Word: affair
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Corruption certainly exists, but it is important to make distinctions-between larger and lesser transgressions, between various motives and aims. The big city machines, forever symbolized by Boss Tweed, were rotten, but some also performed necessary social functions. The Teapot Dome affair of Harding's Administration, the freezer and coat giveaways of the Truman and Eisenhower eras, were corrupt acts based on organized greed, some massive, some relatively modest. Watergate is a far greater malignancy. These conspirators wanted to short-circuit the electoral and judicial processes, to rewrite the book on national security, to manipulate the standards of ethics...
Past Presidents, including Kennedy and Johnson, have of course stretched their powers to the limit. But nowhere in U.S. history does there seem to be the systematic breaking of laws by White House officials and the involvement of Government agencies that characterize the Watergate affair. As the Charlotte Observer put it, if the American majority believes that Watergate is "just a somewhat exaggerated version of politics as usual," then "the American political system is deathly ill." Perhaps the most important thing to rescue from the Watergate mess is the public's ability to make distinctions, both moral and legal...
THREE in ten people who were questioned in the latest Gallup poll said that the Watergate affair made them less likely than before to vote for a Republican in next year's congressional elections. But while Watergate has generally hurt the G.O.P., it has had varying effects on individual Republicans and Democrats, pushing some up, some down. An early and therefore tentative reading of the effects on some men who have been mentioned as presidential or vice-presidential possibilities...
...will not have the same prestige as before-to a new Agnew in back of me ... Your people cannot be moved by the killing of yellow people. The killing of Cambodians means nothing to them. Watergate is more important to them, and we put our hope in the Watergate affair...
...plate, and it is surprising that you have the zeal to add on fresh ones." Amin then ticked off some of the "problems": racial strife in the U.S., Viet Nam, the ITT fiasco in Chile, and, of course, Watergate: "At this moment you are uncomfortably sandwiched in that unfortunate affair." Big Daddy signed off with a heartfelt benison from one hard-pressed statesman to another: "I ask almighty God to help you solve your problems...