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c-span, your unfiltered view of government. >> the 1972 watergate break-in have been 15 years ago today. and washington post and explain in a recent column he joins us now. via zoom to discuss those legacies. and i want to start with an issue that color often brings up on this program. the idea of trust in government. how do we measure trust in government? and how badly did watergate dent americans' trust in government? guest: this is a long-standing question pollsters have asked for more than half a century. it basically says how often do you trust the government to do the right thing, some time, all of the time, very little, or not at all? there is a wonderful graphic, for those who can go to the pew research center and enter in

"trust in government." there is a wonderful graphic that tracks from the late eisenhower period two today with the understanding of government trust is -- host: i will put that graphic on screen for viewers as you talk. guest: great, thank you. what you can see is, in the late 1950's and early 1960's, the majority of americans, and it did not matter which party they were affiliated with -- the majority of americans had a great deal of trust in government. we saw that begin to go down during vietnam. obviously, very divisive period in the late 1960's in the united states, and we saw trust in government begin to erode. with the watergate scandal, it eroded considerably more, so by the time richard nixon left office in august of 1974, trust

was way, way down. only a minority of americans trusted -- said they trusted government some or all of the time to do the right thing. i think the interesting thing is not simply what watergate did to push down trust in government or, in a sense, to shatter americans' faith in government, but it marked a dividing line between an era of trust and, now, a very long era of distrust. that chart, as people can see, has never really returned to anywhere close to what it was pre-watergate and pre-vietnam. there have been a couple moments, 9/11 being one of them, where the american people rallied together with their government and had a stronger feeling about trust in government. but that receded again very

quickly. pew came out with an updated version of this on the 6th of june, and at this point, i think it showed only 20% of americans said they have trust in government to do the right thing. watergate is a dividing line in the history of the relationship between the american people and the government and the american people and their politicians. host: that dividing line and issues of trust what we are talking about with dan balz this morning. if you want to read his deep dive into these issues, you can read on the washington post website. the headline -- watergate happened 50 years ago, its legacies are still with us. (202) 748-8001 for republicans, (202) 748-8000 for democrats. and --independents (202) 748-8002 you also talk about a dividing

line of sorts for the political parties and how watergate impacted the two parties. start with the democratic party. guest: it is a fascinating story. the 1974 elections were a debacle for the republican party. they suffered significant losses. what you had was a gigantic class of new democratic lawmakers coming into the house of representatives. they became known as the watergate babies. a huge class. there were more than 70 new democratic members of the house, starting in january of 1975. they did a lot of things. they came in with a real reformist attitude. as someone said, we felt empowered to try to straighten things out. they instituted and helped answer to a lot of reforms. we can talk about those later if you would like. but this new group of democratic lawmakers were different than some of the old-timers.

they were younger. they were, in general, probably better educated. they were a little bit more liberal, a little bit more professional class in their orientation. host: who is the most famous of those watergate babies? who is a name we would know? guest: the one who typifies this is gary hart, elected to the senate in 1974. he told me he ran for the senate because he was so angry about watergate. he had managed george mcgovern's losing campaign in 1972. he had never thought about running for office. he became a symbol of this new democratic party and what we saw over a number of years and ultimately, in 1984, when he challenged walter mondale for the democratic presidential nomination, you saw the stark dividing line between the old new deal democratic party and a more technocratic democratic party.

we have seen those tensions have played out throughout the half-century since watergate. i was just going to say one of the aspects of this is that, as this new group began to get mass in the democratic coalition, white working-class voters began to deflect and go towards the republican party. we saw that first with the reagan democrats in the 1980's and see it more substantially during the trump era. host: that is the question -- what did it mean to be a republican post-watergate? guest: one of the questions, when i started out on this article, was how is it that the republican party, which saw its president resigned in disgrace and suffered a massive loss in 1974 elections and lost the presidency in 1976 -- how did it

manage to reconstitute itself relatively quickly, and the country elected ronald reagan and ushered in, really, what was the end of the old liberal new deal consensus and an era of conservative governance? one of the answers to that, ironically, is that because watergate had shattered trust in government, there was more fertile ground for a much more conservative antigovernment ideology to take root. the kinds of things that barry goldwater had talked about, when he ran and lost to lyndon johnson in 1964. his conservatism was out of favor in the 1960's. by 1980, it had a majority support in the united states under ronald reagan. it is a remarkable change. so what you had was the party of richard nixon and, if you will, nelson rockefeller and george

