Walter Cronkite School students were brought into the fold of the 40-year-old Watergate scandal at a lecture on Thursday by John W. Dean, former counsel to President Richard Nixon and key figure in the Watergate cover-up.
The lecture, “Uncovering Watergate’s Legacy & Impact on Journalism,” was introduced by Ted Simons, host of the PBS show “Arizona Horizon.”
Dean characterized Nixon as an intelligent man with unintelligible plans. He said Nixon’s downfalls came in the form of an “enemies list,” a secret taping system of voice activities in the White House and, eventually, the invasion and attempted burglary of the Democratic National Committee.
Dean said America’s lenience with the president and other government figures involved “too much tolerance” at the time of Watergate. He described Nixon’s secret tapes as the saving grace for the truth that Dean attempted to expose.
“I think Nixon would have survived had the tapes not existed,” Dean said.
Dean indicated that the Washington Post reporters who broke the Watergate scandal, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, found the tapes invaluable to their reporting. Woodward described them as “the gift that keeps on giving.”
He then expressed the present-day limitations of the government as “not giving the president enough benefit of the doubt to do what he has to do.”
Simons saw the radicalization of investigative journalism after Watergate as a growth period for aspiring journalists.
“It’s been said that Watergate caused a lot of folks to go to journalism school and a lot of folks to leave law school,” said Simons.
“I think that The Washington Post did an amazing job getting the facts and checking them and making the connections that they did,” said Cronkite freshman Xana Doak.
Eliav Gabay, a freshman at The Cronkite School, sees this new era of investigative journalism as encouraging.
“This was a new level of muckraking,” said Gabay, “It just showed that anyone can make a difference — and in journalism, that’s huge.”
Simons referred to the new era of investigative journalism as inspiring for many writers, saying “reporters, inspired by the Post and Woodward/Bernstein, thought that this was what journalism was supposed to do.”
Contact the columnist at Briana.Bradley@asu.edu
