On the Return of Watergate - Worse than Watergate? The Mother of All Constitutional Crises

The recent revelations about the man often seen as the "moral hero" of the Watergate scandal, the Washington Post's Bob Woodward, have the feel of an interment ceremony. Reading press accounts of how Woodward swallowed the first Plame leak for a mere two-plus years without a peep and then went out on the Larry-King circuit to dismiss the significance of Plamegate, what came to mind was the burial ceremony that, in "committing" a body to the ground, goes, in part, "ashes to ashes, dust to dust." If there were a Watergate/Plamegate version of this, those two phrases might be replaced by "Nixon to Bush, Woodward to Woodward."

It's strange, isn't it, that the two great constitutional crises of the last half century are "gated" because the first became public thanks to a two-bit break-in by political thieves at an apartment complex named Watergate. We've been gated ever since. It's no less strange that Bob Woodward's decision to protect a source bookends both crises -- and, though a source may be a source, the differences between the two moments tell us much about the world we've traversed between Richard Nixon's impeachment in 1973 and today.

In both moments, it would not be wrong to say that a small coterie of high officials, a "cabal" (to use the word of Colin Powell's former Chief of Staff Lawrence Wilkerson) took control of the government, intent on pursuing a foreign war (though in Nixon's case, one initiated and escalated by Democratic presidents); intent as well on smearing and destroying presidential enemies, especially antiwar ones, on using "national security" to secure political power, and on removing the Constitutional fetters on the president's ability to pursue any policies he may desire.