January 31, 2014
Dear Everyone:
In 1969, the year that I graduated from
Lake Oswego High School (Go,
Lakers!), the
Democratic National Committee decided to lease office
space in part of a complex in an area of
Washington, D.C. known as
Foggy
Bottom. The complex,
consisting of a hotel, apartments and offices, was called
Watergate.
A few years later, in 1972, fearful that the American Public might
mistakenly make the wrong political choice, the
Committee
for the Re-Eleciont
the President (Richard Nixon), appropriately nicknamed “CREEP”, hired
some rather inept burglars to install listening devices in the DNC’s
Watergate offices. Shortly
after, a second group of rather inept burglars broke in to fix one of
the previously installed “bugs” which was malfunctioning.
Much wrangling, finger-pointing, attempted covers-up-du-jour, and other
political maneuvering ensued, resulting in the aforementioned President
(Richard Nixon) being forced to resign from office.
The
Vice President (Spiro Agnew) having been previously forced to
resign in a completely different political scandal,
Gerald Ford became
the first American President never to have been elected to office.
(In a not-entirely-unrelated matter, 1972 was my first
Presidential
election and the only time I ever voted for an incumbent President.
I quickly learned my lesson and have made it a practice to almost
always vote against the incumbent ever since.
For the record, I wasn’t really voting for Nixon.
I was voting for
Henry Kissinger who, at the time, was Nixon’s
Secretary of State. I
believed Kissinger would get the United States out of the disastrous
war
in Vietnam, and the only way to keep Kissinger was to keep Nixon.
And Kissinger did, indeed, put an end to the Vietnam War or, as
they called it in Vietnam, “The American War”.)
The American Public, appropriately outraged by all the political
nonsense, ousted the Republicans and ushered the disastrously
ill-prepared Jimmy Carter into the
Oval Office.
It was not a rousing success.
Ever since then, any political scandal in the United States has had the
word “-gate” attached to it; “Lawyer-gate”, “Travel-gate”, etc.-gate.
These days, the current governor of the sovereign state of
New Jersey is
embroiled in something called “Bridge-gate” because of an incident
involving the
George Washington Bridge, which facilitates traffic
between Fort Lee, New Jersey and
New York City, and whether said
governor knew beforehand about a nefarious plot to create a major
traffic jam to “punish” the mayor of a relatively small town in New
Jersey. Whatever.
Consider this: How much
difference would it have made to the American political landscape if the
original Democratic National Committee had simply located their offices
in a building called, “Fluffenpiffle”?
Would “The Great Fluffenpiffle Scandal” have had the same
resonance? Doesn’t calling
it “Bridge-Piffle” actually put it into a more realistic perspective?
Would the careers of
Carl Bernstein and
Bob Woodward, reporters for the
Washington Post who broke the
initial scandal, have gone in a different direction?
Would actor
Robert Redford have paid all that money for the
film
rights before the reporters
even started writing
All the
President’s Men?
I’m just saying, think about it.
Love, as always,
Pete
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