save himself, argued in <

The first article had at its heart the Watergate break-in and the elaborate cover-up that followed, including "making false or misleading statements to lawfully authorized investigative officers and employees of the United States," "endeavoring to misuse the Central Intelligence Agency, an agency of the United States," and "making or causing to be made false or misleading public statements for the purpose of deceiving the people of the United States into believing that a through and complete investigation had been conducted with respect to allegations of misconduct on the part of personnel of the executive branch of the United States..."

Article 2 was a catch-all indictment of all the violations of Americans' rights ordered by the White House, including the political use of the IRS, CIA, Secret Service, Justice Department, and FBI as well as wiretapping, surveillance, and burglaries against those on President Nixon's notorious "enemies list." In all such acts, "national security" was the justification given. The facts may be different, but do the charges themselves sound familiar? Article 3 concerned the White House's refusal to honor Congressional subpoenas for the infamous tapes secretly recorded by the President and various papers relevant to the Watergate investigation. "In refusing to produce these papers and things Richard M. Nixon, substituting his judgment as to what materials were necessary for the inquiry, interposed the powers of the Presidency against the...House of Representatives."

No one would expect history simply to repeat itself, especially since memories of Watergate (and myths about it) have affected presidential actions ever since. Ronald Reagan and his handlers, faced with Iran/Contragate, certainly remembered how Nixon's cover-up came to seem more egregious than the actions it sought to conceal. Reagan immediately fired Oliver North, the National Security Council staffer who masterminded the scheme, and sent his National Security Adviser Admiral John M. Poindexter packing (if only for a trip back to the Navy).

He then appointed the Tower Commission and a special prosecutor to investigate, appearing to cooperate with Congressional investigations even while undermining them. In his comprehensive and fascinating book, The Wars of Watergate, historian Stanley I. Kutler points out how much cleverer the Reaganites were than Nixon's men in leaving no documents or tapes to be seized.

George W. Bush and his associates must have remarkably short memories. While he has been careful to mouth words of cooperation in the Plamegate case, he has depended on the Republican control of Congress to stonewall on just about every egregious misdeed that has seen the light of day, blocking public hearings into Abu Ghraib, the treatment of prisoners at Guantanamo, the CIA secret prison system, faux intelligence on Iraq, and Plamegate itself.

That felicitous Watergate phrase "high crimes and misdemeanors" and the word "impeachment" are now heard in circles on the left, with the legal grounds for impeachment being explored by lawyers like Elizabeth de la Vega in the Nation magazine and at Tomdispatch. But what special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald may still lack to crack open the case for a White House-led conspiracy to manipulate intelligence, destroy the Wilsons, and get back at the CIA is a whistleblower like John ("there's a cancer on the Presidency") Dean or even Jeb Magruder, the top Republican campaign aide who helped plan the Watergate break-in and cover-up, only to finally cop a plea.

Now that I. Lewis Libby and New York Times reporter Judy Miller, thick as thieves -- "entanglement" was the word that paper's Executive Editor Bill Keller used -- before the vice-presidential chief of staff's indictment, have been designated the fall folks in Plamegate and the administration's rush to war in Iraq, the question is: Could resentment for shouldering the blame alone (so far) lead Libby to disloyal testimony against his higher-ups as happened in Watergate?

Unlike in the Watergate years, however, most of the legal action that might just dent the Bush administration's imperial armor is happening abroad. Just as the most revelatory reports about American abuses of power and war-making -- from the Italian newspaper La Repubblica's three-part series on the yellowcake forgery to the recent Italian TV film on the American use of white phosphorus against civilians in Falluja -- have surfaced abroad, so the only real court actions against American abuses of power are taking place in Europe.

There, an Italian court has indicted CIA agents for "extraordinary rendition" kidnapping operations on the streets of Milan. Spanish courts -- which sought to try Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet for torture -- are now pursuing American violations of national sovereignty because CIA planes ferrying detainees to secret "black sites" used airports in the Azores and the Canary Islands. Both the United Nations and the European Union are investigating the CIA use of secret European prisons and airfields in their "rendition" operations. If Congress won't act to punish Bush Administration officials who enacted a torture policy, perhaps the Europeans will.

Plamegate, after all, is no more just an odious but simple case of Beltway character assassination than the plumbers' break-in at Democratic Party headquarters was just a burglary. Famed Watergate reporter Carl Bernstein now argues that just as the Watergate break-in was the key that opened a strongbox of ugly facts about the Nixon Administration's unbridled abuse of power, so might the Plame affair break open the Bush Administration's imperial modus operandi.

The Politics of Impeachment and the One-Party State

Will Plamegate lead to the collapse of the Bush presidency or even impeachment? These are, in the end, matters less of legality than politics, consciousness, and conscience. A Republican-dominated Congress impeached President Bill Clinton for lying to a grand jury about sex with a White House intern, while President Bush remains free even from hearings, let alone legal action, on his administration's many Watergate-like excesses. Now that's politics!

What makes the Plame affair so odd, however, is this: Unlike Watergate or the Iran-Contra revelations, it doesn't really tell us anything we didn't know (or at least that we couldn't have known) before the Iraq War was launched. The neoconservatives' < lies it told Congress and the public, the political manipulation of the intelligence community including the CIA, FBI, and the military -- all rivaling in scope any similar Nixonian schemes-- were in plain sight for those who cared to look during the run-up to the war.

