Posted on 08/10/2014 1:31:34 PM PDT by a fool in paradise
At the time, it must have all seemed unforgettable: the endless revelations of wrongdoing, the painful congressional investigation and, finally, the soft black-and-white image of Richard Nixon resigning the presidency.
But ask today’s students about the events of Watergate 40 years ago and odds are that many have never heard of the scandal, or, at best, are vaguely aware that something happened once that lives on in a suffix attached to the occasional controversy.
major reason is that in U.S. classrooms and textbooks, the discussion of Watergate is going the way of the Teapot Dome Scandal and the Petticoat Affair: increasingly simplified and shortened.
(Also on POLITICO: Nixon's newspaper war)
“Watergate is just slowly being condensed, as is the entire time period,” said Kyle Ward, a professor at St. Cloud University in Minnesota who has studied the evolution of American history textbooks. “We are not spending as much time as they did in the late ’70s and early ’80s dwelling on Watergate.”
Lesson plans and textbooks don’t have the space for nuanced discussions about the House Judiciary Committee’s political motives or the legality of forcing Nixon to release his Oval Office recordings. And demanding national and state testing standards only add to the pressure on teachers to move through events such as Watergate faster, they say.
That can make for some interesting moments with students.
“Usually they are pretty surprised to find out that Watergate was a hotel, that it was a standing building that had office spaces in it,” said Matt Moore, who teaches at Mankato West High School in Mankato, Minnesota.
(Also on POLITICO: Watergate scandal: 10 legacies)
Francis Couvares, a history professor at Amherst College, said his students know “almost nothing” about the scandal. “Why would they?” he adds.
Ryan Moran, who just graduated from Warren Hills High School in New Jersey, said that although Watergate attracted better-than-average interest from his classmates, they were generally more intrigued by subjects such as Vietnam or World War II.
“I think people know the word, but they don’t know what it means — most high schoolers, anyway,” he said.
Historiographers (those who study the study of history) say the case of Watergate is really nothing new. History is always under revision, after all, becoming more compact over time as the event recedes. Blow-by-blow details are slowly replaced by an assessment of impact and legacy.
(Also on POLITICO: When Nixon Met the Press)
Watergate is somewhat unusual in that its impact still lingers in the public realm, even as knowledge of its details become less ubiquitous. The same students who know nothing about the scandal’s finer points live in a culture shaped by everything from open-records laws to hyperpartisanship in Washington.
Several teachers interviewed said they tend to budget two or three class periods for Nixon’s entire presidency. After discussing Nixon’s rise, his foreign policy and the Vietnam War, that leaves just half a class or less for Watergate.
“It is painful to have to teach a topic like Watergate in a half an hour or 45 minutes, but it’s reality,” said Eric Hahn, who has taught high school history for more than 20 years in a wealthy suburb outside of St. Louis.
What remains, then, tends to get taught as a “broad morality play,” according to Michael Schudson, a professor at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism and author of “Watergate in American Memory: How We Remember, Forget and Reconstruct the Past.”
(PHOTOS: Is this like Watergate?)
“There was dirty politics, but the system worked. We eliminated the corrupt leader from the system. We got a new president, and Gerald Ford gets a brief mention — you need him to get on to the next president — and the continuity of American history is preserved,” Schudson said.
Moore said he tends to present Watergate as the centerpiece of a broader crisis of confidence in the early 1970s. Couvares explained that he connects Watergate to Nixon’s foreign policy and relationship with the intelligence community. But most educators said they ultimately follow their textbooks and stick to the apolitical approach to Watergate.
Ward says this is unsurprising. The textbook industry is highly politicized, and most big publishers try to minimize historical interpretation so as not to alienate conservative or liberal customers.
For instance, one way to teach about Watergate is to make the case that “the system almost didn’t work, and that there were some maybe lucky coincidences and one clear coincidence — that the Congress was controlled by the Democrats, and they were of course happy to investigate a Republican president,” Schudson said. He added, however, that such a political approach is not really practical for high school curricula.
Hahn said he worried that cramming the tale of the Watergate scandal into a single class period and a neutral frame puts students at risk of missing the point.
