WASHINGTON -- Making her way last week through a new exhibit of photographs commemorating Richard Nixon's fall from power 25 years ago, an elementary school principal who was just 5 when the disgraced president resigned wondered aloud just why he had to go.
When she heard how the president had ordered hush money paid to the Watergate burglars, she gasped. Told about his use of the Internal Revenue Service against political enemies and how his "plumbers" broke into Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist's office, she recoiled.Then she retraced her steps through the Smithsonian's Museum of American History and looked at some more of Fred J. Maroon's striking photographs. The Oregon educator said the exhibit "fills in some of the gaps in my history."
Those gaps are hardly uncommon in a country where the press has treated so many scandals that followed Watergate as if they, too, were constitutional crises that three Americans in four consider Nixon's offenses no worse than the others.
"Treating them all with the same level of breathlessness that Watergate deserved has done nothing but reduce the amount of oxygen to our brains," complained James M. Naughton, director of The Poynter Institute for journalism in St. Petersburg, Fla.
Half of all Americans who are alive today had not yet turned 10 when Nixon stepped down. And Americans are now most likely to learn about Watergate in high school, where the amount of detail varies greatly from one textbook to another.
Tedd Levy, a middle school teacher in Norwalk, Conn., and the immediate past president of the National Council for the Social Studies, said most textbook presentations were "drained of the emotion of that time," and generally end with an upbeat lesson: "The Constitution worked."