Why They Blow the Whistle
Updated at 12:10 p.m. ET on October 3, 2019
For the past three weeks I’ve passed the Watergate complex on my bike ride to the Library of Congress, where I’m working on a book about medical whistle-blowers. To claim a sense of déjà vu would probably be an overstatement. Donald Trump is more Spiro Agnew than Richard Nixon, and the whistle-blower propelling the current scandal hasn’t even been identified yet. But it’s hard to avoid comparisons to Watergate when a paranoid, media-bashing president rants about leaks and hides evidence of wrongdoing. “It’s not the crime; it’s the cover-up that can get you in real trouble,” John Dean told Nixon, who paid no more attention than Trump would have. History doesn’t repeat itself; it doesn’t even rhyme; but occasionally it cracks a joke.
When the Senate began its Watergate hearings in 1973, I was 11 years old; the whole episode feels like a weird dream. The villains were mythic: the sneering John Ehrlichman, the stone-faced John Mitchell, the super-square Bob Haldeman and the more disturbing parts of the King James Bible.