“If … we as a nation are not held responsible for the kinds of data and the kinds of experiences that Watergate has to teach us as a lesson to not repeat, then I think we are going to repeat that kind of activity,” he said.
The RINOS put the forces into movement to build up a second adversary when we effectively had but one. That IS what happened you know. So what if it took thirty years?
So you do agree that it was an oportune time to tap into the angst between the two. Can you please explain to me how a Rockefeller Republican "Kissinger" supposedly screwed that up?
The RINOs not only didn't allow tyranny to fail in China, they helped stabilize and build it, just like they did with the Soviets and unlike the way Reagan drove down oil prices to break them. Instead of letting the Russians fail, the RINOS sold them grain. Instead of gaining cuts in strategic capability, they tried only to cap rates of growth. In effect, they propped up our enemies to justify building an maintaining a very expensive war machine.
Showing their gratitude, the Chinese are working with Russia right now to take out the reserve currency status of the dollar which, if successful, would crush our ability to fund our military or get ourselves out of the crushing debt Zero has built. I don't call that a "peace dividend."
No matter what you think of Kissinger, I don't see a downside to him helping to open up China.
Obviously.
So let me get this straight. Kissinger the supposed evil bastard child of Rockerfeller opened up China and laid the groundwork for what followed, then it wasn't acted on for over twenty years? What a great plot. This wouldn't be fodder for a grade "E" movie.
You take your standards of legitimacy from Hollywood?
You really have no concept for the timelines upon which our enemies work, nor the depth of perfidy within our own country going all the way back to the founding (there's a reason Aaron Burr shot Hamilton). I'm going to suggest you do a little reading: To Eliminate the Opiate by rabbi Marvin S. Antelman. This process started in Eastern Europe before the 18th Century began.
There was nothing wrong with opening up China. Who in their right mind in 1972 could forsee Bill Clinton facilitating the handoff of our top secret military technology to China? Look at what you're accusing Nixon of here. There isn't a shred of evidence to prove he foresaw what was coming, due to him opening up China. The idea he was a traitor to our nation on the order of Bill Clinton or Barack Obama, it's just preposterous.
Giving them our industrial process technologies was dumping the crown jewels of our economy and selling out the American worker, the taxpayers who fund national defense. The guidance technology was just icing on the cake.
Say what you want about the man, he did seek any way possible to counter the U. S. S. R. threat at the height of the Cold War. Those are not the actions of a traitor.
Look, the regulatory monster Nixon made were enough usurpations of powers to have him impeached were it not for a Slave Party Congress that was up to their necks in this kind of corporate corruption. So I'm going to have you read a second book to show that it was well known long before Nixon became President how the socialist corporate foundation regulatory racket worked even then, as written by the chief counsel of the Republican led Congressional committee convened on that very topic: Foundations: Their Power and Influence, by Rene Wormser.
You have a lot to learn.
I'm not. Got details/sources? What do I Google under?
ff
Ron Ziegler, the White House press secretary at the time, dismissed the break-in as a “third-rate burglary,” which is why that phrase is repeatedly found in discussions of Watergate.
In it, one notes an early mention of Harry Dexter White, Undersecretary of Treasury during World War II being outed as a Soviet agent. Although Truman apparently knew White was a Soviet spy BEFORE appointing him, he fired White in the row over the public disclosure. Not long thereafter, White was named to be Executive Director of the IMF. Therewith was a discussion of how the Chairman of the Federal Reserve, Mariner Eccles, was already advocating opening up trade with the Chinese Communists, despite the fact that we had been at war with them in Korea. Truman's support was instrumental in their defeat of the Kuomintang.
My point in posting this is that opening trade with China had long been a goal of the financial powers of America as allied with the communist LEFT, both of which had repeatedly betrayed America, and which Nixon HAD to know. The money power of this country has long run both political parties with conservatism as we know it today its mortal enemy.
Nixon was their "right wing" stooge, as the left kept reminding us in their blind flailing over the outing of Alger Hiss (fall guy), thus garnering Nixon grudging conservative support that was used to great effect in building the socialist Federal bureaucracy we face today. It was a cover.
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