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We'll Always Have Nixon To Kick Around -- And Vice Versa

By Charles Bierbauer/CNN

WASHINGTON -- I looked up and there he was, it seemed, on every television set I could see around the newsroom. Richard Nixon. As though he'd never left us. He probably never will.

June 17th was the 25th anniversary of the Watergate break-in. The rest is history.

-- But the anniversary was Tuesday. Can we get beyond this?

No, we can't. That's the point. Just as Bogart and Bergman will "always have Paris," we'll always have Nixon.

-- Nixon's been dead since 1994. Is there no mercy?

Did Nixon show any? Listen to those tapes now being released. Listen to the arrogance, the derision, the corruption of power.

-- Were you on his enemies list or something?

No, that's my old colleague Dan Schorr. I was overseas in London the day the wires ticked out the words "Nixon Resigns." It was August of 1974. It stopped us in our tracks. This had never happened before.

You can read the same headline -- Nixon Resigns! -- from The Washington Post. It's framed on the wall of room 723 of what was then the Howard Johnson's hotel on Virginia Avenue in Washington. It's right across the street from the Watergate office building where the Watergate burglars were caught in their effort to bug Democratic headquarters. Burglars wearing suits and rubber surgical gloves. Not your average thugs.

The lookout was in the Howard Johnson's room. HoJo now calls it a Premier hotel and room 723 has been turned into a Watergate museum.

Television networks were renting the room by the hour this week. Hotel rooms that rent by the hour are usually the dens of prostitutes and johns. Watergate shares that tawdriness.

Room 723 is something else. The desk clerk says it rents for $159 a night. Not out of range in Washington. It's not very big. Not very plush. Just unique.

Every inch of wall space is hung with Nixon memorabilia, pictures and newspapers. There's an "Agnew Resigns" headline from the Baltimore Sun for good measure, though Agnew made his own problems quite independent of Watergate. Every centimeter of table top is arrayed with documents, memoirs and knick-knacks. Many are for sale: glasses and ash trays from Air Force One, hand towels with presidential seals.

You can prop yourself up on the king-size bed with a portrait of Nixon looking over you -- sleep if you can -- and watch a video of "All the President's Men" as Robert Redford, playing the Post's Bob Woodward, helps bring down the Nixon presidency.

Woodward said this week he still talks with "Deep Throat." The never-identified Nixon insider was Woodward's and Carl Bernstein's key source confirming details of Watergate as they ferreted them out. Woodward's pact with "Deep Throat" was not to identify him -- Woodward says it's a he -- while he is still alive or until released from that pledge.

There are still plenty of Watergate's Who's Who around. Plumber G. Gordon Liddy was airing his radio show from the old Howard Johnson's lobby on the anniversary day. Alexander Haig, who became Nixon's chief of staff after the dam broke on Watergate, is a talk show favorite any time the issue resurfaces.

Four of the five Watergate burglars-- Gonzalez, Martinez, Barker and McCord-- are still alive. Extra credit if you remember the fifth -- Sturgis -- who died in 1993.

If you were around in 1972, these names still have a familiar ring. And Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Mitchell and Dean. If you weren't, the names may not be familiar. The nature of the offenses may only be vague.

Current polls show many Americans -- younger ones especially -- do not know the details of Watergate. Many don't see much difference with President Bill Clinton's Whitewater woes.

There's a world of difference. Whitewater is about the current president, though years before he came to Washington. It is not about the Clinton presidency. Watergate was at the heart of the Nixon presidency and destroyed it.

Watergate turned many Americans' view of the presidency, politics and Nixon himself. An uncle of mine who was an ardent Nixon supporter made a 180-degree turn. Watergate marked the decline in civility between the press and the President. Are you running for something, Mr. Rather? No, are you, Mr. President?

There's just no escaping the impact Richard Nixon had on this country and this capital.

Would we be debating China's Most Favored Nation trade status here now if Nixon had not opened the dialog to China? We might, but he clearly started the process.

"The evil that men do lives after them, The good is oft interred with their bones... So let it be with Caesar..."

That might have sufficed for Shakespeare. Not for Nixon.

Nixon was in charge of his own rehabilitation, seeking some good to live after him as a twinkling amid the tarnish. And virtually all efforts to rehabilitate him start with his China policy. His acknowledged international expertise gained entry to the foreign affairs neophyte Bill Clinton just weeks before Nixon's death.

In other words, Nixon is inescapable. And this compulsion to write about him is not paean, nor apology, nor assault.

Its timing is owed to the media penchant for celebrating anniversaries. Five, 10, 20, 25 years after. It's a quarter century since the bungled break-in which the Nixon White House sought to pass off as a "third-rate burglary" when in reality it was the start of a first-rate scandal.

It's worth the reflection. Nixon will now likely slip from our immediate attention for a while, but not from our random access memory. Someday, something will again trigger the recollections of those vividly painful days. The 30th anniversary of Watergate will do.