Even the Downing Street memo, the now infamous secret minutes of a meeting of Prime Minister Tony Blair's senior foreign policy and security officials, describing the White House's commitment to invade Iraq at a time when it was telling Americans it had no plans to do so, had little, if anything, new in it. (At least, its exposure in the British press, like the latest reporting on Plame affair revelations, helped chip away at what had once been a well-armored administration.)

In fact, one of the most revelatory pieces of reporting on the whole pre- and post-invasion period could be found not in the American press but in an extraordinary three-part series in the leftist Italian newspaper La Repubblica, articles which have received only a few skeptical references buried in the back pages of our major papers (while being headline news in the on-line world of political websites and blogs). The Italian investigative reporters do tell us something new -- exactly how two of the key administration arguments for war in Iraq were concocted and known to be bogus by Italian intelligence and discredited by the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency and State Department officials until Vice President Cheney pounded CIA Director George Tenet and Secretary of State Colin Powell into submission.

According to La Repubblica, the yellowcake story and the forged documents that were its source were cooked up by a bottom-feeding double agent who needed the money. (He's Plamegate's most colorful character, rivaling G. Gordon Liddy, Watergate's handlebar-mustachioed, gun-loving CIA operative.) And Italian intelligence knew that the infamous aluminum tubes purchased by Saddam Hussein's regime were for rockets, not centrifuges in a nuclear-weapons program, because the Italian military had once equipped the Iraqis with that make of rocket.

High-level Italian spies are quoted in the piece as being well aware that they needed to hook up with the rogue Cheney/ Rumsfeld back-channel intelligence operation -- running counter to CIA analysis -- in order to keep their hand in with the White House. (Where is this era's James McCord, the Watergate burglar and CIA loyalist who told all because he feared the White House sought political control over the CIA?) Pre-war, the aluminum tubes were also roundly dismissed as evidence for an Iraqi nuclear weapons program by the UN's nuclear-weapons inspectors as well as recent Nobel Prize winner Mohamed ElBaradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency. Ex-Ambassador Wilson was only the last in a long line to discredit Cheney's zealotry about Saddam's nonexistent nuclear program.

As for the Bush Administration's insistence that Saddam had chemical and biological weapons, last week < dubbed "Curveball," who was the sole source for these claims, was a con artist who cooked up his story to get a German visa. But the CIA went right ahead, funneling "Curveball's" phony info into Secretary of State Colin Powell's UN rush-to-war speech and other presidential and vice-presidential saber-rattlings.

Even the weak-kneed Senate Intelligence Committee has revealed how analysts at the Defense Intelligence Agency and the CIA among others, discredited the administration's assertions that al-Qaeda operatives were in league with the Iraqis and gave the infamous Chalabi network of defectors (the main source for Judy Miller's "scoops") zero marks for credibility. It's often forgotten how long it took for Watergate to get traction as a political juggernaut. The initial Washington Post reports by Woodward and Bernstein on the Watergate burglary were printed before the 1972 election and yet Nixon was reelected. (The two reporters had not then traced Liddy, McCord, and the other Nixon "plumbers" back to the Committee to Reelect the President and the White House).

Three decades later, much more was known about the Bush administration's excesses before the 2004 election. But times are very different. The young investigative reporter of Watergate morphed over those three decades into insider icon Bob Woodward, the <

In the early seventies, however skeptical Americans were about Washington after more than eight years of the war in Vietnam under both Democratic and Republican war-makers, some hope of political change still smoldered. Cold War paranoia was ebbing, the horrors of 9/11 yet unimagined. Government was still a bipartisan concept; corporate money had yet to completely dominate elections; the media was still diverse, independent of the Republican attack machine, and skeptical of the powers-that-be. It was still imaginable that classic American checks and balances might right the ship of state.

Now, when the President waves the 9/ll voodoo doll, Congress, the media, and the public flinch. With both houses of Congress under Republican domination and both parties beholden to corporate America but not voting citizens, there have been no Watergate-style hearings, no impeachment hearings, no public investigations at all of Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, torture and secret prisons, war profiteering, or the lies told in the rush to war. The Supreme Court is controlled by conservatives unblinkingly willing to put into the presidency a man whose party may well have stolen elections in Florida and Ohio.

We have no Sen. Sam Ervin, the avuncular constitutionalist and Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee whose Watergate hearings educated Americans about the uses and abuses of government; no Rep. Peter Rodino, who ably and calmly chaired the House impeachment inquiry; not even a Republican like Sen. Howard Baker, who began by defending the White House and came to understand during the Watergate hearings that loyalty to country was more important than the survival of a corrupt president. Congressional critics have no forum like the Watergate hearings and are dependent on the jaded Beltway media to get the word out.

But in recent weeks, moderate Republicans and John McCain, one of the few politicians still willing to fight for those quaint, old-fashioned things called "principles," are gaining traction. And liberal Democrats have new allies in the antiwar fight, most notably conservative Vietnam veteran
White House attempts to tar critics with treason have met their match in retired colonel Murtha who sarcastically said he "liked guys who got five deferments and [have] never been there and send people to war and then don't like to hear suggestions about what needs to be done." (During Vietnam, Vice President Cheney received five deferments and never served in the military.)

