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Watergate refers to the political scandal that broke in 1972 and forced Richard M. Nixon to resign as president of the United States 2 years later. It offered a language and framework for public discourse about scandal around the world in the decades since. This article recounts the basic story of Watergate, discusses the impact of Watergate on American politics, and focuses on how comparisons to Watergate shaped the unfolding of later American political scandals, notably Iran-Contra, Whitewater, and Monica Lewinsky. The article concludes by reviewing John Thompson's sociology of political scandals and argues that scandal, although not peculiar to democracies, has an especially important role in a system of government that encourages distrust of authority.
Keywords: scandal; democracy; Watergate
In the summer of 2000, Germany celebrated the 10th anniversary of reunification. Reunification was of course an event of enormous importance, both symbolic and material, for Germany, Europe, and the world. It was a dramatic and unexpected achievement presided over by Chancellor Helmut Kohl, who as it happened could not attend the commemoration of the crowning moment of his own career because he had been disgraced by a campaign financing scandal. In the United States at about the same time, all major party candidates for president and vice president were parading their wives and "family values" as prominently as their ideas, each of them seeking to demonstrate that he was not now and never would be the philandering and dissembling Bill Clinton.
Scandal seems everywhere, inescapable. The lead story in The New York Times for December 25, 1992, concerned President George Bush pardoning six figures in the Iran-Contra affair, one of them already convicted, three who had already pled guilty, and two who were still scheduled for trial. Special prosecutor Lawrence Walsh declared that "the Iran-Contra cover-up . . . has now been completed." On the left-hand side of the page, President-elect Bill Clinton was pictured with Zoe Baird, the corporate lawyer he had just nominated to be his attorney general. It is as if three decades of scandal were holding a conclave. The special prosecutor's office existed as a response to Watergate, the Iran-Contra affair dominated the last two years of the Reagan presidency, and the revelation that would appear within a few...