What If Watergate Never Happened?
LIN: Well, from the arrest to the articles of impeachment and finally the resignation of a president, Watergate was a political cliffhanger that no one could have predicted. It changed history, but imagine what would be different if the Watergate scandal had just gone away. Here's CNN's senor analyst Jeff Greenfield.</s>JEFF GREENFIELD, CNN POLITICAL ANALYST (voice-over): August 9, 1974, Watergate's final chapter. As the first president in American history to resign -- hold it, hold it. Imagine this never happened. Imagine that Nixon or John Mitchell or somebody had said, a burglary, at Democratic headquarters? Are you nuts? Or suppose there had been no Deep Throat or any other source to guide Woodward and Bernstein down the money trail? Or that we'd never learned about those tapes? Imagine, in other words, that Richard Nixon had served out his second term and done it without the cloud of scandal. (on camera) The what-ifs are fascinating. They suggest, in fact, that everything from our politics to our journalism to our national culture might have been very, very different. (voice-over) Start with our politics.</s>SPIRO AGNEW, FORMER VICE PRESIDENT: I had not resign...</s>GREENFIELD: Vice President Agnew still would have been forced out of office in the fall of 1973. His misdeeds had to do with bribes, not Watergate. But without Watergate, Nixon would not have had to reach out to Congress by picking House Republican leader Gerald Ford. He might well, have turned to one of his personal favorites, Democrat turned Republican John Connolly. And that, in turn, would have made Connolly a serious contender for the Republican nomination in 1976. Also without Watergate, the appeal of a Washington outsider like, say, California Governor Ronald Reagan, might have been less compelling. And it's just possible that conservatism's most articulate spokesman might never have had a real shot at national office.</s>JIMMY CARTER, FORMER PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: My name is Jimmy Carter, and I'm running for president.</s>GREENFIELD: And speaking of outsiders, would a peanut farmer turned governor like Jimmy Carter, who boasted of his lack of Washington experience, really been a likely Democratic presidential nominee? Or would a Washington face, Senator Scoop Jackson, Congressman Mo Udall, even former vice president, Hubert Humphrey, have been more likely? And a likely Democratic presidential nominee?</s>UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Opening the mail of American citizens for over...</s>GREENFIELD: What about public policy? After Nixon quit, Congress asserted its power over an imperial presidency and essentially refused to fund the Vietnam War any longer. In 1975, the communist north conquered the south, and the Khmer Rouge took over Cambodia. To this day some conservatives argue that, had Nixon not left, these events and the subsequent genocide in Cambodia might never have happened. Another question: without the loss of Vietnam, would later enemies of the United States have come to believe that this nuclear superpower was a paper tiger which could be successfully attacked? Other what-ifs. Would American journalism have developed quite as big an appetite for the political scandal? Would every political controversy have been labeled as another "gate"? And would the press and the public have developed so strong a sense that government itself was a suspect institution? In 1964, one major survey showed more than three-fourths of Americans trusted the government to do what is right almost all or most of the time. A decade later a little more than a third did. (on camera) Which leads to this final what if: without Watergate, which led to big Democratic gains in the Congress and to a Democratic White House takeover in '76, would the distrust in government grown so great that most Americans now accept the central conservative premise that government is often not the solution but the problem? Jeff Greenfield, CNN, New York.</s>LIN: And that is all the time we have for this evening. We're going to leave you tonight with your responses to our last call question. Given the same opportunity with the same damaging information, would you do today what Mark Felt did back then? Here's what you had to say. And have a great night.</s>CALLER: I would most certainly do what Mark Felt did. It's a form of patriotism to see something that is wrong and try to correct it.</s>CALLER: Yes, I would because as Coleen Rowley said, integrity should trump loyalty.</s>CALLER: Of course I would do it because I believe in the freedom in the American people. And I do not believe in evil and oppression ruining the state of our nation.</s>CALLER: I think he's a coward that he waited to be 91 or whatever, and because he's dying, he's considered himself being a hero. I don't think so. He should have said it then and there 30 years ago.</s>CALLER: Yes, I would because political corruption is the biggest enemy of the freedom.