romney, the father of senator mitt romney today -- that party which was more eastern in its grounding, more midwestern, gave way to a party that is southern-based and sun belt based and western based and a much more conservative party. the republicans have always been the more conservative of the two major parties, but by the time ronald reagan was elected, and since then, it has become a much, much more conservative party. host: talking legacies of watergate that we will be talking about, stemming from dan balz and his column on this. it is watergate happened 50 years ago and its legacies are still with us. let's chat with our callers. first before we get to of those legacies. roger in north carolina, independent. you are up first. caller: yeah, good morning. i was a sophomore in high school when watergate went down. i kind of lost my trust of the

government during the vietnam war era. i am sure you have written a lot about the watergate thing and all that debacle that went down. i think it was a really sad time. my question is will you write about the conspiracy between the dnc and the fbi to take down donald trump? thanks. guest: we have written and -- extensively about donald trump and about about the mueller investigation. we have been through that for many years. i don't know if we have anything new to say about that, but as more information is made available, we will certainly write more about it. host: one of the things you talk about in your piece is drawing the line from watergate to donald trump and our current situation.

take us through that. guest: it is interesting. we are on the 50th anniversary today of the break in. we are in the middle of the select committee hearings in the house, looking at what happened on january 6 and the role of the trump team involved in that. there are a number of connections or links you can draw from nixon to trump. one of them is similarities in their personalities. both of them had a kind of sense of being victims, that people were out to get them. both of them tended to demonize their opponents. we know richard nixon had an enemies list. and we know from all the tweeting donald trump did that he would go after anybody who he felt was going after him.

the other aspect of this is the bigger question, and that is what each did during the presidency to try to -- -- subvert the democracy of the united states. -- sabotage against the democrats heading into the 1972 campaign, and frankly the massive effort to cover it up through the lying that went on for some years, until finally, through the release of the tapes that were in the white house and all the investigations that were going on in the senate watergate hearings, richard nixon ultimately was forced to resign. i think one of the things that is important also is that we are in a different era today. we are obviously in a much more partisan environment, a much more polarized environment.

an environment in which people, whatever side they are on, have great hostility to those who disagree, those on the other side of the debates. what we saw during watergate was an impeachment proceeding with the house of the judiciary committee ultimately voting three articles of impeachment against nixon. that vote included a number of republicans and conservative democrats on the committee. in that sense, it was a bipartisan vote. in the days before nixon resigned, a delegation of senior republican lawmakers, led by barry goldwater, went to see the president and basically said, you have no support in the senate. your support has collapsed. and they left it to nixon to decide what to do, and nixon resigned. what we saw during the trump administration was two different

impeachments. people can decide what they think about whether that was valid, but what we saw and that was that, in both cases, the ultimate vote in the senate was pretty much a partyline vote. there was one republican, mitt romney, who voted for conviction in the senate in the first impeachment trial, i believe there were seven in the second. but it is basically a partyline impeachment proceedings. in a sense, the outcome was preordained or foreordained. it was clear how i was going to end up. that is the environment we are in today. it raises a question, if impeachment was one way or a principal way that the founders felt a president could be held to account, and that process seems not to work today because of partisan overlays, what, then, is the answer if you have a president who does some of the

things that we have seen in recent years? host: we head out to boston, charles, a republican. good morning. caller: good morning. i think at the core of watergate was richard nixon's dirty tricks campaign against the democrats. i would make a juxtaposition with a hillary clinton campaign. hillary and her followers and her campaign had many, many connections in washington and was able to pay for and peddle information that was false, proven false, and use it to manipulate the fbi, manipulate the media to go on a tear on russia collusion and use it as an excuse when she lost. then we went through the impeachment hearings, and basically hillary clinton's russia collusion and the dossier was used for smear donald trump and impeach him, and it cost us $40 million in the mueller

investigation. i would say that is, in history, much, much more serious than watergate ever was. i would like to hear your thoughts on that. guest: i am not sure i agree with you. i am not sure that, as you lay it out, is exactly the way it played out. i know there are many people who believe, as you do, that it is exactly the way it happened. there is certainly a different set of scenarios as to what actually went on. i think it is pretty clear that what happened in watergate was a substantial effort, as others have said, to damage the democrats in a way that i do not think we saw, have seen in more recent campaigns. but i appreciate your perspective on this. host: where were you on june 17 of 1972?

