Top 70 Watergate Quotes

The institution of the presidency was profoundly affected by Watergate.

As a long-time registered Democrat who started voting in the year of Watergate, I resent being taken for a ride to the place where anything goes and nothing matters. And especially where nothing matters less than clear thinking and straight talk.

Presidential power was overruled by the high bench in July 1974, when President Nixon was ordered to turn over some audio tapes of his White House conversations, including the ‘smoking gun’ tape of June 23, 1972, that revealing the Watergate cover up.

Sometimes I forget some of the things I’ve done. I recently recalled that after Watergate I went away by myself to Tahiti for a month, moving from island to island. That was a point in my life where I didn’t know what was next.

I suspect there have been a number of conspiracies that never were described or leaked out. But I suspect none of the magnitude and sweep of Watergate.

The biggest rap on me is that I don’t find a Watergate every couple of years. Well, Watergate was unique. It’s not something Carl Bernstein, I, or the Washington Post caused.

The official version of Watergate is as wrong as a Flat Earth Society pamphlet.

This is a generation weaned on Watergate, and there is no presumption of innocence and no presumption of good intentions. Instead, there is a presumption that, without relentless scrutiny, the government will misbehave.

Watergate is an immensely complicated scandal with a cast of characters as varied as a Tolstoy novel.

If the many allegations made to this date are true, then the burglars who broke into the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee at the Watergate were, in effect, breaking into the home of every citizen.

I believe Watergate shows that the system did work. Particularly the Judiciary and the Congress, and ultimately an independent prosecutor working in the Executive Branch.

My 1974 album ‘Mind Over Matter’ was a detailed thing about Watergate. I always had some righteous indignation.

The fact of the Watergate cover-up is not nearly as interesting as the step into making the cover-up. And when you understand the step, you understand that Richard Nixon lied. That he was a criminal.

The Watergate reforms did work well for many years, and if improved and broadened, these reforms can have real and major impact on the system today.

After the 1970s, when President Nixon’s illegal campaign cash was used as a secret slush fund to pay for the Watergate burglary and cover-up, Americans have demanded to know where the money fueling our elections is coming from.

Watergate enabled the Democrats to cut off all aid to South Vietnam and ensure American defeat in a war their party entered and had effectively lost, before Nixon salvaged a non-Communist South Vietnam while effecting a complete American withdrawal.

After Watergate, America was a ship without a rudder. Vietnam was left to its own devices, drifting along towards its fate.

I grew up a child of Watergate. It gave me a good dose of skepticism about authority. One of my favorite movies is ‘All the President’s Men.’ Woodward and Bernstein, those guys were my heroes. I have a degree in journalism.

The source known as Deep Throat provided a kind of road map through the scandal. His one consistent message was that the Watergate burglary was just the tip of the iceberg.

I can see clearly now… that I was wrong in not acting more decisively and more forthrightly in dealing with Watergate.

I remember being a kid and the Vietnam War was huge and looking at Watergate.

I used to think that the Civil War was our country’s greatest tragedy, but I do remember that there were some redeeming features in the Civil War in that there was some spirit of sacrifice and heroism displayed on both sides. I see no redeeming features in Watergate.

I hope you will respond to the crisis of confidence that Watergate has created by opening up your administration and reaching out to people in a more magnanimous spirit.

I’m still friendly with Dean. He still calls me on the phone from time to time. John Dean was fired and later ended up spending some time in prison for his role in Watergate.

We’re not going to have another Watergate in our lifetime. I’m sure.

Suppose Watergate had not been uncovered? I’d still be on the City Desk.

Everybody has a little bit of Watergate in him.

I was unknown because I came to Washington from the West. I started covering Watergate. Immodestly, I’d say I did it pretty well, in part because it was hard to go wrong.

I was raised – professionally – in the Public Integrity Section. I started in 1976, stayed there for 12 years. It was formed after Watergate by then-head of the Criminal Division Dick Thornburgh, who ultimately became Attorney General.

I’ve often wondered what it would have been like if we’d had cable news during the Vietnam War and Watergate.

From Watergate we learned what generations before us have known; our Constitution works. And during Watergate years it was interpreted again so as to reaffirm that no one – absolutely no one – is above the law.

I was never for Richard Nixon until Watergate.

I think I would have done very well as a writer in the Forties. I think the last time America was a great country was then or not long after. It was before Vietnam, before Watergate.

Watergate provides a model case study of the interaction and powers of each of the branches of government. It also is a morality play with a sad and dramatic ending.

I almost became a political journalist, having worked as a reporter at the time of Watergate. The proximity to those events motivated me, when I wound up doing philosophy, to try to use it to move the public debate.

I think we’ll go through a period when there’s a revival of concern about ethics. After Watergate, we got the Ethics in Government Act, which has a lot of additional regulations.

Gerald R. Ford was a decent and honorable man. Under his steady hand, the nation began the process of recovering from the terrible trauma of Watergate – the lies, distortions, cover-ups, misuses of federal agencies to exact political revenge, illegal wiretapping, burglaries.

