Country about party
The Ervin Committee’s third lesson highlights the huge political divide between 1973 and 2022: Republicans on the committee — and in Congress more broadly — participated in the hearings in good faith. Despite their partisan affiliation, they went into the process with an open mind. Even the leading Republican Senator Howard Baker noticed his mind shifting as evidence of wrongdoing accumulated over the summer. He said years after the hearings that he initially believed they were “a political ploy by the Democrats, that it would come to nothing,” but as they progressed, “it began to dawn on me that there was more to it than that. I thought, and more than I liked.”
Baker’s Republican committee colleague Lowell Weicker of Connecticut was shocked by what he learned of John Dean’s testimony. He told the Ervin committee, “Republicans don’t cover it up. Republicans don’t go ahead and threaten. Republicans don’t go ahead and commit illegal acts. And God knows Republicans don’t see their fellow Americans as enemies to be harassed.”
It is this last point that most clearly points to the divide between politics then and now; Throughout Watergate, Republicans in both the House and Senate understood that they had an important role as members of the equal legislature to hold the executive to account.
Watergate is ultimately a story of the American system at work – the delicate ballet of constitutional checks-and-balances working to bring a corrupt and criminal president to justice. But the story was only possible because the Republicans, both leaders and commoners, acted first as members of Congress and second as partisans.
Today, of course, there is a very different political dynamic on Capitol Hill. The courage — and political isolation — of the two Republican members of the Jan. 6 committee, Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, and the skewed Republican votes on both of Trump’s impeachments show how difficult it will be to force the party to take action. of its members clearly want to ignore.
Garrett M. Graff is a journalist, historian and author, most recently, of “Watergate: A New History.”
