Letter from the editor
I love big cities. The public transportation, the diversity, the restaurants, galleries and cafes filling every street, the busyness of it all. People wear nice clothes and walk with a purpose (excluding the tourists). And in Washington, D.C., there’s the politics.
Last month, a few students and I flew up for a journalism conference. We poked our heads in South Carolina Sen. Jim DeMint’s office, sat in the Senate gallery and heard the longest-serving senator (yes, he surpassed Strom Thurmond) speak on the U.S. policy on Iran. We walked the halls of the Supreme Court, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the only female justice, shuffled past us in the hallway. We were in political Hollywood.
And then as part of the conference, we got to meet a few journalistic celebrities. Ben Bradlee, former executive editor of “The Washington Post” joined Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein for a panel discussion of Watergate. Woodward and Bernstein became the journalists on the forefront of the public arena as their coverage and journalistic investigation of Watergate turned over a presidency.
Maybe I’m underestimating my fellow students, but I think a large percentage of our campus doesn’t exactly know what Watergate was. We are so far removed from it these days, and the distant echo of our American history teachers is starting to fade -- if we ever learned about it in the first place. There are other things that crowd it out of our mind and occupy that thin space in our brain reserved for political corruption.
At the panel discussion, all the ‘big whigs’ involved in the investigation of Watergate talked about what it was like to cover such a groundbreaking story. It was both a reminder of what true ‘watchdog’ journalism is and an impetus for us as journalists today to require the same level of sharpness and perseverance in our stories. Bernstein and Woodward uncovered some pretty outrageous and bold claims but had the conviction to stand by their story, once they had the verification required by Bradlee.
In this issue of g&b, we revisit the infamous Watergate break-in and what it meant for our country, and what it continues to mean to us as citizens. It was an unprecedented breach of the American people’s trust and eventually led to a presidential resignation and the incarceration of the U.S. attorney general, several key White House staff members and numerous government officials.
We left the discussion with a renewed sense of purpose and a clarified knowledge on what exactly Watergate was and what it meant. I hope you come away from the Watergate story feeling the same way.
>> October's Letter from the Editor
