A bungled political burglary 20 years ago still echoes in the depths of America's troubled soal, in the nation's angry heartbeat.
Watergate. The word entered the language as a synonym for scandal. Koreagate, Irangate, Iraqgate. Every sniff of governmental wrongdoing is linked to that granddaddy of abuse. Overdrafts at the House bank? Call it Rubbergate.But the June 17, 1972, breakin has a deeper legacy. It changed the course of American history and the nature of the relationship between the citizenry and its government.
The Watergate tapes made every American a fly on the wall of the Oval Office, privy to crude conversations that linked the president of the United States to the illegal coverupof "a third-rate burglary attempt" at the Democratic National Committee headquarters.
Americans never thought politics was a clean sport. But their cynicism never approached the Watergate disclosures of stacks of $100 bills and of demands that defense contractors kick in huge illegal contributions to the Committee to Re-Elect the President, acronym: CREEP.
Watergate's impact also was magnified by the accident of its timing.
The scandal capped a period of national agony. Starting in November 1963 with the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the nation entered a deadly decade.
A horrified America saw leaders gunned down, fire and violence engulf cities, the Vietnam War defy the nation's military power.
The war drove Democrat Lyndon B. Johnson from the White House. But his Republican successor, Richard M. Nixon, was headed for a 40-state re-election landslide when Watergate happened.
Democrats did their best to make the break-in an issue in the 1972 presidential campaign. Party chairman Lawrence F. O'Brien called it "political espionage" and suggested it was part of a wider plot to undermine the electoral process.
White House spokesman Ronald Ziegler tried to brush it aside as "a third-rate burglary attempt." But one of the five men arrested inside Democratic Party headquarters in the Watergate office building was James W. McCord, security director for CREEP.
Three months later seven men, including former low-level White House aides G. Gordon Liddy and E. Howard Hunt, were indicted on charges of conspiring to commit burglary. They also were charged with possession of wiretapping equipment. The indictment charged Liddy, Hunt and McCord with eavesdropping on Democratic Party phone conversations during the three weeks before June 17.
But it was an operation so pointless on the face of it, that who could believe it involved anyoine of substance in the administration?
Watergate was hardly a footnote on Election Day. Democrat George S. McGovern carried only Massachusetts and the District of Columbia.
The following January, Nixon was sworn in for a second term. The shouts of anit-war demonstrators provided a faint counterpoint to a presidential speech declaring the nation was "on the threshold of a new era of peace in the world." There was hope U.S. involvement in Vietnam was ending.
The newly elected Senate controlled by Democrats established a special committee headed by Sen. Sam Ervin, D-N.C. to investigate the Watergate break-in and allegations the Republicans had sponsored widespread political dirty tricks. The day before Nixon's inauguration, George Bush was elected Republican Party chairman.
With The Washington Post taking the lead, an aggressive press began unearthing evidence of greater White House involvement in Watergate.
Suddenly the president who'd been re-elected by one of the largest landslides in American history was on the defensive.
The Watergate committee opened its hearings in May. The Senate Caucus Room was packed. Americans were transfixed by the televised spectacle, the patient unfolding of a crime gone awry and a clumsy attempt to conceal its purpose and planners.
If people shook their heads at the strange tales they were hearing about the Nixon re-election committee, their hearts stopped in mid-June when a slight, sandy-haired young man wearing hornrimmed glasses spent a full week before the committee. John W. Dean III had been White House counsel, the president's in-house lawyer.
In flat, unemotional tones, Dean directly implicated the president and top White House aides and his friend and former law partner, Attorney General John Mitchell, in the effort to cover up the Watergate burglary.
In an extraordinary statement on May 22, Nixon had denied any knowledge of the coverup and said, "The truth about Watergate should be brought out in an orderly way." That statement, testified Dean, contained "less than accurate statements."
If the nation was divided on whether to believe the president or Dean, the issue was truly joined on July 16, when Alexander Butterfield, a previously unknown White House aide, told of the existence of a secret taping system that recorded all presidential conversations in his office or on the telephone. Butterfield's disclosure was electrifying.
The existence of the tapes doomed Nixon. No one could know at the time that the tapes would lead to impeachment proceedings and to Nixon becoming the only president in history to resign the office.
Even less predictable was how those tapes would change the national mood and haunt all of Nixon's successors.
The tapes robbed Americans of an idealized 20th-century view that presidents were somehow different, that the office made its occupants better, that they grew in office.
That view had endowed presidents with a nobility that persisted even when the public disagreed with administration policies. In 1972, Americans still wanted to respect and re-elect the president.
Watergate and Vietnam left the national feeling betrayed. A yearning to respect the president was replaced by a haste to suspect him of the worst.
Cynicism dies hard. Twenty years later, Americans haven't kicked their inclination to believe the worst. Pollsters regularly find majorities saying the country is headed in the wrong direction.
In the heady hours after proclaiming victory in the Persian Gulf war, President Bush proclaimed: "We've kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all."
A year later, Bush's re-election is in doubt.
The victory parades are long forgotten; the marchinig bands silent. America is not yet in a mood to celebrate.