Forty
years ago this past Sunday, a momentous historical event occurred. I graduated
from college. If memory serves, there was also some sort of third-rate burglary
in Washington, D.C. that morning.
News
of the burglary was on the radio when we woke up that day but at the time no
one thought much of it. Even the Nixon haters didn’t think he’d do something
that criminal or that stupid. It was probably the only time they underestimated
their man.
It’s
not uncommon for people to feel their lives are inextricably connected to some
historical event. For my parents’ generation it was likely to be the Great
Depression or World War II. In my generation it was likely to be the Vietnam
War, the Civil Rights Movement, or, as in my case, Watergate.
One
of the things I was in a position to see first-hand was the impact Watergate
had on the business of journalism. After graduating from college, I began
applying for newspaper and radio reporting jobs with a resume that consisted of
a bachelor’s degree in English and a few clips from my college newspaper. In
six weeks I got several offers and ended up at a highly regarded daily
newspaper in coastal California.
A
decade later, after All the President’s
Men had been a bestselling book and top-grossing movie, a lot of smart kids
wanted to be newspaper reporters. By then I was doing the hiring, and many of
the resumes I was looking at featured a lot of master’s degrees in journalism
from some of the best journalism schools in the country. Anyone trying to get
into the business with a background like mine would likely have been
job-hunting for months before landing at a weekly paper in rural Nebraska.
In
the first couple of years at the newspaper, I absorbed the business at several
levels. Being new, everything I covered — even a routine water board meeting —
was exciting. There were a lot of non-routine stories locally, as well,
including several horrifying mass-murder cases that are remembered to this day.
And in the background, Watergate was moving toward its conclusion.
We
were an afternoon paper then, with a news deadline of noon Pacific Time, or 3
p.m. Eastern. Much of the news coming out of Washington was fresh when we
published it, and we had it to our readers an hour or more before the evening
news came on TV. We in the newsroom were the first in town to know the latest
developments in Watergate.
Because
the story completed itself so completely with President Nixon’s resignation,
many people who lived through it now think of it as a whole. I don’t. What I
remember about Watergate was how it came out one piece at a time — a steady
drip, drip, drip of shocking revelations. Just when you thought you’d heard the
worst, something else came along to top it.
The
news came over the wire from United Press International (now gone), and
whenever there was a big story, the wire machine bell would ring several times.
Most of us would drop what we were doing to run over to the machine and read
the first couple of paragraphs of the story.
Watergate
solidified my commitment to the news business as it poisoned the politics of
the country. It’s unlikely that there will be any major new revelations after
all this time, and kids today hardly know the tale at all. But whenever I hear
the word Watergate, I think of bells ringing in the newsroom, and for a few
seconds, my blood runs a bit more quickly.
