In the late spring of 1972, two break-ins at the Watergate Hotel in Washington D.C. led to one of the most significant events in American history…The resignation of the President. To be clear, it was not the break-ins that brought down Nixon. It was the cover-up OF the break-ins which damaged his presidency well beyond repair.
It took 2 years of intense investigations and a handful of stories in the press which relied on an unnamed source, identified at the time only as…Deep Throat…to shift public opinion, focus attention on the administration and eventually, force the resignation of Richard Nixon, the ONLY United States President ever to resign the office.
It has often been said that to ignore history is the most certain way to repeat it. While the adage stands as a stark warning it may well not go far enough. Ignoring the present may be the most certain way to render the lessons of history a mere whisper of the tumultuous days to come.
That is where we find ourselves as a nation today. The lessons of mid 1970s are being ignored and the faint whispers of pretense are being hushed.
Since 1972 and Nixon’s resignation in 1974, each and every purported scandal regarding any political entity has had the word “Gate” added to it as a suffix, almost as if the “Gate” in Watergate was a separate word. It wasn’t.
