Ghosts of Vietnam and Watergate

by Tom Engelhardt
TomDispatch.com

“The great lesson of the Watergate era was: However bad you think things are, however nefarious you believe the administration’s plans and actions might be, however deep you believe their roots might reach, it’s only going to prove worse as the facts emerge.”

Two presiding deities — and lively ghosts they are — continue to hover over the present administration: Vietnam and Watergate. Though the competition between them is fierce, this week Watergate suddenly surged to the fore as the Washington Post’s Bob Woodward, famed investigative reporter turned imperial “stenographer” for the Bush administration, crashed and burst into distinctly Judy-Miller-esque flames.

Even Woodward’s blurry account of his testimony for Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald had a taste of Millerdom to it. It’s interesting, by the way, that he thought to offer an “apology” to his Washington Post colleagues and boss, but not to the Post’s readers who might wonder why the supposed greatest reporter of our times swallowed the first Plame leak the way a cat might a canary and later went out on the hustings claiming there was little significance to the case. On Larry King Live (”When the story comes out, I’m quite confident we’re going to find out that it started kind of as gossip, as chatter…”) and National Public Radio (”When I think all of the facts come out in this case, it’s going to be laughable because the consequences are not that great