This Just In – Public hearings do matter.
In the summer of 1973, I was looking forward to my 15th birthday and you can be assured I had no idea who John Dean was or why Sam Ervin’s eyebrows were so out of control.
I knew nothing about a break-in at the Democratic headquarters in the Watergate complex, except that as described on the news it sounded like an amateur hour burglary. Who cares?
Across the span of that summer, I came to care very much. The Senate Select Committee hearings started at 10 a.m. daily. I was transfixed with this story. I would talk to my dad about it when he came home from work–kind of my first reporting experience. On July 13th, we learned from Alexander Butterfield, a deputy to President Nixon, that there was a taping system in the Oval Office – installed by Lyndon Johnson and used by Nixon.
My attorney father heard that and suspected that the jig was up. He was right. When Nixon (a Duke-trained lawyer) filed a lawsuit to claim the tapes created in that office belonged to him, Dad called BS on the claim. If Nixon was so sure those tapes belonged to him (not the taxpayers, as they are public records) he would have taken them out on the South lawn and set them on fire, he said.
Right again.
Nixon’s tactics only delayed the inevitable. The truth came out. A Republican, Howard Baker of Tennessee, synthesized the committee’s search for truth with his iconic question “What did the president know and when did he know it?”
The crimes of Watergate were a serious assault on the Constitution. A paranoid president schemed to illegally cover up crimes that were committed in an effort to secure re-election. Terrible.
Starting this evening, we will see the story of the January 6th Insurrection laid out, under oath … at the scene of the crime. The crime in this case is not only a conspiracy to thwart the certification of the results of the 2020 election – sedition. It’s also a murderous rampage and conspiracy to assassinate the Vice-President and others.
Nixon’s crimes occurred soon after we had all lived through the 1960s, a decade remembered for its political assassinations.
There will be audio, as there was in Watergate, but there will also be documents and video. Lots of it. Cell phone video, security camera video and footage shot by a documentarian. Objective, dispassionate evidence that a murderous coup attempt was led by the President of the United States.
Perhaps underestimated will be the accounts of that president who gleefully watched this unfold on television. There was no pretense that he was horrified or that this was nothing like what he intended. This was exactly what he intended. Tonight, we going to start receiving the evidence of that – his intent.
The real story going forward is about the members of Congress who gave unauthorized tours in the days just prior to the attack and have sought to delegitimize the Select Committee’s investigation. Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) has refused to comply with a subpoena to appear before the committee. He’d like very much to be Speaker of the House – second in line for the presidency. McCarthy couldn’t spell integrity with a dictionary in one hand and a smart phone in the other. His obstruction should end with his expulsion from Congress.
Watch the hearings when they begin airing tonight. Pay attention. Everything you love about being an American is at stake.
Jean Bolduc is a freelance writer and the host of the Weekend Watercooler on 97.9 The Hill. She is the author of “African Americans of Durham & Orange Counties: An Oral History” (History Press, 2016) and has served on Orange County’s Human Relations Commission, The Alliance of AIDS Services-Carolina, the Orange County Housing Authority Board of Commissioners, and the Orange County Schools’ Equity Task Force. She was a featured columnist and reporter for the Chapel Hill Herald and the News & Observer.
Readers can reach Jean via email – jean@penandinc.com and via Twitter @JeanBolduc
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