We now have something close to one-party government in this country, an idea still so fantastic to Americans and their media that the most serious, in depth, and credible exploration of the 2000 and 2004 election fraud by any journalist -- the book Steal This Vote: Dirty Elections and the Rotten History of Democracy in America -- has been done by an Englishman, Andrew Gumbel of the British newspaper The Independent. He's now been joined by American professor Mark Crispin Miller, whose new book Fooled Again: How the Right Stole the 2004 Elections and Why They May Steal the Next One Too (Unless We Stop Them) digs into the subject as well.

And instead of the Woodward/Bernstein team, we have Judy Miller (and the reborn Bob Woodward). Only a tiny handful of reporters at the New York Times, Washington Post and Los Angeles Times (all with sinking circulations), 60 Minutes and almost uniquely the New Yorker's Seymour Hersh have been doing the kind of serious, in-depth investigative journalism that was done by many in the Watergate era. On-line reporters, able to circulate a single story at lightening speed around the world, are fueled by the same obsessive zeal as their age of Watergate print compatriots but have radically less money to support investigations of any sort.

As Carl Bernstein pointed out recently in Vanity Fair, the Bush administration, like Nixon's, has succeeded only too well "in making the conduct of the press the issue -- again in wartime with false claims and smears directed at political opponents, reporters, newspapers, magazines and broadcast organizations for supposedly undermining national security." If only the media of our era had actually justified such attacks.

John Dean was indeed right. The Bush Administration's excesses are "worse than Watergate," in part because the power that has congealed in presidential hands is much greater than Nixon's imperial presidency held in the early 1970s. As a result, its zealotry, secrecy, deceit, and abuses of power are more akin to the secret bombing of Cambodia or the Iran-Contra affair -- scandals which did not unseat presidents -- than Watergate itself. In both the bombing of Cambodia and Iran-Contragate, a power-hungry White House kept secret foreign policies that it knew neither Congress, the courts, nor the public would be likely to approve -- even though Americans have traditionally been only too eager to give the White House a blank check on national security. No one was indicted for the secret bombing of Cambodia.

In Iran-Contragate, eleven top administration officials, including two national security advisers and an undersecretary of state were finally convicted, but the first President George Bush rushed to pardon four of them as well as Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger (even before he could be indicted). The specter of this resolution of the Libby case recently prompted Democrats and then a group of CIA officials -- to little media attention -- to write the President demanding that he go on record indicating there will be no pardons in the Plame affair. They received no reply.

