"I'm not going to wallow in Watergate", Richard Nixon avowed in one of the iconic statements of the twilight of his Presidency (amateurs remember "I am not a crook"; true aficionados tend to side with "wallow"). But Tuesday's revelation that W. Mark Felt, the former number 2 man in J. Edgar Hoover's FBI was the source Woodward and Bernstein (or some market-savvy book editor) named after the most successful porn movie of all time has given us all an opportunity for one more wallow, perhaps our last.
Deep Throat may have been important to W & B. He certainly was important to the makers of the movie version of "All the President's Men": a shadowy figure with a sexy name whose importance could be inflated to become the fulcrum of a journalistic crusade that toppled the most Imperial of American Presidents -- up to that time.
But to those of us who became Watergate-aholics -- pull your chairs up close, kids -- Deep Throat was the maraschino cherry on a seeminly limitless confection of political whipped cream and dark chocolate. Here, after all, was Richard Nixon -- like all kids of California Democrats, I grew up despising the man for his Red-baiting campaigns against people whose domestic policies were probably less liberal than President Nixon's -- being systemically de-pantsed in a drama whose minor characters (Anthony Ulascewitz, the bagman for the burglars who left cash under DC bridges, Alexander Butterfield, the minor White House aide who closed the Presidential coffin with his revelation of the existence of The Tapes) were worthy of the juiciest fiction.
Watergate started a media era, the era of live coverage of scheduled events. Up to that time, the only wall-to-wall live TV coverage Americans had experienced came on the weekend following the Kennedy assassination, and the associated gunning down of Lee Harvey Oswald, on a live feed from the Dallas police headquarters. The direct descendant of that coverage was the media performance following the attacks of 9/11.
But Watergate -- some TV stations aired the hearings twice a day, live and delayed -- spawned the almost equally remarkable live coverage of the Iran-Contra hearings, the super-heated Robert Bork hearings, the bizarre weekend of the Clarence Thomas hearings, the Clinton impeachment sessions, and the live coverage that effectively ended the era, the O.J. Simpson trial.
Since OJ 1 (the civil trial, the one his defense didn't win, was not televised), a reaction has set in. Judges have banned cameras from courtrooms -- hence, no wall-to-wall MJ, just throw-rug coverage -- and the proliferation of cable news channels has given us less live coverage, not more. The Bolton nomination hearings were sampled like an over-spicy gumbo, George Galloway's feisty confrontation with Sen. Norm Coleman was covered more in paraphrase and summary than in the live event. As Gerald Ford put it upon his swearing in as America's first appointed President -- and, clearly, not its last -- "our long national nightmare is over".
What for Gerry Ford was a nightmare was for some of us a dream -- the opportunity, through long, slow, unmediated live television, to see the squirmy underbelly of the regally strutting characters who inhabited the segment of television later labeled "show business for ugly people". That television could make us so familiar with Sam Ervin and Sam Dash, Howard Baker and Fred Thompson, John Dean and John Erlichman, that it could make everyone you encountered during the day -- in cabs, in elevators, in restaurants -- fellow experts, fellow wallowers, was a wonderful validation of the power of broadcasting to make us part of a sadder, wiser national community.
Broadcasting doesn't want that power. It just wants the money. As Deep Throat supposedly told Bob Woodward in that underground parking garage, "follow the money".