The Legacy of Watergate

The Watergate scandal has changed the law that the president must observe in order to preserve the secret the president can detain from Congress. The most remarkable change is the clear information action law, such as revision of the Information Freedom Act (FOIA). After the Watergate incident, the Information Freedom Act was amended so that Congress could obtain information that the president should be hidden from the public, thinking it is a national security issue. This was caused by several actions by President Nixon, including strengthening the detention of "smoking gun" and involvement in the scandal with one hand.

Bob Woodward's latest book, Shadow, believes that the legacy of Watergate Incident (also) relies heavily on unnamed internal sources. In May 1992, the Watergate Times reporter James Mann on the Washington Post reported speculation about the motive and identity of "Deep Throat" who gave President and Woodward to Nixon. The career has become a reality. President Clinton last week visited many poor people throughout the country, and many would like to know what he has been doing over the past six years. "Through suspicious measures to convey good news to us, John Schwarz wrote in October last year," We ignored deep erosion of America's dream. "

Bob Woodward ("I can not believe it is a member of the Nixon's escort" club) wrote in Ford's pardon in his 1999 book "Shadow: The Presidency of the Five Presidents and the Watergate Incident" It was. After Ford's death, he regained the Washington Post. Woodward's statement said before Nixon's resignation, Nixon's chief executive Alexander The Hague proposed what Ford explained as an exchange of conditions: if you promise him an amnesty, Nixon will leave right. (Hagri denied that he offered another to another) Ford replied that he had to think about it. After the assistant told him that such a deal was very inappropriate, Ford called Hagrid and said "no deal". But the next day, Ford told another assistant to forgive Nixon. A month later, President Ford did this. We can discuss whether this series of events constitutes an implicit agreement, but at least we must conclude that forgiveness is Nixon's idea rather than Ford's idea.

This book on the political heritage of the Watergate event provides some background knowledge necessary to answer these questions, but it does not draw important conclusions. It is not about writing down the history of scandal in Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton administration, but rather on "the honesty and truth of the president, the closest moment they challenge" . "It was revealed that the standards stipulated by the law were too low immediately, the first approved investigation was an unfounded allegation, including a derogatory holding, that a trivial complaint was unfounded As with Star Investigations, millions of people will be used in one case and will be prosecuted under normal circumstances There would be no.