SAN FRANCISCO -- It was while artist Richard Kamler was waiting in San Quentin prison for the guards to release him that he was struck by the inspiration for his next piece. Kamler was sitting with the mother of his friend who is on death row, and she turned to him and said, "Waiting like this reminds me of being in a hospital waiting room 37 years ago before they checked me in to give birth to Guy."Here was "the arc of life" from birth to death. But life was not ending in natural death; the arc was being cut short with "murder at the hands of the state," says Kamler. And suddenly, remembers Kamler, he was overcome by the "incredible" feeling of waiting for death, a slowing down of the senses, "like that moment between when we inhale and exhale -- which we usually aren't conscious of -- when we're waiting for the next breath to happen.""I knew then I had to make a waiting room," says Kamler. And so every time he went to San Quentin after that day, he began to memorize the look and contents of the waiting room. "I measured and counted the tiles," he says, "the number and size of the concrete blocks, the warning signs on all the walls, what was in the vending machines -- everything."At The Gallery at the University of Texas in Arlington, Kamler has recreated San Quentin's waiting room as a multimedia, interactive art installation. The installation first opened in February at the Sam Houston Memorial Museum in Huntsville, Texas -- a town which also is home to the death chamber where an average of two prisoners are executed each week. "I had to start this in Texas," says Kamler bitterly, "the state-sanctioned murder capitol of the world." Kamler's bitterness is understandable. The United States is the only country in the developed world except Japan that executes prisoners -- and Texas has the highest rate of capital punishment in the Union. Two hundred and twelve prisoners have been killed in Texas since 1982; 225 since 1995, when George W. Bush became governor. Florida, where Gov. Bush's brother Jeb Bush is governor, is the second largest executioner of prisoners in the country. Dominating Kamler's piece is the sound of time running out. A giant video metronome is projected on a set of bars at its entrance; its ticking and the sound of the beating of a heart fill the space. The waiting room itself has been recreated by 13 hanging banners made of thin sheets of lead, which Kamler says symbolize toxicity. On these banners are stenciled the actual warning signs posted on the walls at San Quentin: "If you wear a bra containing any wire you will not clear the metal detector"; "No excessive kissing"; "Kissing only at the beginning and the end"; "No sleeveless tops or dresses." Another hanging piece in the installation is titled "Dead Women Waiting." It has photos of the 37 women on death row bordered in red, white and blue. Kamler calls it his "American Flag." Still another part of the installation features the "execution record" of Texas prisoner Clydell Coleman, who was recently put to death. The record includes the exact times Coleman was taken from his cell, strapped to the gurney, administered the lethal dose of poison and died.When a visitor enters the installation, to one side of the space is a cart where the museum-goer can pick up trays with a prisoner's last meal cast in lead. Kamler downloaded a list of prisoners' last meals from a ghoulish Internet Web site the Texas Department of Criminal Justice has maintained since 1982. (Most of the condemned ordered burgers or T-bones and French fries. A few ordered nothing.) On each tray is the executed prisoner's name and his last words before being executed. Visitors can take a meal and sit down in one of 60 waiting room plastic chairs bolted to the floor. A stack of video monitors run tapes Kamler has recorded with murderers and members of the victims' families, one of whom opposes the death penalty."I hope people wait there," Kamler says. "To me waiting is a pause, a kind of momentary clemency, a time to reconsider. When you witness an execution, you're assembled, then you wait, then the person is killed and you have to wait to be released from prison yourself." While Kamler's metronome keeps its regimented ticking in the gallery, every so often the recorded heart beat stops. "Some people grab their chests to see if their own hearts are still beating," Kamler reports.Kamler, 57, a native San Franciscan, has been making art about prisons and the death penalty since 1979 when a friend invited him to show slides of his work to prisoners at San Quentin. "It was the din that hit me -- people in your face shouting, the TV blaring, metal on metal, concrete on concrete. Everything is hard and boom, boom, boom. I was just stunned. Stunned and excited," says Kamler of his first visit to prison. He signed up to work with prisoners as an artist-in-residence, first at San Quentin, then in San Francisco city jails.Kamler also explains that as a young art apprentice in 1963, he had an epiphany while waiting to introduce himself to Austrian-American sculptor Frederick Kiesler. Kamler overheard Keisler say to a visitor, "Through art, we can change the laws of the world." Kamler has been trying to change the laws of imprisonment through his art ever since.In 1992, he set up gigantic speakers on a boat in the San Francisco Bay just off San Quentin and broadcast lions roaring while Robert Alton Harris was being executed. His purpose, he says, was to reconfigure the ritual of capital punishment into a spectator sport. In 1993, Kamler astonished San Francisco by installing 100 painted plywood buffalo he'd built with prisoners in the field facing the city jail in San Bruno. (The jail quartered its own herd of buffalo, which has been moved there from their former home in Golden Gate Park.) "Oh Give Me A Home Where the Buffalo Roam," as the piece was called, prompted Sheriff Michael Hennessey, one of Kamler's fans, to comment, "Richard saw the unmistakable irony: the buffalo being kept at the jail for their own protection alongside hundreds of prisoners supposedly being held for OUR protection."Kamler, with his Fu Manchu moustache, shaved head and uniform of watch cap, denim shirt and jeans, looks like an ex-con himself. But his work is more than protest art. In a 1997 piece on Kamler, Sculpture Magazine wrote, "Whether inside or outside the confines of the gallery/museum setting, this art explores the realm of protest as the content of fine art."Alchemy is a persistent metaphor in Kamler's work. His last piece, "The Table of Voices," installed at the ex-prison on Alcatraz Island, featured a table bisected by Plexiglas as in a prison waiting room. Viewers could sit on one side of the table, pick up a phone and listen to a murderer talking about his crime or -- on the opposite side of the glass -- to a family member of a murder victim. This provided a wrenching dose of prison-life reality, but Kamler's table was also beautiful: half lead -- the basest of metal, the stuff of bullets -- and half gold, the most precious of materials. In places on the table, lacey patches of gold filigree broke through the lead and caught the light, as if change had begun.In "The Waiting Room," Kamler says, "the alchemy is personal, not visual." For years he has been fascinated by the transformation of some murder victim's families from supporters of the death penalty to abolitionists. And so during the exhibitions of "Table of Voices" and "The Waiting Room," he has organized "community conversations" to which he invites paroled murderers, families of murder victims, pro- and anti-death penalty activists, police, prosecutors and politicians to talk with the public.At first Kamler had hoped that the dialogues "might help heal the families who've lost loved ones and everyone else dragged into murder's vortex." But after pro-death penalty activists tried to break up the Alcatraz show, Kamler isn't so optimistic about the prospect of healing. He hopes now just to temper the revenge he believes drives those who support capital punishment.In the end, Kamler's heart is with people like Texan Ron Carlson, whose sister was hacked to death by Karla Faye Tucker. After championing Tucker's trial sentence of death, Carlson befriended Tucker, campaigning against her execution. Kamler features Carlson on one of the videotapes in "The Waiting Room." "I just hope a few of the people who sit in 'The Waiting Room' might go through what it's like to wait for someone to be executed," Kamler says and, as a result, "find a way to change themselves.""The Waiting Room" will next travel to Houston, where it will open on May 25 at The Art League of Houston; then it will move on to Boston, Rhode Island, Tennessee and Long Island.Judith Coburn writes for many media, including Salon.com, The Village Voice and the Los Angeles Times. Her first piece on AlterNet.org was an interview with feminist historian Ruth Rosen.

To create the scholarly life she's led for over thirty years, University of California at Davis history professor Ruth Rosen first had to help wrench open the doors of academe to women including herself. Her just-published book, "The World Split Open: How the Modern Women's Movement Changed America," chronicles how she and hundreds of other radical women launched a new wave of feminism in the late '60s and watched it crash over America, changing how we think about sex, motherhood, and just about everything else.

Rosen is already known for bringing to light one of the major discoveries of feminist scholarship -- 'The Maimie Papers," an early-20th-century prostitute's letters to her upper-class benefactress -- as well as "The Lost Sisterhood: Prostitution in America 1900-18," about a Progressive Era movement to abolish prostitution. Her latest work, which took ten years to write, is a gold mine of feminist research. For "The World Split Open," Rosen interviewed over one hundred feminist activists and combed scores of archival collections, including FBI files, collections at Radcliffe, Duke, the University of Wyoming, New York University, the Bancroft Library, and Berkeley archivist Laura X's women's library. The bibliography alone -- 31 pages of references to books and articles for readers to follow up on -- is worth the price of the book.

