As Americans take leave of an extraordinary year, they can recall endless days when the front pages of their daily newspapers seemed to suggest that everything — and everyone — is corrupt.
And the stories were not just about Watergate and all that. Like a steady drip-drip, they told of big companies caught paying bribes, of little fellows paying kickbacks, merchandise failing to support the promise of its labels, employees defrauding their bosses, physicians involved in accident-insurance swindles, 300 indictments in 20 cities in poverty-housing scandals, developers paying off zoning commissions, policemen on the take, store employees outstealing shoplifters, even a cherubic youngster caught cheating in the soap-box derby. Any day, anywhere: see your local paper for further details.
The hardened reader is privy by now to journalism's dark secret, which is that news is the extraordinary, not the ordinary. Even so, in 1973 one all-purpose phrase was often heard, as useful to malefactors justifying their ac tions as it was to cynics excusing their civic indifference. It is that They All Do It. But do they all?
The suspicion must exist, of course, that the constant emphasis on corruption is like those "crime waves" that newspapers used to discover in slack periods when no other story dominated the head lines. Any story with however tenuous a "Watergate angle" has a better chance of making the front page. In this effort, journalism may have had a collaborator in Richard Nixon. Indeed, as the notes on those 18 minutes of missing tape show, the White House's first response to Watergate was to invoke public relations to "top" the embarrassing news: "We should be on the attack — for diversion." In other words, show that They All Do It.
In the days when President Nixon was criticizing the morals of others rather than defending his own, he used to speculate about whether the U.S. had entered a Roman decline, what with so much permissiveness around. The argument is familiar: the church has lost its authority, parents are too soft, and every new Gallup or Harris poll shows a decline in the public's confidence in all institutions. But it is fair to ask: Were things really better when respectability was in flower and authority spoke in plummy, assured tones? Historians, whose occupational peculiarity is to find the past at least as interesting as the present, are certain to rank Watergate paramount on any list of presidential misdeeds, but that is not to say that they will regard the present as more corrupt than earlier times. In fact, less so. To think otherwise is to fail to appreciate the high savor of Boss Tweed's New York or General Grant's America.
Investigations now being pursued may yet link the Nixon Ad ministration to more classic kinds of corruption. But the transgressions of Watergate and the Nixon palace guard turn more on amorality than immorality and are all the more pernicious for that. These were power-intoxicated, self-righteous men, sure that their purposes justified their wrongdoing, insisting that they were not themselves profiting financially, though they were in fact serving their ambitions in the process and showing themselves ready to subvert government and justice when it suited them. Corruption once wore a plainer face.