Watergate: a trivial misdemeanour

The identity of “Deep Throat”, the insider source who blew the whistle on the Watergate affair, was revealed earlier this week. The informant had been Mark Felt, a former FBI official who leaked details of the break-in and attempted bugging of the Democratic Party HQ organised by Richard Nixon’s White House. The scandal ultimately led to the President resigning in disgrace. This week’s revelation has revived old arguments over Watergate in the US, with some praising Felt as a hero and others branding him a traitor. It also provides us with a fresh opportunity to take a step back and look again at the nature and meaning of this most famous of political scandals.

Watergate was, by any objective standards, a fairly trivial misdemeanour when compared to the real crimes of Nixon and his administration. Beyond the obvious example of the ongoing carnage in Vietnam, the charge sheet will also include the indiscriminate carpet bombing of Cambodia which killed tens of thousands of civilians, crippled the country and went some way to preparing the ground for the genocidal Khmer Rouge. Further down the list we find the backing for a military coup in Chile that overthrew the democratically elected government and installed a savage dictatorship that murdered thousands of its opponents. The list goes on and the death toll is of biblical proportions. If we're being objective, Nixon was a mass murderer first, a war criminal second, and anything else a very distant third.

Its unlikely that there would have been any kind of political scandal at all if those targeted by the Watergate criminals had not been respectable establishment figures like Thomas Watson of IBM James Reston of the New York Times, and the staff of the US Democratic Party. The US state had always used dirty tricks against internal enemies, be they native Americans, civil rights leaders or other dissidents and undesirables. If Nixon had concentrated on the state's traditional enemies as others had done, his reputation would in all probability have remained intact.

Nixon's shaming for the Watergate scandal, far from being a triumph for the free media and democratic accountability, was rather like the conviction of Mafia Godfather Al Capone for tax evasion. He was guilty, but that was hardly the point. In fact, if we're to take all of Nixon's real crimes into account, the contrast between these and the Watergate scandal stands as a potent symbol of how western democracies routinely allow criminals in high office to go entirely unmolested.