Forcing open academe's doors didn't just help Rosen gain entrance to the ivory tower. It also helped her escape it. Over the years, her old-fashioned academic critics (most of them male) have given her lumps not only over her activism and participatory scholarship, but because she's chosen to write extensively for the popular press -- from Dissent and the Women's Review of Books to hundreds of op-ed pieces for the San Francisco Chronicle and the Los Angeles Times, to which she is a regular contributor. (Maybe what irked them the most -- given the impenetrable quality of most academic writing these days -- is Rosen's clear prose.) As Rosen says in her book, she wrote it for "the women and men who did not participate in the women's movement, who were too busy trying to survive, who felt excluded or estranged, who were too scared, were too old or too young, were not yet born, or are still not born." As an historian she writes for people who love to read history but aren't necessarily scholars.

In Berkeley, California, where she lives, Rosen talked avidly about her work, her book, and the women's movement:

JUDITH COBURN: I can't resist starting off by asking why you thank Norman Mailer in your introduction to "The World Split Open."

RUTH ROSEN: Two years ago, I was at an annual seminar at Robert J. Lifton's home in Cape Cod, and Norman Mailer was making an informal presentation to the assembled group. As an aside, he said that the women's movement never helped anyone but the women who take the shuttle to Washington, DC with their attaché cases and live like men. I told him how much his version of the modern women's movement was media-generated and without intimate knowledge of what it had actually done. I told him how NOW's first six actions all benefited working-class women as well as privileged women.

He was surprised, but I had just finished my book and knew more than I'll ever know again. No matter what he said, I had facts and knowledge that had eluded him. Afterward we bantered and talked and he asked for a copy of my book. I then reread his infamous "Prisoner of Sex," and we had a lively correspondence. For my part, I told him that I now read his "assault" on feminism quite differently. I heard the vulnerable man beneath the aggressive prose, the man who needed women and feared them. It was quite an experience. I told him also that his great legacy as a major American writer, as well as a progressive activist, will be tarnished by his attacks on the women's movement, and that he should reconsider what he thought in light of the actual history. I await his response.

JC: You have some very funny stuff in the book from Federal Bureau of Investigation files, about the FBI attempting to infiltrate the women's movement, taking all the historical names seriously and starting dossiers on them.

RR: FBI agents were bewildered by J. Edgar Hoover's insistence that they engage in complete surveillance of the women's movement all over the country. Hundreds of women were paid as informants, but not as agents, because no women were allowed to be agents until Hoover died. So they paid hundreds of women to sit in people's living rooms while other women poured out their sorrows and their epiphanies and their revelations, and these women took mental notes. They then gave them to field agents, and the agents then forwarded those reports to J. Edgar Hoover.

In almost all circumstances, the field agents wrote to Hoover that these women are not dangerous, they're not subversive; they simply want greater equality; there's no point in continuing this surveillance. Hoover always wrote back, they are a danger to the national security of the United States; continue surveillance.

JC: You don't think women like us were dangerous?

RR: Yes, but not in the way Hoover imagined. They were searching for bombs and communists. What we were doing was more profoundly subversive, because we were questioning all received wisdom and turning lives upside down.We were questioning the nature of our education, curriculum, our marital lives, our sexual lives, the lives of our children. We were talking about how to change American society, which is deeply, profoundly revolutionary. But not in the way that the FBI viewed subversion.

Every once in a while something hilarious would happen, because Hoover, who was used to infiltrating disciplined groups like the Communist Party, would demand that all the leadership and all the dues-paying membership be sent to him. The field agents would try to explain that there were no leaders, there were no dues-paying members. And Hoover would say, There must be -- get these names.

So the FBI was flummoxed. They really didn't know how to infiltrate the women's movement. Yet there are thousands of pages. My name is in there. Most women I knew, their names are in the files. And the FBI simply didn't know what to say about them. But I must say the FBI is the best clipping service in the world, because every time there was a newspaper article about any event that occurred in the Bay Area, you can find an FBI clipping.

JC: I'm glad they did something useful. The media keeps stereotyping the women's movement as middle-class and white, and has done that since the late '60s. I was fascinated to learn from your book that the suffragist movement was also stereotyped that way. I'm interested in these kind of stereotypes, and whether they were the same stereotype as in the late '20s?

RR: The suffragists who led the movement were mostly middle-class women. But among the 8 million women involved in the movement there were huge populations of working women, poor women, and African-American women. In the modern women's movement, it seemed as though everyone was middle class. But actually, when you looked at their backgrounds, most of these women were the first women in their families to go to college. They grew up in working-class homes. And as a result of their college education, they then looked middle class, talked middle class, were articulate, educated, and they seemed like white middle-class women. Most of the famous leaders -- like Gloria Steinem, or Betty Friedan, or Alix Kates Shulman -- so many of these women were really from blue-collar families. And a lot of members of the women's liberation movement were as well.

