Peter Wallsten: Watergate Weighs on Today's White House

Peter Wallsten, in the Los Angeles Times (6-7-05)

Shortly after a 91-year-old man was revealed last week as the answer to the 30-year-old mystery of the Watergate affair, President Bush cast the scandal as something from the distant past.

"A lot of people wondered ... who 'Deep Throat' was, including me," Bush said after news broke that former FBI official W. Mark Felt had been the source leaking Watergate details to the press. "It would kind of fade from my memory, and then all of a sudden, somebody would pop it back in. Some story would reinvigorate that period."

And yet, far more than Bush has publicly acknowledged, Watergate and its aftermath have exerted a strong influence on the policies and attitudes of the president and others now in the White House -- some of whom had front-row seats for the scandal as members of the Nixon and Ford administrations.

Vice President Dick Cheney, who worked in the Nixon White House and served as chief of staff to President Ford, has spoken of using his current position to restore powers of the presidency that he believes were diminished as a result of Watergate and the Vietnam War. By withholding details of his energy task force meetings and advising Bush to aggressively take the reins of power after the contested 2000 election, Cheney has tried to rekindle a broad view of executive authority.

Bush was a student at Harvard Business School when Richard Nixon resigned the presidency in 1974. He watched as his father, chairman of the Republican National Committee and one of Nixon's most visible defenders, butted heads with a press the elder Bush believed was out to get the president....

...Years later, Bush's anger toward the press showed itself when the Washington Post's Bob Woodward, who forged the relationship with Felt and drove much of the newspaper's Watergate coverage, requested an interview with the former president. Bush declined.

"I think Watergate and the Vietnam War are the two things that moved beltway journalism into this aggressive, intrusive 'take no prisoners' kind of reporting that I can now say I find offensive," Bush wrote Woodward in a 1998 letter. "The new young cynical breed wants to emulate you. But many of them to do that question the word and the integrity of all in politics. It is almost like their code is 'You are guilty until proved innocent.' "

Under President George W. Bush, leaks are kept to a minimum and White House officials are rarely off-script. The president often criticizes reporters' use of anonymous sources, although his administration regularly makes officials available under the condition that they be identified only as a "senior administration official."

"On the scale of whether sources are being smoked out or not smoked out, it is clearly on the side of not smoked out,'' Bush told a group of radio and television news directors last week. "There is a lot of sourcing here in Washington, D.C., that never gets called into account. I mean, a lot. I'd say it's a million to one. That would be the ratio."