Two Nixon Anniversaries: Watergate and the Opera "Nixon in China"

Richard Nixon
(photo from CBS News)

Anyone with a sense of history and dread should not miss reading Bob Woodward's and Carl Bernstein's account of Watergate in today's online editions of the Washington Post. The article is a searing indictment of Richard Nixon and his cabal. For those who did not live during the Watergate era, the piece offers a blunt reminder of how a president masterminded a criminal conspiracy designed to consolidate power by undermining the nation's principal governmental and communications institutions.

Tricky Dick's exploits led to his forced resignation. However, it's a bit easier to be "holier than thou" when Nixon is the subject. Where was a very compliant American media when George W. Bush and his collection of ideologically motivated cohorts treated the law as an inconvenience rather than something to cherish? The actions of right-wing intellectual gangsters such as John Yoo brought far deeper disgrace to the United States than anything Bob Haldeman and John Ehrlichman did during the Watergate era. To this day, the American people have not been able to face the collective domestic political silence that characterized the Bush-Cheney era. A contrast of that inaction with the ferment of the Watergate era is not flattering to the current generation.

Hillary Clinton and Chinese President Hu JinTao in 2009
(photo from Xin Hua/Yao Dawei)

While the mainstream media is busy recalling Watergate, the San Francisco Opera is staging John Adams' Nixon in China. This year, coincidentally, is the 25th anniversary of the opera's premiere in Houston. The opera's story line involves the historic meeting between Mao and Nixon. At that time, the People's Republic of China was a largely backward, agrarian, and communist nation immersed in the Cultural Revolution; the United States was a stable, economically flush superpower. Now, America relies on Chinese purchases of US Treasury bonds to remain solvent; China is busy creating a new economic nexus that includes Brazil and a non-communist Russia. Unfortunately, there is currently an absence of effective American foreign policy leadership. It is more than a little ironic that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was a staff member on the House committee that investigated the Nixon Administration's involvement with Watergate and other criminal activities. I wonder if she reflects on those days and asks herself what Tricky Dick would do with China now.