“…Two years later Richard Nixon would become the first and only U.S. president to resign -
-his role in the criminal conspiracy to obstruct justice — the Watergate coverup — definitively established.
Another answer has since persisted, often unchallenged: the notion that the coverup was worse than the crime.
This idea minimizes the scale and reach of Nixon’s criminal actions.
Ervin’s answer to his own question hints at the magnitude of Watergate: “To destroy, insofar as the presidential election of 1972 was concerned, the integrity of the process by which the President of the United States is nominated and elected.”
Yet Watergate was far more than that.
At its most virulent, Watergate was a brazen and daring assault, led by Nixon himself, against the heart of American democracy: the Constitution, our system of free elections, the rule of law.
Today, much more than when we first covered this story as young Washington Post reporters -
- an abundant record provides unambiguous answers and evidence about Watergate and its meaning..”
(cont..)
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