Nabobs revisited: what Watergate reveals about today's Washington press corps.

• Author: Greenberg, David
• Position: On Political Books

Richard Nixon, Watergate, and the Press: A Historical Retrospective By Louis W. Liebovich Praeger Publishing, $49.95

Watergate: The Presidential Scandal that Shook America By Keith W. Olson University of Kansas Press, $35.00

"The definitive judgment on a president is almost always written during his life or in the first obituaries," wrote the historian Fawn Brodie, referring to Richard Nixon, in 1981. "The patient work of historians and biographers may serve to rediscover and underline it, but it has always already been said by a contemporary, and usually with distinction." For young historians writing about Nixon (myself included), this is a rather dispiriting assertion. But there's more than a little truth in it.

Indeed, the journalistic accounts of Nixon, and especially of his downfall, written during and just after his presidency--J. Anthony Lukas's Nightmare, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein's The Final Days, Theodore H. White's Breach of Faith--have proven hard to improve upon. As a result, Nixon scholars, not wanting to write what might be greeted dismissively as "another Watergate book," have mined to under-explored areas of his presidency such as his domestic policy making. One unfortunate consequence of this shift was to cede the "Watergate field to conspiracy theorists, like the authors of the incoherent Silent Coup (1991). Even some of the better Nixon books of late steered clear of Watergate and thus may have unintentionally fostered the notion that the scandal need not underpin any discussion of the former president. Add to this trend the steady debasing of the coinage of "scandal" in Washington, and you get an overall shrinking of the sense that "Watergate was a uniquely important event.

The two books under review offer a sensible corrective to this historio-graphical drift. Both are by middle-aged scholars for whom "Watergate was a vivid and central political experience. Both offer careful accounts of Watergate based largely on secondary sources. Unlike some of their contemporaries--such as Stephen Ambrose, who ended his Nixon trilogy avowing a newfound admiration for his old nemesis--neither man comes bearing a revisionist account. Rather, both wind up reaffirming what most of Nixon's contemporaries, Republican and Democratic alike, concluded at the time of his resignation. Watergate yeas not, in the famous, famous, and inaccurate phrase of Nixon press secretary Ron Ziegler, simply "a third-rate burglary," but, in Liebovich's words, a lesion on the surface that revealed a malignancy below."

But these books do more than merely remind us of something--the gravity of Watergate--that we may have forgotten. They also shed a not-altogether-flattering light on the one institution whose reputation was enhanced by Watergate: the Washington press corps.

Press corpse

It is widely held that the news media performed heroically during Watergate, exposing secrets that otherwise would have stayed hidden. For liberals especially, the affair reinforced a tendency--rooted in a bedrock belief in free speech and open debate--to side with the press against politicians who complain about their press coverage. (Complaining about the press, the journalist Fred Barnes has written, is like whining about...