Orange County Weekly: What’s Worse: Blowjobs or Watergate?

Nov. 26 - Dec. 2, 2004

Minimize This

What’s Worse: Blowjobs or Watergate?

by Todd Mathews

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In this case, we’re talking about Washington Times staffer Audrey Hudson’s Nov. 18 piece "Nixon Library Doesn’t Minimize Watergate." The Clinton Center, she complains, "includes small alcoves dedicated to numerous themes and scandals, including Mr. Clinton’s Whitewater hearings and impeachment trial." Key word: "small."

By contrast, Hudson avers, the Nixon Library in Yorba Linda is all about an honest recap of Watergate. Key figures in the scandal "are identified in photographs," she reports, and a document in the exhibit notes that "Nixon himself said he made inexcusable misjudgments during Watergate. But what is equally clear is that his political opponents ruthlessly exploited those misjudgments as a way to further their purely political goals."

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I’ve been to the Nixon Birthplace many times, and I can tell you this: "minimize" isn’t nearly grand enough a word to describe all the minimization in just those few sentences. But let me just point out that the Nixon Library’s smoking-gun tape doesn’t say what Hudson says it says. In fact, as UC Irvine history professor Jon Wiener pointed out in "Inside the Nixon Library," a 1990 Nation magazine article, a library narrator helps contextualize the tape by asserting that whatever you think Nixon may have said, what he "really said was, ‘the best thing to do is let the investigation proceed unhindered.’ Why that would bring Barry Goldwater and the Senate Republican leadership to advise Nixon to resign," Wiener observed, "is not explained."

I called Hudson at her Washington, D.C., office and asked if she’d ever visited the Nixon Library—or Yorba Linda, Orange County, or California. She said she’d never been to the library but defended her article by revealing that she had actually looked at floor plans of both libraries—Nixon’s and Clinton’s—and, on that basis, felt confident that Nixon’s gave Watergate the broader stage.

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It’s worth noting that among all libraries for modern presidents, only Nixon’s remains outside the control of the National Archives, the government agency committed to full public access to presidential records. It’s worth noting that Hudson’s paper, the Washington Times, is backed by high-rolling religious whack Reverend Sun Yung Moon, a man whose financial empire finances many of the Republican party’s most extreme politicians. And it’s worth noting that Watergate happened a long time ago, but try as we might, we can’t forget its gruesome details.

http://www.ocweekly.com/ink/05/12/news-mathews.php