Letters to the Editor
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We haven't "gotten over" Watergate
And I hope to God we never do. As Ford himself said, Watergate established the principle that we are a government of laws and not of men. Right now, the presidency is held by a man who reads the Constitution as including two phrases in big bold letters, one that says that the executive power is vested in a President of the United States, and another that says that that President is commander-in-chief. Everything else, in his constitutional view, is in footnote-size type and need not be bothered with.
What is the source of this? His principal advisers are two men who cut their teeth running the government in the Ford Administration, Ford's two chiefs-of-staff, Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney. These men came from the school that thought not that Nixon had gone too far, but that he hadn't gone far enough. What he should have done was to burn the tapes on the White House lawn and declared himself above the courts and the Congress. Nixon's own shell of a sense of justice stopped him from doing that. They now advise a president who believes he can interpret the Constitution on his own and the laws Congress passes as well, and that his powers in a self-declared war (notwithstanding a clear mandate in the Constitution that only Congress may declare war) are virtually unlimited.
What little chance we have in this country of ridding ourselves of this scourge is the legacy of Watergate.