After Nixon resigned in 1974, he engaged in a very aggressive war with history, attempting to wipe out the Watergate stain and memory. Happily, history won, largely because of Nixon's tapes.
Watergate just happened to come along at the same time as the demand for honesty in relations between the sexes, in advertising, in ecology, in almost everything. It just stumbled into that great big elephant trap that had already been built for it.
We're not going to have another Watergate in our lifetime. I'm sure.
Until we have a better relationship between private performance and the public truth, as was demonstrated with Watergate, we as the public are absolutely right to remain suspicious, contemptuous even, of the secrecy and the misinformation which is the digest of our news.
The crusades of Vietnam and Watergate seemed like a good idea at the time, even a noble one, not only to the press but perhaps to a majority of Americans.
An attempt is already underway to revise history - to leave the impression that the former president had nothing to do with Watergate. But there is no doubt about his obstruction of justice after the Watergate break-in.
After Watergate, which happened when I was in college, I became increasingly inspired by journalism as a way to change the world. It sounds corny, but to wake the public up, to serve a higher cause.
After Watergate, America was a ship without a rudder. Vietnam was left to its own devices, drifting along towards its fate.
I'm still friendly with Dean. He still calls me on the phone from time to time. John Dean was fired and later ended up spending some time in prison for his role in Watergate.
As a long-time registered Democrat who started voting in the year of Watergate, I resent being taken for a ride to the place where anything goes and nothing matters. And especially where nothing matters less than clear thinking and straight talk.
I contend that, in spite of all that might be said about Watergate, Richard Nixon was good for the poor people of America.
Sometimes I forget some of the things I've done. I recently recalled that after Watergate I went away by myself to Tahiti for a month, moving from island to island. That was a point in my life where I didn't know what was next.
The source known as Deep Throat provided a kind of road map through the scandal. His one consistent message was that the Watergate burglary was just the tip of the iceberg.
My 1974 album 'Mind Over Matter' was a detailed thing about Watergate. I always had some righteous indignation.
I believe that President Nixon was right in what he did at Watergate. Lack of respect for authority and things like socialism are turning this into a weak, effeminate country.
Watergate had become the center of the media's universe, and during the remaining year of my presidency the media tried to force everything else to revolve around it.
The government paid the family of Richard Nixon $18 million for papers, tape recordings and other materials seized after Watergate.
The biggest rap on me is that I don't find a Watergate every couple of years. Well, Watergate was unique. It's not something Carl Bernstein, I, or the Washington Post caused.
I grew up a child of Watergate. It gave me a good dose of skepticism about authority. One of my favorite movies is 'All the President's Men.' Woodward and Bernstein, those guys were my heroes. I have a degree in journalism.
You must pursue this investigation of Watergate even if it leads to the president. I'm innocent. You've got to believe I'm innocent. If you don't, take my job.
From Watergate we learned what generations before us have known; our Constitution works. And during Watergate years it was interpreted again so as to reaffirm that no one - absolutely no one - is above the law.
Keeping his face clean over Watergate was one of Kissinger's biggest successes; so was his overall handling of the Yom Kippur War.
The French were mystified about the Watergate scandal.
Watergate got us to think of leaders as mere mortals. America began to think of itself in a very different way - I would say a salutary way - and Reagan was most important in shifting the grand dynamic thrust of the American historical process by ending that.
I was unknown because I came to Washington from the West. I started covering Watergate. Immodestly, I'd say I did it pretty well, in part because it was hard to go wrong.
In hindsight, Watergate was a curse as well as a blessing for American journalism. The courageous reporting of the 'Post' and the 'New York Times' - coupled with the favourable Supreme Court rulings on publication of the Pentagon Papers - were landmarks for the interpretation of First Amendment rights and the freedom of the press.
Before Watergate and Viet Nam, the American public, as a whole, believed everything it was told, and since then it doesn't believe anything, and both of those extremes hurt us because they prevent us from recognizing the truth.
The official version of Watergate is as wrong as a Flat Earth Society pamphlet.
I think I would have done very well as a writer in the Forties. I think the last time America was a great country was then or not long after. It was before Vietnam, before Watergate.
When Richard M. Nixon resigned and Ford became the 38th president of the United States, the Watergate Special Prosecutor's Office, of which I was a member, was preparing for the criminal trials of Nixon's top aides - H.R. Haldeman, John Ehrlichman and John Mitchell.
The big moment for me was making 'All the President's Men'. It was not about Watergate or President Nixon. I wanted to focus on something I thought not many people knew about: How do journalists get the story?
The political lesson of Watergate is this: Never again must America allow an arrogant, elite guard of political adolescents to by-pass the regular party organization and dictate the terms of a national election.
There were no dead bodies in Watergate.
