By William C. Mann
Associated Press
June 17, 2002
WASHINGTON - So, 30 years after the break-in that brought down Richard Nixon,
what is the legacy of Watergate?
"What we should learn is not to put our trust and faith in men who are
corruptible," said Charles Colson, who as a presidential aide ventured
that "I would run over my grandmother to re-elect Nixon."
That lesson wasn't learned, however, Colson said Sunday, noting that Congress has just overturned post-Watergate restrictions on political money-raising.
"Those reforms didn't work," Colson said on Fox News Sunday, because "human nature doesn't change."
Colson and other Watergate figures reminisced on Sunday's television talk shows about the 1970s scandal that began with an early morning June 17, 1972, break-in of an office in the elegant Washington office building and ended more than two years later with the resignation of the 37th president.
John Dean, the Nixon aide whose "cancer on the presidency" warning to Nixon was the first sign of slippage in the presidential advisers' code of silence, said that when he broke ranks, "I realized my days were numbered, because I could no longer serve as the desk officer of the cover-up and be giving him that kind of advice."
On NBC's Meet the Press, former Washington Post reporters Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward spoke of the lessons for journalists that grew out of their work. Again, Bernstein said, the lessons are largely ignored.
"The lessons have to do with being careful, with using multiple sources, to putting information into context, to not being swayed by gossip, by sensationalism, by manufactured controversy," Bernstein said.
On the eve of the publication of Dean's Unmasking Deep Throat, Woodward and Bernstein's famed anonymous source, the writers held to their 30-year silence.
Asked about a project by university students in Illinois that had eliminated all but seven Nixon White House aides as possibilities, and the students' unanimous guess that Deep Throat was commentator Pat Buchanan, Woodward said: "You're going to get a kind of deep silence from us on this subject."