"Nabobs Revisited" (WaMonthly) has some Words of Wisdom about Impeachment

[KoKo]

& the Press Coverage of Clinton/Nixon: From Nabobs Revisited by David Greenberg:http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2003/0310.greenberg.html
Check out the third paragraph! Will Chimp bring himself down?

(SNIP)"........
Watergate blossomed from a Cold War national-security state in which every president
from Harry Truman to Lyndon Johnson "used exaggerated rhetoric, crisis analysis, and
oversimplification" to justify both the commission of illegal acts and the concealment of
them from the public. But Olson seems to recognize that this analysis, which in the 1970s
was fashionable with the New Left, is at odds with the story he has just told. And so
even as he critiques the post-World War II power structure, he can't avoid the verdict
that Nixon's crimes were "unique."

Liebovich, for his part, is tempted to toss Nixon in not with his predecessors but with his
successors. Every president from Ford to Clinton aroused distrust in the press for his
efforts at manipulation. The resulting negative and even sneering coverage kept public
cynicism high. But Liebovich also cannot allow his recognition of a long-term dynamic in
presidential-press relations to obscure what he calls Nixon's oversight of "one of the
most corrupt and immoral administrations in U.S. history." Nixon's "abnormal
preoccupation with the influence of the press," he determines, "was largely responsible
for the most despicable of White House covert activities."

Like Olson, Liebovich concludes that Nixon's own actions were the key to his demise.
Well into 1974, after all, Nixon had a fighting chance to survive. Though public opinion
was coalescing against him, without conclusive proof of his role in the cover-up, he
wouldn't have been impeached. But his own tapes caught him discussing hush money and
clemency for the defendants in the break-in trial and recorded him plotting to have the
C.I.A. squelch the investigation under bogus national-security pretenses. The revelation
of this baldly criminal behavior alienated not only moderate congressmen, but also
conservative loyalists, without whose support Nixon was doomed. It was not George
McGovern but men like Barry Goldwater, the stalwart Republican senator, and John
Rhodes, the House Minority Leader, who forced Nixon to step down. "When President
Nixon resigned," Olson notes, "...Americans stood with uncommon unanimity on a
crucial political issue that had once divided them."

Besides the culture of scandal, another development of the last generation has been the
rise of press criticism as a staple of journalism. The pioneers of this criticism of the late
1960s and early 1970s understood that the press corps had grown to be what the
journalist Douglass Cater called "the fourth branch of government" and that it had to be
scrutinized like any other branch. While the acknowledgment of the power of the press is
welcome, if not overdue, what's most surprising about its behavior in both the Clinton
scandals and Watergate is its modest influence on the ultimate outcome. In both cases, a
few journalists did heroic--even historic--work. Others performed their job creditably.
Many more were suggestible and sheep-like. The difference between 1974 and 1998
was not the changes in the press corps, but the fact that Nixon had committed serious
abuses of power. Nixon--not the press--brought himself down.