The Wrong Watergate Lesson
In his new book, Shadow: Five Presidents and the Legacy of Watergate, Bob Woodward writes that every U.S. president since Richard Nixon has missed the message of Watergate and made critical misjudgments because of it. He spoke with CBS This Morning Co-Anchor Mark McEwen to explain what he sees as the pattern of dishonesty in the White House and what it will take to break the cycle.
Woodward was The Washington Post reporter who, with Carl Bernstein, broke the Watergate story more than a quarter of a century ago. Now an assistant managing editor there, he says that all of the post-Nixon presidents flunked the Watergate test, failing to realize how much the scandal changed the presidency and the view the public had of it.
There is a pattern to the five presidencies, Bob Woodward says. "The presidents spend all these years scrambling up the political ladder to the top and they don't want anyone questioning their authority, their behavior, or their past," he says.
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About a quarter of the book is about the Lewinsky affair. "You see lawyer after lawyer not being able to get through to the president to say what really happened, what are your vulnerabilities?" he says. It was Clinton functioning, to a certain extent, as his own lawyer," he says.
In a passage from the book, Woodward includes a candid conversation between President Clinton and his attorney Bob Bennett, when they were walking around the White House grounds. Bennett says in the book, "If you're caught ------ around the White House, I'm not good enough to help you." and President Clinton replies, "I'm retired."
With this exchange, Woodward says, the president shows his increasing isolation and, to an extent, perhaps that he learned the wrong lesson from Watergate.
"Nixon confided in lots of people and they turned on him," Woodward notes. "That's one of the reasons he had to resign. Clinton really didn't confide in anyone, and so these lawyers are kind of out there not having the facts to deal with, and. . . as you see it from the inside, you realize that this is a man who for various reasons just can't be frank with people."
Part of the remedy is for people to just start telling the truth, Wodward says. For voters, he says, the issue is making those in power accountable: "You can't have a president who is just going to go off and be a king and not be accountable."
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