Forty Summers

"A third-rate burglary," is how press secretary Ron Ziegler referring to the break-in at the Watergate hotel forty years ago. If that was true, then he was describing the most famous third-rate burglary" of all time. I will always remember that summer as the one in which I became aware. It would be two more summers before Richard "Tricky Dick" Nixon would resign in shame, but when I was ten, this was the news: Five men were arrested in the wee small hours having been discovered inside the offices of the Democratic National Committee, located inside the soon to be infamous hotel.
Amazingly, Nixon won the election that November in a landslide, and the only recount that was necessary was to discover if George McGovern had actually voted for himself. But things had already begun to unravel. All those machinations and manipulations the appropriately abbreviated Committee to Re-Elect the President started to surface. It started with Washington Post reporters Woodward and Bernstein, spreading over the next year to Walter Cronkite and even the funny papers. The fuse was lit, and it was only a mater of time before the whole charade came tumbling down.
The most visible mark that we bear as a society is the way we now put "-gate" at the end of anything that even hints of scandal, but the real change is deep inside. Out trust in government has returned to those low levels experienced in the early seventies, and despite the fact that we have more information than ever before because of the response to that third-rate burglary four decades ago, we don't trust our elected officials as far as we can throw them. Even if that throw is the metaphorical one out of office. I grew up in a world that regularly painted its public officials as glad-handing liars, but back in 1972, we learned that some of them were actual criminals. A twenty-six-year-old lawyer not long out of Yale Law School recalled her days on the Watergate investigation as "one of the greatest personal and professional opportunities I've ever had." She would soon marry former schoolmate Bill Clinton. What a long, strange trip it's been.