What's even less known is the fact that the women who started NOW, and the women who were on John F. Kennedy's first Commission on the Status of Women in 1961, came out of the old left, came out of the black civil rights movements in the '40s and '50s, and also came out of very radical unions. One thing that young women didn't understand -- and I include myself -- was that those women, while they may have appeared to us as matrons by then -- because they were in their forties, and they may have thought they were old and ladylike because they dressed nicely -- were in fact longtime radicals. We didn't understand that these were women who had the longest records of activism. They had been quieted during the McCarthy period, they had raised their children during the McCarthy period, but with the election of John F. Kennedy they came out into the political arena, and they were the most extraordinarily radical women.

And everything they did the first few years between l966 and l973 were class-action suits on behalf of phone operators, textile workers, stewardesses, as they were then called, not for upper-middle-class women. Another example of that is the segregated classified ads. That's something my students know nothing about, that newspapers once had "women wanted" and "men wanted" ads on separate pages. And the very first thing that NOW did was to make sure that that was ended, and that jobs and classified ads were for men and for women.

Now, who did that benefit? Professors, lawyers, doctors, dentists, and professional women don't look in the classified ads for jobs. This benefited skilled blue-collar workers. It benefited women who wanted to get into working-class jobs that paid a lot more than the secretarial and clerical workers.

JC: I didn't realize until Betty Friedan's biography appeared that she had actually been a union organizer. We all thought she was a suburban housewife straight out of The Feminine Mystique. You also mention a group called CAW. Could you talk about them a little bit? I never even knew they existed.

RR: The biography is by a man named Daniel Horowitz. And he's the one who really, in a sense, broke the news that Betty Friedan had an extraordinary past. And now it all makes sense, that the connections between the old left among women, and the new left women, were there, and that this wasn't just reinventing the wheel all over again. These women had the language, and activism, and discipline, and writing skills, and rhetorical skills. So Betty Friedan was part of a large group of women who, as I said, came from radical unions. She was a member of the United Electrical Workers, an extremely radical union, and she was a labor journalist. She made the choice in 1959, which was a reasonable one, to portray herself as a sister suburbanite, so that women would just see her as another housewife who was unhappy, rather than experience endless red-baiting and be discredited. Some people think that was the wrong decision, but the success of her book shows, I think, that it probably was the right decision at that historical moment.

CAW, which stands for the Congress on American Women, was an organization in the postwar period. It was an international organization, but the American part was called the Congress on American Women. These were women from the old left. They were dedicated to interracial activism, toward improving women's lives, and toward improving the lives of African-American women. Their agenda was as modern and radical as you can imagine, and they were devoted to economic and social justice.

JC: Do you think the women's movement ever really dealt with race and gender? To take one example, many African-American women thought when they listened to the women's movement, that this idea that women needed to have careers, just simply didn't apply to them because most of them were already working, already trying to raise children while they were working, and at jobs that didn't "liberate" them at all.

RR: I think that most "minority" women saw the first agenda that the women's movement created as fairly irrelevant to them, except they understood that child care was necessary, that equal pay was necessary, that access to education and highly skilled jobs were necessary. And they very quickly redefined women's issues as being the need for shelter, the need for safe communities, an end to institutionalized racism, and access to education. I think the most ignored aspect of the women's movement is that unions began to take up feminist issues very quickly and create entirely new demands on corporations and companies that included basic feminist demands, such as onsite child care, equal pay, access to promotion and to higher wages. And by 1975, there were hundreds of new movements, and those included working-class women and unions, every "minority group" -- Puerto Rican, Native American, African American, Mexican American -- all of whom realized that their history dictated the need for a very different agenda.

JC: Even though they might not call themselves feminists.

RR: That's right. And they didn't always. In fact, what's most surprising was that African-American women -- not those who were involved in the Panthers or in movements, but just ordinary working women -- supported the women's movement to a much higher degree than white women. This is because they were already in the working force, and they understood that they needed certain kinds of rights as working women. They recognized things like sexual harassment and being excluded from skilled trades and from higher education.

JC: The book has a lot of wonderful anecdotes of just the strangeness of the cultures flipping between feminists and tradition in the late '60s. Tell the story about your friend graduating from Stanford.

RR: One of my friends who was about to get her PhD at Stanford didn't know what to do because her husband was out of town and she had this tiny little infant that she had no one to take care of while she went to graduation. So she took the baby to the ceremony and in the hot California sun she fed her baby little pieces of chocolate to try to keep her quiet. Eventually the baby's face and hands were just covered with chocolate, and finally my friend's name was called. She went up the stairs onto the podium, shook hands with the president, somehow managing to get her PhD in one hand and shake hands with the other, while carrying her baby. Meanwhile, on her baby's back she had a sign that read, "We need child care at Stanford." The audience roared its approval and applauded loudly. She then went down the stairs and went back to her seat. Meanwhile, the president of Stanford wondered what that gooey brown stuff was all over his hands.

JC: But child care is still the most important goal we haven't achieved. If poor women are to get off welfare and go to work, we need to have universal, affordable, quality child care. Clinton said he would do that; it's not been done. It's probably the most important part of the feminist agenda that was never achieved. Why do you think that is?

RR: First, I think we still have a Cold War mentality and assume that child care is a socialist and a communist institution, not an American institution. When President Nixon vetoed the Comprehensive Childcare Act of 1971, he explicitly stated that we do not want to sovietize our children. After having passed the Senate and the Congress, that act was vetoed by President Nixon, and wasn't taken up again until Clinton became President, who then dropped it during the Lewinsky scandal.

