Watergate reforms fade, 30 years later

The Watergate scandal that resulted in the only resignation of a US president produced profound changes in the American political system – from a deep-rooted distrust of public officials to the rise of investigative journalism to a greater openness in government.

Today, 30 years after what was called a "third-rate burglary," many of those sweeping changes are now being reversed or receding into history as a quaint curio.

In just the past few months, the federal government has loosened many of the restraints on intelligence-gathering that were rooted in the Watergate era. Americans are no longer reflexively cynical about their leaders, if President Bush's approval ratings in particular are to be believed. Even many of today's young reporters have a different raison d'être: They want to be narrative storytellers as much as investigative journalists, developing Deep Voices instead of Deep Throats.

"My sense is you can just erase the '70s," says LeRoy Ashby, a historian at Washington State University.

Part of the change in the nation's zeitgeist simply reflects the normal ebb and flow of history. Part of it is generational: Today's 20-somethings are more likely to remember the Watergate complex as Monica Lewinsky's address than as the site of a politically motivated burglary of Democratic headquarters on June 17, 1972.

Part of it is the defining moment of the time: In the 1970s, it was Watergate and everything it represented about the excesses of government. Today it is the war on terrorism after an attack that exposed America's vulnerability.

"We reacted strongly to Watergate and Watergate-era excesses of government power," says Norman Ornstein, a political analyst at the American Enterprise Institute here. "Now we're making a readjustment. We're swinging back to what we were before, but to a new set of realities."

In some respects, the swing is culture-wide. Americans' impulse to embrace rather than spurn people in positions of authority, as well as certain institutions, is seen in everything from movies that celebrate patriotism to a canonization of those in the military to Mr. Bush's poll numbers.

Indeed, suspicion of official Washington – from the Vietnam War, to the Iran-contra scandal of the Reagan years, to the image of Bill Clinton as "slick Willie" – has often been cited as one of the most enduring legacies of Watergate.

In a more concrete sense, the shift is now visible in the greater empowerment of the nation's intelligence agencies. In recent weeks, the FBI has given its undercover agents new rules that allow them to conduct surveillance in public places, such as at mosques, even if there's no evidence of criminal activity. Since 9/11, there has been renewed talk about the assassination of foreign leaders or agents by intelligence operatives, something that has been an anathema for more than two decades.

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