[laughter] guest: that is a great question. i was getting out of graduate school and was making my way with my wife from central illinois, the university of illinois, to philadelphia, where i went to work for the philadelphia inquirer and spent a few months working for the inquirer before i went to washington in the fall of 1972. i have to say the watergate break-in had no particular impact on me at the time. i was more concerned about making the move and getting settled in a brand-new job and not paying that close attention to that particular story. it took me a while to catch up to it. host: did you get a sense that, after watergate, after nixon's eventual resignation in 1974, that there was something different about being a journalist?

what was it like, being a young journalist back then, in the wake of everything that happened after that break-in? guest: one of the things about being a journalist, whether you're young or old, is the exhilaration of being able to watch history unfold and try to write about it and describe it and interpret it. i think, for me, trying to understand kind of the new world we were in, the post watergate world, a new president in gerald ford, try to take hold and a country shaken by what happened. on one hand, a desire to move on, and on the other, a recognition that we had to come to terms with what we had just gone through, that was all part of what any journalist, young or old, was feeling, particularly those of us who were in washington. but i think, more broadly, one of the important changes as a

result of watergate, in the same way that there was a change in the relationship between the american people and their government, there was a way in -- there was a change in the way reporters dealt with the government, the relationship between reporters and public officials and lawmakers. we learned, through the pentagon papers, which had been published a year before watergate, of the lying that had gone on about vietnam. it was not just the pentagon papers that exposed that, but it brought it into sharp exposure. we learned about that lying. we then saw what happened during the nixon administration. prior to watergate and vietnam, there was a much cozier relationship between reporters and public officials. there was much more trust that what government officials were saying was accurate, was correct. i think, again, watergate helped

shatter that, and we have had, since then, a much more adversarial relationship between the press and government. and i think the other aspect, and give credit to bob woodward and carl bernstein in investigating and producing the stories nobody else was, investigative reporting is now a central part of what any major news organization undertakes. we have a very large investigative unit, as do most big news organizations. this is now a critical part of the responsibility that we feel is part of our work. host: speaking to some of those exact issues that you just brought up, a column i will point viewers to in the op-ed of -- pages of the washington post -- the former publisher of the post -- watergate resonated because post reported the truth. here is a little bit of what he

had to say. those on both the left and right decry stories they do not like as fake news. had the phrase been around in 1972, nixon's folks would have gratefully used it. but the stories hit hard for the simple reason they were true. they were not fake. they were news. if most of their stories have been untrue or exaggerated, watergate would have been the story of embarrassment of a newspaper. -- not of the president. but bob and carl told as much of the truth they could learn every day -- they got it right. do you want to be -- read more in today's washington post. guest: can i just add a footnote to that? bob and carl were alone on that story for many months. they had done the work. they had applied issue leather. they were able to produce stories that nobody else seemed to be able to get.

every reporter likes to be first on a story and ahead on a story, but it can be a little lonely if you are the only ones doing it, and there are not a lot of others who are essentially quickly confirming those stories. there was certainly nervousness at the washington post. if you read the histories of that era, there was nervousness at the washington post about why is it that we are the only ones who have this? there was a very important moment in the fall of 1972 -- walter cronkite, the anchor at cbs news, a very trusted news source, devoted 14 minutes of one of his programs and 8 of another of his nightly newscasts to the watergate story, and that brought it to public consciousness in a way it had not. it was very important, obviously, for the washington post, but it said to the country this is a story that you should be paying attention to. host: jeff out of new york, independent.

