I became politically aware at a younger age than most people. I took a major interest in the Republican primaries in 1980, when I was just ten years old. By election day, I was eleven. When I hit puberty, I paid more attention to other things, but my interest in politics came back by my mid-20’s. Because of my specific age, I was born into a kind of Golden Age. The Civil Rights Era was over. The Vietnam War was basically over by the time I started school. I remember my father fuming about Ford’s pardon of Nixon, but that’s all I remember of Watergate. While adults remember the late 70s as a time of high inflation, high unemployment, national dishonor, and cultural excess, the children of that era remember it as a time when our big national problems had been resolved. Blacks were equal citizens. The war had been wrong. The press stood up to a tyrannical president and Congress tamed the CIA. As if to verify all of this, radio stations cropped up with a Classic Rock format, telling us that the counterculture had been right all along.
Bob Woodward was part of this. He was a hero. He was a dragon-slayer. If Martin Luther King Jr. had forced the country to live up to the true meaning of its creed, Woodward had forced the president to abide by the Constitution.
Most of this was the illusion of a 10 year old. Pretty soon the head of the CIA would be vice-president, and then president, and then his son would be president. The son would bring Ford’s chief of staff Dick Cheney and his Secretary of Defense Dick Rumsfeld back to DC to undo everything the Church Committee had accomplished in the aftermath of Watergate. Long before that, Reagan would usher in a group of conservatives who shut down the march of black progress and turned black poverty into a wedge issue. The counterculture may have prevailed on the radio, but it took a beating at the ballot box.
And through it all, it began, slowly slowly slowly, to become clear that Bob Woodward is a fraud.
