George W. Bush's supporters often compare him to men they consider among the greatest presidents of American history: George Washington, Harry S. Truman, Ronald Reagan.

Friday's Watergate symposium at the University of Texas suggested a less flattering point of comparison: Richard Milhous Nixon.

Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, who broke the Watergate story for The Washington Post more than 30 years ago, spent three hours Friday afternoon at the University of Texas discussing the scandal that made them famous.

But"The Legacy of Watergate: Why It Still Matters" didn't focus on the past: For much of the time, Woodward and Bernstein — Bernstein, especially — kept bringing the discussion back to the present.

"This administration is not evolutionary, it is sui generis," meaning of its own kind, unique, Bernstein said of the Bush White House."We are dealing here with a level of untruthfulness that is so constant that it is exceeding what we saw in the Nixon presidency."

The audience, which seemed to be made up largely of UT students and people who were adults when Watergate broke, was sympathetic to such sentiments, laughing and applauding when Bernstein asserted that,"One thing Bush II and Nixon share is a psychological unfitness for the presidency."