Then and Now: January 6th Committee and the Senate Watergate Committee

This spring, my wife and I watched every public hearing of the house committee investigating the January 6 insurrection. During the few moments when we were not watching the hearings, or commentary on the hearings, or exchanging our own commentary, I’ve found myself remembering the summer of the Watergate hearings, some 40-odd years ago.

The summer of 1973 fell between my freshman and sophomore years at Pennsylvania State University. My parents and I had an understanding that I would work when not enrolled, so I took a job as a “night porter” at the Holiday Inn about a mile from campus. The core of my duties proved to be janitorial – vacuuming the carpeted lobby and dining room and mopping and sweeping the tiled kitchen floor. I worked from 11pm to 7am, drove home in the brilliant light and long shadows of the early morning sun, ate breakfast, and went upstairs to sleep until the early afternoon. By the time I roused myself and made my way downstairs, the hearings were usually running, so I sank into my parents’ deep leather couch and let the voices of Sam Ervine, Howard Baker, and others wash over me.

During that summer, my whole life seemed to exist between the Watergate committee and my mop and bucket of gray, sudsy water. Watching the slow, ratiocinative process of the committee gradually instilled in me a sense that the truth would be discovered, that our republic had “built-in” mechanisms that would save itself from the influence of dishonest men like Nixon and his operatives. On some occasions, I’d even drift back to sleep, cradled by a new confidence in our constitutional system of checks and balances.

As the January 6 committee presents its findings to the country, I feel considerably less confident about the fate of our republic. With the exception of Liz Cheney, Adam Kinzinger and a few other marginal figures, the Republican party has followed Trump into the fact-free zone in which he lives. This makes the threat to democratic governance posed by Trump and his successors far more serious than the threat posed by Richard Nixon and his inner circle in 1973. The de-stabilization of public discourse by disinformation has greatly facilitated Trump’s takeover of the Republican party. Demagogues can muddy the waters of public discourse quickly, distracting the public and forestalling or perhaps even escaping their day of reckoning.

As I watch the January 6 committee hearings, I will not be drifting in and out of sleep.