M L Berg, Minot

Fifty years ago, in the summer of 1973, congressional hearings were being held concerning the Watergate scandal that occurred on the orders of then President Richard Nixon. A break-in had occurred at the Democratic National Committee’s offices at the Watergate office building in Washington, D.C., on June 17, 1972.

As a result of congressional investigations, 69 people were indicted and 48 were convicted.

During the same year, Charles Reich wrote a newspaper article for the New York Times giving his take on this scandal. Charles Reich was a law professor at the Yale Law School then. He had also written a well-known book titled “The Greening of America” (1970). “Greening” became something of a manifesto for the counterculture movement in the United States during the 1970s.

Reich had previously clerked for Supreme Court Associate Justice Hugo Black in the term of court in 1953-54. Based on his legal experiences, Reich viewed the Watergate scandal as a symptom of social changes that had been occurring in the United States ever since World War II. He wrote in his newspaper article: To view Watergate as a self-contained series of actions by overzealous men in the Nixon Administration, correctable by exposure, prosecution and possible impeachment, is to close one’s eyes to our political and legal history since World War II. During that entire period, we have been moving steadily away from constitutional government and toward arbitrary rule.

Two decades of the dissenting opinions of the late Justice Hugo L. Black tell the story eloquently and passionately. It is the story of a society which has resorted over and over again to repression rather than to the open discussion and responsible solution of problems.

Reich concludes his article by offering a suggestion as timely in 2023 as it was in 1973: The lesson of Watergate must be that we are responsible for what we call reality. It is not something that is inevitable, but something we chose. And having the power to choose, we have the power to choose and to create something better. The base and shameful pleas of the men now testifying before the Watergate committee is that they did not decide, they only followed. The moment we acknowledge responsibility for our present condition, we regain the sacred power that human consciousness gives us, the power to choose by what truths we shall live.