UF Professor: Watergate Reforms Have Spawned New Scandals

June 16, 1997

GAINESVILLE — The very reforms passed to correct the scandals of Watergate have spawned new abuses of their own, says a University of Florida political scientist on the 25th anniversary of the famous burglary.

“People often don’t understand that it was Watergate that led to passage of the 1974 Campaign Finance Act, which opened up the door for political action committees and soft money,” said Ken Wald, who has taught American government and politics since 1975. “These initial reforms were supposed to limit the influence of money, but smart lawyers found loopholes that produced the system that everyone now regards as scandalous.”

The 1974 congressional elections that were a reaction to Watergate brought to power a large group of young Democratic activists and reformers who single-handedly gutted the seniority system in favor of subcommittees, Wald said.

Most people today would agree that these reforms were probably needed, but they led to such extreme decentralization of power that it has been difficult for Congress to govern, he said.

The good side of Watergate is that it has produced a more wary public and the recognition that government can do wrong, Wald said. “I think some real outrages have been prevented by having this kind of vigilance,” he said. “I doubt, for example, that we would have learned about Iran-Contra had it not been for Watergate.”

But the deep cynicism Americans feel for their government has been taken to such an extreme that they often are unable to distinguish between reprehensible behavior and actions that amount to a full-blown constitutional crisis, Wald said.

“There is a tendency to assume that any form of misbehavior is a matter for public concern and the appointment of special prosecutors,” Wald said. “There’s a sharp distinction between Watergate and Iran-Contra, on the one hand, which deserve to be regarded as scandalous because the mechanism of government was used in a systematic effort to break the law, and the Whitewater investigation, which, if anything, was a localized scandal in Arkansas that nobody heard about or cared about until Clinton became president.

“That’s not to deny that if laws are broken it should be investigated and people should be punished, but the notion that somehow we need an ongoing federal prosecutor for acts of individual personal misconduct strikes me as rather bizarre,” he said.

Watergate and the Vietnam War, which also had a corrosive effect on political trust, permanently changed American culture, giving rise to attack journalism that has produced a kind of voyeurism in the political process, Wald said.

As a result, cynicism has become so pervasive, people often don’t know enough to judge the system against reasonable standards, Wald said. They tend to lump together minor transgressions most people commit in the course of daily living with systemic acts of political violence, he said.

“When I began teaching American politics in the 70s, I was one of the children of the Vietnam era who thought one of our problems was that we were uncritical of the American governmental system and took for granted that we had the best political system in the world,” Wald said. “What Watergate and Vietnam did is turn that portrait on its head.”

Today’s students have the opposite problem: They have so little faith in government and consider politics such a filthy endeavor that Wald said he finds himself having to point out ways in which the system does work.

“I deal with the legacy of Watergate almost every time I walk into a classroom,” he said. “The long-term impact has really been devastating.”