Fifty years later, Watergate seems quaint compared to the Jan. 6 attack on democracy

As we mark the 50th anniversary (gasp) of the Watergate Hotel break-in on June 17, 1972, it’s not difficult to find parallels between that scandal and former President Donald Trump’s Jan. 6, 2021, coup attempt.

It is even tempting, as we go through a congressional investigation devoted to discovering the truth about Jan. 6, to compare today’s House select committee to the Senate Watergate committee of 1973.

In case anyone still has any question about it, Jan. 6 was much worse.

Fifty years ago, the media culture was vastly different. For example, the majority of daily newspapers were owned by pretty conservative people, and the owners’ editorial positions were echoed by their writers.

Imagine the outcry then! Oh. There wasn’t much. We just rolled with it.

Television news was dominated by three networks, all of which seemed to be determined to be actually fair and balanced, which wasn’t yet a disingenuous slogan.

What are the differences between the House select committee on Jan. 6 and the Senate Watergate committee? Well, to begin with, there was something of a bipartisan consensus that Watergate needed to be investigated, and there wasn’t a lot of nationally televised infighting over whether or not there was in fact a Watergate break-in.

I can only imagine how Nixon would sound if he got up and denied that the black bag job even took place: “My fellow Americans, there was no burglary at the Democratic National Committee. The seven Watergate burglars are a figment of the liberal news media’s imagination. There were no arrests, and not only am I not a crook, but I am also the most perfect president ever, as well as a very stable genius.”

The above is barely parody by Trump standards.

In the media world of 1973, there not only were no websites, but there also were no ideological cable news networks. People just paid attention to the news, whether it was CBS, the Washington Post or the Kankakee Daily Journal. They didn’t argue about whether it was fake.

The hearings were a staple conversation item in my family’s house as they were in millions of others. My parents were Eisenhower Republicans who found Nixon too unpleasant by 1968. In 1972, they voted futilely for Sen. George McGovern because of the Vietnam War.

My father was not, by contemporary standards, a liberal man. He was a gun owner, a veteran and a guy who wasn’t down with long hair, hippies, pot, acid, amnesty, adulterers or draft dodgers. He was a federal employee prone to express himself in non-woke language while smoking a Pall Mall.

I recall him and my mother being cumulatively appalled by what was revealed by Walter Cronkite every night.

Some of my friends’ parents were conservative Republicans who did not deny that Watergate happened. Their argument was, oh, JFK and Lyndon Johnson did all that; they just didn’t get caught. I heard that a lot.

There was absolutely no doubt that the Watergate committee was effective, but it wasn’t as coordinated or calculated as the Jan. 6 committee. The production values were low, and the committee depended on live testimony. In fact, Nixon aide Alexander Butterfield’s revelation that there was a taping system in the White House was a spontaneous discovery by the committee during his testimony.

The Watergate committee led to the House Judiciary Committee’s passing articles of impeachment in 1974, and that led to the Republican congressional leadership marching into Nixon’s office and telling him that the jig was up.

The GOP leadership showed no such courage with Trump. Courage — or a sense of shame — is optional in the Trump GOP.

I’m ever-hopeful that the Jan. 6 hearings will have the same bombshell effect, but I’m not sure they will. If they’re not perceived as such, we’re really in trouble.

If Trump’s thugs take over in 2024, you won’t have the luxury of making a decision about them again.

The night Nixon resigned, my dad drove down to the federal office building he was in charge of, took Nixon’s portrait down and put it underneath his bed. He didn’t announce it; he just did it. Later, I wondered why there was a black-and-white photo of Nixon under the bed where there used to be some Playboys.

My dad was just an American who was angry about some hearings he saw, and he acted accordingly. Let’s hope we do, too.

This story was originally published June 17, 2022 at 5:00 AM.