A second reason is that there's still a deep belief that women ought to be home with their children -- unless they're on welfare, in which case they should be at work without child care. Which doesn't make any sense. But there is still this belief that it's women who are responsible for raising the children. Scandinavian countries have paid leave for men and women for several years to be home with infants. But the political shift in the last twenty years has been so far to the right that the idea of a big, centralized government giving money to the states, or even to community-based groups, is antithetical to the larger trend of privatizing everything.

JC: You've said that the young women in the '60s who started the radical feminist movement didn't really know about this history or feel connected to it. Why do you think that the radical women's movement seemed to burst out of what we thought was nowhere?

RR: I think one reason for that distaste for NOW, or the distaste for women who were working with the government, is that those of us who were involved in the antiwar movement did not trust the government, hated the policy in Vietnam, and were so radical about our revulsion about the war in Vietnam that we couldn't trust people who were calling themselves liberals and who were working within government structures, even working within "the system." A second reason is that many younger women felt very strongly that they did not want to live an exclusively domestic life. And they feared more than anything becoming like the cultural icon of the '50s, of being a woman who lived to serve her husband and her children. The younger, more radical women's movement was a kind of matricide, a kind of revolt against the mothers.

JC: In a way it was the beginning of identity politics. A lot of radical feminists really wanted to reinvent the idea of woman.

RR: That's right.

JC: There was a lot of debate then, and you talk about this in your book, about the question of whether women are really just like men, but have been culturally conditioned to believe that they're inferior, or whether women in fact are very, very different from men, but that their differences are assigned an inferior position by the culture.

RR: I think that the '50s used women's difference so powerfully as a means of excluding women from so many parts of life that the first group of feminists in the '60s, both older and younger, really feared asserting anything but sameness. They wanted to be seen as equals of men, and they wanted the laws to operate equally before the court for men and women. Sameness was the most important, the most salient legal way to fight the exclusions that had been so much part of the '50s.

But by the late '60s, '70s, and '80s, women began to address the reality that women are, in fact, somewhat like men and somewhat unlike men. The problem is, men remained the legal and the cultural and the social reference point. So then women began to argue, well, we should create a society that honors women's difference and considers that as much of a norm as men's life. We bear babies; we lactate. The society should be organized around our life experience as well as men's -- not exclusively around ours, but should accommodate with honor and with dignity women's life experiences.

JC: Certainly lesbian women were very important on this question because their experiences were very different than either men's or heterosexual women's, although of course many of them wanted children and committed relationships or marriages.

RR: That's right. Lesbian women were very important in pointing out different sexualities, in questioning what is really female, what is really male, and making that seen as a much more complicated question. By today, there are fewer people around in the women's movement who would be essentialist and argue that women are completely different than men and morally superior. Equally outmoded is the position that women are exactly like men and that there's no difference, and that all the laws and all the organization of society can equally accommodate men's and women's lives; they can't. A perfect example of that is that women are still fighting when they go to work to have institutions address their real need to be both parents and workers. And men who choose to take parenting seriously are also frequently viewed as unacceptable, as not taking their careers seriously.

One of the stereotypes of radical feminists now is that they're puritans, that they hate sex, that they hate pornography, that sexual harassment is really just flirting, and feminists just want to spoil everyone's fun. It's simply not true that the women's movement was largely prudish or primarily antisexual. It's very important for people to realize that the sexual revolution preceded the women's movement, and quite a number of women were thrilled by the idea of sexual freedom. But abortion was illegal, and many women felt that sexual freedom seemed to have arrived on men's terms. They felt that men could use women like Kleenex and throw them away.

So it's not a surprise that some of the most vitriolic and powerful and rageful farewells that women wrote to new left men include an angry statement about sexual exploitation. It's not that these women were prudish and didn't want sex, but they wanted it in a more respectful and a more equal way. And I argue in the book that, for a good part of the '70s, those women tried to find ways to make the sexual revolution equal, to find a way that a sexual freedom could be experienced with respect and equality.

Now there's another, much smaller, number of women in the women's movement who became obsessed with pornography. They got all the attention because it's very sexy and it's dramatic, and pornography is a very hot topic at any point in history. But there were much larger numbers of women who were in fact trying to look at the ways in which women were sexually harmed through illegal abortion, through sexual harassment, through domestic violence, through rape, through marital rape, through date rape. [Those women] wanted to get rid of those sexual injuries so that there could be true sexual freedom and sexual equality. The image of our generation as a prudish generation is really off the mark.

JC: The stereotype is actually the reverse of what a lot of men experienced, which was that they were threatened by women's sexual liberation. That meant that women had something to say about what the sex would be like, and who approached whom, and the whole question of women's orgasms -- the fact that men didn't really know how to give a woman pleasure and that sex was focused on the male orgasm. Of course, most women didn't really understand that either.

RR: That's right. The ignorance level was astonishing. Here's a sexual revolution and there's a whole generation of young men and women who didn't know how to talk about sex, didn't know much about anatomy. The men knew very little; the women knew even less. And so resentments and angers grew on both sides. There was no malevolence from anyone. It was simply a lot of ignorance, which took a long time to correct.

JC: You talk in the book about "consumer feminism." What is that exactly, and how does it compare to what advertisers were doing in the '50s with the feminine mystique?

