Watergate
I re-watched “All the President’s Men” yesterday. It’s a 1976 movie featuring Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffmann and it chronicles the work of Washington Post journalists Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein that led to the uncovering of the Watergate Scandal and the eventual resignation of President Nixon. The facts surrounding Watergate happened in the early seventies – a time without the mass means of communication and information that we know of today. Journalistic investigation was painstakingly slow and when the main whistleblower “Deep Throat” speaks in riddles there is much digging for information to be done.
Watergate was all about a money trail. Nixon and his party were using huge slush funds from the GOP campaign to finance covert operations intended to sabotage the Democrat campaign. There was no sudden discovery of all the information. It all started with what seemed to be a simple burglary at the Watergate complex and it was only thanks to the dogged work of the two journalists against all odds that the whole extent of the scandal was uncovered.
When the Post decided to run with the first big title linking big heads in government to the corruption trail, the official response was big and could be summed up in one word: denial. Nixon’s spokesperson attacked the journalists and the entity they worked for and came up with the phrase “shoddy journalism” and “shabby journalism”. Nixon’s people implied that there was a misreading of facts and that the Post had an ulterior political motive for “fabricating” such information.
All Nixon’s men did was gain some more time. They used that time to abuse their positions in power to try to harass anybody who was on their trail and close to obtaining damning information. Astonishingly Nixon won an election when the scandal had only just broke – but not so astonishingly at that point the pieces of the puzzle were far from Nixon and it was hard for the man in the street to make the connection. As more evidence was compiled – mostly by “following the money trail” – Nixon’s position became untenable.
All through the scandal that dragged on for two years, Nixon’s behaviour smacked of abuse of power and disrespect of institutional authority. At one point Nixon ordered the Attorney General (Richardson) and his deputy (Ruckelshaus) to sack special prosecutor Cox. Neither of the two accepted such a blatant abuse and both resigned in protest. Nixon only managed to get what he wanted when he found an appeasing Attorney General in Bork. Responding to members of the press for this Nixon stated emphatically “I am not a crook”.
Walking on Water
Events closer to home are uncannily similar to what happened in the Nixon days. We have a musical chairs of police commissioners who hesitate to prosecute when it is blindingly obvious that there is matter sufficient for prosecution. We have a government machinery that functions on blanket, unfounded denial and that resorts to bullying tactics when it comes to investigative journalists doing their job. Yesterday we had a Minister without portfolio mimicking Nixon’s spokesperson accusing journalists of not knowing how to read and of being “malicious”.
Every day is bringing to light more damning information linking more and more dots in a scandal that knows no equal in Maltese history. The Prime Minister and the two persons directly involved in the story choose to bury their heads in the sand and cling onto power hoping for a miracle of the walk on water kind. Apparently these scandals are not enough because some still claim that Malta is “economically strong”. I seriously believe it is only a matter of time that this fabrication of statistics falls apart – especially in the light of the fact that the greatest supposed economic injections under this government are tainted and linked with the scandalous events of Panamagate.
Muscat prefers to drag Malta through scandal after scandal rather than bear the responsibility and act in the interests of the nation. Like Nixon he believes that he will not “resign a position that he was elected to fill”. Like Nixon he prefers to use his incumbency in his favour so long as it is possible – thus protracting the agony of an electorate in need of clarity and honest politics.
One day, in the not too distant future, Muscat might face a journalist like Frost who when asked by Nixon “what would you have done” replied:
One is: there was probably more than mistakes; there was wrongdoing, whether it was a crime or not; yes it may have been a crime too. Second: I did – and I’m saying this without questioning the motives – I did abuse the power I had as president, or not fulfil the totality of the oath of office. And third: I put the American people through two years of needless agony and I apologise for that.
Watermarks is a new series on J’accuse. The idea consists in having a morning “short” taking a quick look and reflection on current events in the news – what is trending and why.
