Trust in government was shattered and never recovered. Efforts at reform were successful and unsuccessful. Both political parties were affected, as was the practice of journalism. And then there was Trump, Dan Balz writes.
Trust in government was shattered and never recovered. Efforts at reform were successful and unsuccessful. Both political parties were affected, as was the practice of journalism. And then there was Trump.50th anniversary of the Watergate break-in
a more deeply polarized electorate, the erosion in the strength of democratic institutions and the transformation and radicalization of the Republican Party.The aftermath of the Watergate scandal opened up the operations of Congress but also contributed to making the legislative body less manageable. The scandal helped change the way reporters and government officials interacted with one another. A more adversarial relationship has existed ever since.
By 1968 and the end of the presidency of Lyndon B. Johnson, with Americans violently divided over Vietnam and shaken by the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, the line on the chart heads downward, but still with a majority expressing trust. From there, it begins to fall farther. By late 1974, after Nixon left office, just 36 percent of Americans say they trust their government.
One irony of the decline at the time of Watergate is that democracy had worked, from the actions of government institutions to the public’s response. “It’s really important to understand that the process that took down Nixon was driven by an extraordinary level of civic engagement,” said Rick Perlstein, a historian who has written multiple volumes about the history of the 1960s and 1970s. “The response was not this kind of nihilistic response we would see now.
These Democrats were diverse in their ideologies — some moderates and conservatives but many liberals. They shared a passion for reform. “The collective sense was that it was time to change the seniority system,” said Tom Downey, who was elected to the House as a Democrat from New York at age 25. “We wanted this to be a more accountable institution.”
“It really meant we had more influence in the subcommittee, we had more influence on the House floor, we had more influence in the conference committees.” Then-House Speaker Thomas P. “Tip” O’Neill Jr. , among others, had worried about too much openness, especially the decision that would allow C-SPAN to begin to televise House floor proceedings in 1979. “They understood that the more public the system was, the less power the old order would have,” said former speaker Newt Gingrich .
In 1974, Congress approved the Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act, which established a new process for federal budgeting by lawmakers, created the Congressional Budget Office and sought to limit the power of the president to override decisions made by lawmakers on how to spend the government’s money. The 1973 War Powers Resolution, a response to Vietnam, was designed to prevent future presidents from engaging in military conflicts without having consulted Congress in advance.
Of all the efforts to clean up after Vietnam and Watergate, reforms of U.S. intelligence agencies have been generally the most successful and long-lasting. The reforms grew in part out of hearings by a select Senate committee headed by then-Sen. Frank Church , which investigated questionable and illegal covert actions aimed at foreign leaders and U.S. citizens by the CIA, the FBI and the National Security Agency.
“I'm a big supporter of oversight,” he said, “because without it, you cannot count on the trust of the American people for an institution that has great power and is asked to do difficult things by the president. Even at that, it doesn't assure that trust or that confidence, but it's the closest thing we have.”
“You have to remember that for most of the post-World War II period, liberalism, for better and worse, had really been the reigning public philosophy in the United States,” Schulman said. “One of the ways that Watergate is very important is in the transformation of the Republican Party into a conservative party. … And after 1980, it was, by all effects, really a conservative party.
Hart helped lead the party in new directions, and his eventual challenge to — and near-victory over — former vice president Walter Mondale in the 1984 Democratic presidential “A lot of journalism prior to that time was very deferential to political leaders,” Lawrence said. “You didn’t say certain things, and that wasn’t so good either. But I think a lot of younger people learned that the way you get ahead, just like members [of Congress] learned through oversight, that the way you get your name in the papers is by making a splash and by making accusations of wrongdoing or corruption. That culture … became very, very powerful.
That, he said, does not outweigh the fact that investigative journalism is now one of the most important roles of the American news media. “Holding power — all forms of power — accountable to American citizens is a good thing. And I just don’t worry about this adversarial aspect. I think that’s fine. I do not see a downside.”Scholars and politicians debate when the extreme partisanship and polarization that defines today’s political climate really took root.
Lawrence, the historian of the class of 1974, believes the reforms those freshman members of Congress helped to force through the legislative branch were responsible. “Some of these reforms actually facilitated a rise in partisanship,” he said, “because they enabled people who otherwise might have been blocked from playing a more political or more public role in the more traditional management of the House — they gave them platforms to do so.
Trump presidency. Part of this is because of the similarities between Nixon and Trump — the self-pitying nature of their personalities, the venality exhibited during their presidencies, the demonization of their opponents.
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