RR: Advertising changed a great deal from the '50s to the '60s. It became much more sexualized. So in the '50s you see a nice housewife with a shirtwaist dress putting away ironed linen in a linen closet. In the '60s you see a woman who is scantily clad, lying on those same sheets looking very sexually available. In the '70s advertisers realized that the women's movement had become a household word, and they consciously wanted to appropriate it and use the language of liberation and emancipation to sell things to women.

Advertisers began to assert that in order to be free, women must buy. They'll have to buy appropriate clothes to go to work. They'll have to purchase the proper stereos, the proper cookware. And all in the name of being an emancipated woman.

JC: It's faux feminism.

RR: I call it consumer feminism because it's such an appropriation and such a transformation of feminism, which had been very antimaterialistic and very critical of the materialism of American culture.

JC: Now that the women's movement has made its way out into the mainstream culture, and it affects the majority of American women, what has happened to some of the radical feminist ideas? Do you feel anything has been lost by the movement becoming so mainstream?

RR: I think the women's movement is not a single movement anymore. By 1975, I think, in fact, the women's movement had become "hundreds" of movements and there were hundreds of feminisms. I don't think we lost anything, because what we did was to ignite questioning, and those questions are now at the center of a lot of mainstream politics and cultural and social debate. We have not won. There is no national consensus. The whole country doesn't agree with those ideas. But think about the fact that we put abortion on the political agenda and it has stayed there now for thirty years.

JC: You could say that that means we failed.

RR: Absolutely. I totally agree. We have not won. But it is a great tribute to the women's movement that we were able to change the terms of debate. I don't think we ever had a clear picture of how difficult it would be to win. But in fact, everyday life is different. There are many young women who simply wouldn't put up with the kinds of experiences that we put up with. They simply have a sense of entitlement -- that they should be treated with respect at work and in private life. There are many young women who assume that both parents should take care of children. Now this is not uncontested. No idea is uncontested that came out of the women's movement.

JC: I'm curious that you used the phrase "a revolution," started by the women's movement. The way you use it seems very different than what radical feminists had originally envisioned.

RR: Many radical feminists had the apocalytic expectation that patriarchy would collapse, alongside of capitalism. At the same time we were saying that patriarchal attitudes and values totally permeated the culture, so how could we have an instant revolution and how could we expect such a saturated patriarchal culture to change in a moment, or day, or year? So many early feminists just hadn't thought that through.

I think the net effect is that we did start a revolution, a revolution that's very profound, very disorientating, and therefore extremely threatening. And it is not one that occurs within a decade, or even within our own lifetimes. Feminist ideas continue to burrow deeply into the culture; they're being argued about, debated. And that's a different kind of revolution. And perhaps we should realize that the kind of revolutions that women start do not involve building barricades in the street, or throwing tear gas grenades back at the police, but rather slowly changing our institutions, our homes, our lives.

JC: What are some of the arguments that women historians talk about now, in terms of interpretation of women's history?

RR: One of the very biggest differences today is whether to emphasize women's actual social experience in the past -- the social history of women, what they were saying, what they were doing, their participation in economic, educational, sexual, social, cultural life -- or to look at a society and see the way in which it's gendered. One example might be, how did a political party use particular kinds of imagery to feminize certain men so that the men in another political party looked very strong and masculine -- the way Republicans have, in the last few decades, tried to make democratic men seem effeminate if they proposed too much nurturing or caring by the state.

To me, both approaches are really useful, and really exciting. There are some pioneering feminist scholars who think all this emphasis on gender will just exclude women from the picture. And women will disappear again. And then there are people on the other side who think that what's most important are cultural representations, gendered representations of life, rather than what women did themselves, or what women wrote themselves.

JC: You mention in your book having cancer while you were doing the research and writing it, and how even that experience was affected by the women's movement.

RR: The women's health movement was arguably the most successful movement ignited by feminism. It virtually changed medical practice. It attacked the idea that women should be infantilized and treated as idiotic patients who simply had psychosomatic complaints. And most important to me is that the women's health movement said you have to be responsible for your own health. You can't assume that you are a child who has no responsibility. If you feel things, you experience things, then take those things seriously, because it's possible that the physician who you'll see will ignore them or not take them seriously. For quite some time, I had had a sensation that made me worried. I went to doctors for six months and they kept saying, don't worry about this, this is not cancer, cancer doesn't hurt, you don't have sensations. But the women's movement, in my opinion, saved my life, because I trusted the fact that I was experiencing something abnormal, a sensation that verged on discomfort but not pain, a kind of stinging sensation in breast tissue.

And when I finally convinced a doctor to send me to a surgeon, and when the biopsy was over and it was positive, the surgeon and a nurse were holding my hands. And the nurse was saying to me, you must join a women's support group; you will get through this. At the very moment I was being told I had cancer, I was being told that a women's cancer group would be the means by which I would overcome this. And that was so powerful, because she had no idea who I was, she had no idea that the women's health movement had saved my life and she had no idea that the women's movement had been at the core of my life for so many years. I joined one of the first women's cancer groups, which helped me get through it.

So now, when the breast cancer advocates are a national group and have succeeded in increasing the amount of money, this is a direct outcome of the women's movement. And we shouldn't see this as something that's a fluke. This is a direct outcome of what was started by women in Boston when they began to study women's bodies, women's health, and published the very famous first book, "Our Bodies, Ourselves."