Newswatch /Thomas Griffith Watergate: a Poor Parallel

All those comparisons with Watergate needlessly complicate an understanding of Ronald Reagan's problems. Those who make the comparison usually disavow too specific a parallel (the new scandal involves zealots, not scoundrels, etc.). Yet to invoke Watergate implies the playing out of an old scenario (looking for the smoking gun), which leads to only one result, whereas Reagan's destiny can still take a number of turns. Finally, Watergate revives that memory of a period when the press got hopelessly muddled over whether its role was to be observer or participant. It is not anxious to revive that issue.

In popular memory, the press brought down Richard Nixon. This isn't true, though the press in a moment of hubris once thought so and later paid for its arrogance in public disapproval. In Watergate's early days the story was kept alive mainly by the valiant reporting of the Washington Post. But Nixon was finally toppled by two institutions more powerful than the press -- Judge John Sirica's federal court and Senator Sam Ervin's Senate committee.

When the Iran-contra scandal broke, Ronald Reagan, behaving as besieged politicians invariably do, said that "this whole thing boils down to a great irresponsibility on the part of the press." The accusation was false and desperate, and he has not tried to sustain it. Not the American press but an obscure Beirut magazine serving an Iranian faction broke the story of selling U.S. arms to Iran. (The Los Angeles Times was also onto it but feared that first publication might jeopardize the release of hostages.) As for Oliver North, his shadowy activities with the contras have been noted sporadically in the press, but neither Congress nor the press ever aggressively looked into what he was up to. Why not? Admiral Stansfield Turner, who ran the CIA under Carter, believes "it was the popularity of the President that deterred the oversight committees and the press from pursuing the issue." Can it be that the press, like the Supreme Court, follows the election returns?

The Iran scandal changed everything. A frustrated Washington press corps had felt itself ignored by a public that did not want to hear criticism of a popular President. But the sudden and steep decline in Reagan's popularity suggests that all along the public had recognized, in a man it admired, how casually he minded the store, and how willfully he could deny facts or distort them. The most devastating statistic in the polls was that more than half the people didn't believe him.

"This is the most fun we've had since Watergate," Ben Bradlee, the Washington Post's top editor then and now, was quoted as saying. In the liberal New Republic, Editor Michael Kinsley wrote, "The only irritating aspect of the otherwise delightful collapse of the Reagan Administration is the widespread insistence that we must all be poker-faced about it . . . C'mon, everybody, admit it. We're high." A few days later Kinsley turned up in the Wall Street Journal, whose editorial page primly savages Reagan's critics and sometimes finds Reagan insufficiently a Reaganaut. Kinsley noted gleefully that the Journal now "has been oddly subdued."

Such spirited fun disturbed David S. Broder, the Post's chief political correspondent, who severely chided Kinsley but not Bradlee. Broder linked Kinsley with Patrick J. Buchanan, the irascible White House director of communications, as two juveniles playing mock war games, while the "grownups recognize this disaster for what it is, a calamity for the nation." So stuffy an outburst is rare for Broder, but it illustrates an attitude common this time in press coverage. Print all the facts you can find (often in numbing detail), but mute the rhetoric. It is as if journalists, as well as opposition politicians, want to avoid appearing guilty of "breaking another President," knowing that their own reputations are also somehow at stake, along with those of the President and the President's men.