good morning. caller: good morning. and thank you for taking my question. i would like to point out that you mentioned the public trust after vietnam, there were terrible consequences that followed. i think one of the underestimated, untold stories is the lack of trust in public health after the vietnam era. we successfully were able to trust both the polio and smallpox epidemic with vaccination campaigns that were trusted by the american people. this is before vietnam, of course. after that, we suffered, of course, many pandemics, the hiv and now covid-19. we see now there is no trust to do all the necessary public

health measures in either of those two. it took a long time to even fund a lot of the drug development for hiv because the government would not admit that there was a problem. no one mentioned the word hiv. and we see donald trump completely politicizing the covid-19 pandemic. we have preventable deaths that are unconscionable and far greater than anything we have lost in wars. there are 1 million deaths, and a great many of these deaths are preventable, and we know they are preventable because we can countries that did well, like south korea, and each per capita death rate -- host: i think we got your question. dan balz? guest: it is an important observation. certainly, the government was slow to recognize the seriousness of the hiv crisis

and to begin to try to act on it. he is right. it took ronald reagan a while to do that. i think, subsequent to that, the federal government did very important work on that, and george w. bush with his program has provided a legacy that is very important. as to what we have gone through with the pandemic and covid-19, i think this is a further reflection of the state of american politics today, the degree to which almost any issue, whether it is seemingly political or not -- and obviously, public health should not be a political issue -- everything does become politicized. we have gone through that with covid-19. and we are still reckoning with the implications of that. it is unfortunate that we cannot

step back from the partisan political barricades and deal with public health issues in a more sober and less political way. but we are where we are in this country, and we have to figure out how to deal with that reality and still find ways to make breaks through the and to battle this terrible virus. host: oklahoma, this is barbara. good morning. caller: good morning. -- host: we will work on your line for a second. try one more time. we will try to hear you. caller: [indiscernible] host: i am so sorry. try calling again, and we will try to get you through. but we will go to richard in louisville, kentucky, republican. good morning.

caller: that line you put up at the beginning of your program talked about the trust in government and how it was so high during eisenhower, who was our main commander coming out of world war ii, and he became president. his speech, one of the last days as president of the united states as he told the american people, you have to watch out for the industrial military complex. john kennedy comes in there. john kennedy was assassinated, so he was out of there. then came lyndon johnson. boy, he really worked with that military complex, didn't he? he lied to the american people about how the war was going, and 57,000 men and women were killed as a result of that democrat, lyndon johnson. in -- lyndon johnson. in comes richard nixon. he stayed the course for a while, then, all of a sudden,

pentagon papers come out, then now we see mcnamara lied, johnson lied, all these liberals who were running the show lied. richard nixon should never have resigned. he started to bring down the military movement in vietnam, and then they come out and impeached him. before they could remove him from office, he resigned. he should have never resigned. now, today, you talk about the washington post has done everything it could to get into all the crap that went on with donald trump and the fbi? all the crap that went on with donald trump and the fbi? that is a falsehood. >> he was right there was a lot of lying.

he decided he needed to get out of vietnam. vietnam had torn the country apart and that we were in a situation that was essentially not -- a war. and he were to try to de-escalate the war. that is separate from the things that ultimately brought him down. i think we have to be able to look at the totality of the presidency. whether it is lyndon johnson's presidency, if you read robert's -- volumes on lyndon johnson, he see the full complexity of a politician. the good things he did and the bad things he did. it is similar with richard nixon. there were things that happened in early 1972. the open of china which was a historic break from where the united states had been and its

relationship to china. those are things that are part of the nixon record. also, watergate is part of the nixon record. we have to evaluate the full measure of all these presidencies. >> coming back to your column and the -- watergate anniversary of the break in. you touch about the aftermath of the watergate scandal. the -- congress. i wonder if you think that this network as you have appeared on as of today 102 times. is this network a legacy of watergate? >> i think it is. going back to the class of 74, the watergate babies. they came in with the idea that they wanted to open up institution. one of the first things they did was they help knock out three very powerful committee chairs.

democratic committee chairman. they did other things that were designed to essentially decentralize power in the house. effects watching online and watching on c-span, it is my pleasure to welcome everyone back to the hearing on mike pence. -- the library of congress. today is the 50th anniversary of the break-in at the democratic national committee headquarters in the watergate, >>. there is no doubt the scandal has had a lasting impact on history of everything from politics to journalism to american culture over the past five years. gaetz is now -- watergate is a word that is added to almost every controversial hearing. -- the library of congress is home to more t50