The possibility of collusion between Trump’s allies and Russian intelligence is much more serious than Watergate. It is a constitutional crisis. It represents a violation of our republic’s most sacred trust.

The U.S. Constitution has absorbed the end of slavery, the Civil War, Civil Rights and Watergate.

Even before Watergate and his resignation, Nixon had inspired conflicting and passionate emotions.

The great thing about Watergate is, is that the system worked. The American system worked. The press did its job. We did what we were supposed to do.

The American Dream has run out of gas. The car has stopped. It no longer supplies the world with its images, its dreams, its fantasies. No more. It’s over. It supplies the world with its nightmares now: the Kennedy assassination, Watergate, Vietnam.

The facts of Watergate have been wildly exaggerated.

Because of Watergate in part, I am kind of a magnet for calls and information and suggestions.

Watergate just happened to come along at the same time as the demand for honesty in relations between the sexes, in advertising, in ecology, in almost everything. It just stumbled into that great big elephant trap that had already been built for it.

The political lesson of Watergate is this: Never again must America allow an arrogant, elite guard of political adolescents to by-pass the regular party organization and dictate the terms of a national election.

In 1974, Democrats gained 49 House seats and four Senate seats. It wasn’t just the Watergate scandal that drove Democratic wins, but the sense that Republicans had defended corruption and criminality in the White House.

Until we have a better relationship between private performance and the public truth, as was demonstrated with Watergate, we as the public are absolutely right to remain suspicious, contemptuous even, of the secrecy and the misinformation which is the digest of our news.

To compare Whitewater to Watergate is a travesty.

An attempt is already underway to revise history – to leave the impression that the former president had nothing to do with Watergate. But there is no doubt about his obstruction of justice after the Watergate break-in.

In the seventies, a group of American artists seized the means not of production but of reproduction. They tore apart visual culture at a time of no money, no market, and no one paying attention except other artists. Vietnam and Watergate had happened; everything in America was being questioned.

Nixon was a crook, but he was our crook. He didn’t have the KGB do the Watergate job.

Watergate was a constitutional crisis of the highest order.

You must pursue this investigation of Watergate even if it leads to the president. I’m innocent. You’ve got to believe I’m innocent. If you don’t, take my job.

Everything is a conspiracy. People kind of demonize the word. But a conspiracy is when two people get together and do something. So, if more than one person does something, it’s a conspiracy. The revolution was a conspiracy, Iran Contra, Watergate.

The French were mystified about the Watergate scandal.

My mom is a nurse; my dad is a pediatrician. They were born in the 1940s, and they were both inspired to fight against injustice, whether it was the injustices of the Vietnam War or Watergate or children in poverty or oppression of African Americans in Philadelphia where I was growing up.

After Nixon resigned in 1974, he engaged in a very aggressive war with history, attempting to wipe out the Watergate stain and memory. Happily, history won, largely because of Nixon’s tapes.

Indeed, it was largely the clubbiness of the Washington village press corps that let Nixon get away with Watergate and still win his landslide in 1972.

I kind of struggled as a 10-year-old to make out what it meant that Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy were killed within two months of each other. I think I was 14 when Watergate happened and a president was impeached. So between my birth and age 14, I just saw a lot of turmoil.

I learned one thing in Watergate: I was well-intentioned but rationalized illegal behavior. You cannot live your life other than walking in the truth. Your means are as important as your ends.

The crusades of Vietnam and Watergate seemed like a good idea at the time, even a noble one, not only to the press but perhaps to a majority of Americans.

Watergate had become the center of the media’s universe, and during the remaining year of my presidency the media tried to force everything else to revolve around it.

Back in the ’90s, whenever we were having ’70s nostalgia, you could take the good with the bad. Like yeah, sure, Nixon happened, Watergate happened, but we also had bell bottoms and ABBA and ‘The Brady Bunch.’

I didn’t really see a way to make a living on the farm. I always loved writing. I was the guy who won the D.A.R. essay contest and things like that, and it was the era of Watergate, and I decided I would be the next Woodward and Bernstein, and then retire to the farm.

Some of the things I have written about are a way of connecting with my father – I know he knew who Idi Amin was, and I know he knew who Longford was. And I know he knew who Nixon was, because shortly before he died, I talked to him about Watergate.

I think there are periods in this country when behavior is abhorrent: McCarthy, Watergate, Bill Clinton. It’s just a question of how the checks and balances in the American system work and how leaders stand up to it or don’t stand up to it.

I have very vivid memories of my parents talking about Nixon, my mom watching Watergate on the black-and-white set in the living room. The mayor at the time in Philadelphia was a guy named Frank Rizzo – a Democrat, a real bully, a racist.

When Richard M. Nixon resigned and Ford became the 38th president of the United States, the Watergate Special Prosecutor’s Office, of which I was a member, was preparing for the criminal trials of Nixon’s top aides – H.R. Haldeman, John Ehrlichman and John Mitchell.

The White House tapes, recording Nixon’s nefarious doings from Watergate to the bombing of Vietnam, made frightening reading once made public on the orders of Congress.