Watergate! So Many Years Ago!

We’ve just finished observing the 40 anniversary of Richard Nixon’s resignation from the Presidency. It brought back so many memories.

by Charlie Leck

Back then I worked for a company called The Bureau of National Affairs (BNA). I called on law firms and introduced them to the various and many services and publications that BNA could provide them in order to keep them up to date about the latest news and court decisions within various fields of law. I really loved my work. I respected the company for which I worked. The lawyers I called on respected my company also and most of them seemed to respect me.

It was difficult to get in to see people during the Watergate hearings, however (1972-1973). Every law firm would have the television on and a host of lawyers would be surrounding the television, watching the intriguing hearings about what caused a handful of Republican cronies to break into the National Democratic Headquarters in the Watergate office complex. Our company sales records showed that the downtrend in sales activity was a national phenomenon.

What a time that was? Members of the Senate panel in charge of the investigation became near rock stars in the nation. The chairman of the investigating committee, Senator Sam Ervin (North Carolina) became an incredible celebrity during the long investigation. I took to him and admired him and loved to hear him speak in that slow, extended drawl. Ervin loved to call himself “just a country lawyer,” but he was sharp as a tack about the U.S. Constitution and he was a remarkable examiner of witnesses during the public and televised investigations. Some of us forget that Senator Ervin also worked on the Senate committee that brought down the scoundrel Senator Joe McCarty in 1954.

Those of us who were around during the Watergate investigation will never forget the hours and hours we spent watching the U.S. Senate investigation panel on television. We witnessed, time and time again, amazing revelations about the seriousness and audacity of the boss in the White House at the time.

The scandal, of course, led to the very first and only resignation of a sitting U.S. President. Richard Nixon stepped down in shame and guilty of the abuse of law. America’s newspapers and the U.S. Senate had taken the nation to the place where they could really see the President’s new set of clothes for what it really was.

It was an incredible time in the history of the United States. Watching it unfold in front of us, we the people of the United States of America were witnesses to truth that was totally unvarnished by political obfuscation because we saw it all live and up-close.

Amazing! Forty years ago!

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Watergate after 40 Years

June 17, 1972 – forty years ago – was an incredible and historic day in the United States and a bunch of criminals and political crackpots were responsible!
by Charlie Leck

“The good of man must be the end of politics!” [Aristotle]

You know, I read something somewhere that contended the nation’s production rate was seriously and negatively impacted by the Watergate Hearings of 1973 and 1974. Why? Because the nation was gripped by those hearings and couldn’t pull itself away from them – lawyers, doctors, teachers, researchers and government employees. We were hooked on Watergate.

I know I was. I was working for a Washington, D.C. company at the time and I can honestly admit that I wasn’t very productive for them on those days when Sam Ervin’s committee was in session and on TV.

It all led to the eventual resignation of the President of the United States – the only time such a thing has happened in our nation’s history.

Now, forty years later, the two reporters who broke so many big stories surrounding the Watergate investigation are looking back at it all and saying it was worse than we thought back then.

If you were a Watergate junkie, be sure to read this extraordinary account in the Washington Post by Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward: “Nixon was far worse than we thought!”

Wow! This article is loaded with good and deeply interesting stuff!

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I’m going back to Mississippi again this year, to recognize the 48^th anniversary of the murders of the three civil rights workers, James Cheney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner – and to call for justice in the cases of dozens of Mississippi and Arkansas martyrs whose murderers have never been brought to trial. I’ve been asked to speak a couple of times during the gatherings. I’ve been working on those presentations. If you have suggestions, please don’t hesitate to email them to me [my email address].

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Why not become a follower?
If you read my blog regularly, why not become a follower? All you have to do is click in the upper right hand corner and establish a simple means of communication. Then you'll be informed every time a new blog is posted here. If all that's confusing, here's Google's explanation of how to do it! If you don’t want to post comments on the blog, but would like to communicate with me about it, send me an email if you’d like.