Watergate Era Research Articles

Do Scandals Matter?

Political science research is conflicted about the impact of political scandals on survival in office. Scholars have found strong negative impacts to some scandals but others have found minimal or no effects. The literature has explored several consequences but no one work examines them collectively. This article examines presidential, gubernatorial, and Congressional scandals from 1972 to 2021 to assess the impact of scandal in a polarizing America. We find the negative consequences from scandals vary across time and institutions. Scandals in the Watergate era led to more resignations in Congress but fewer resignations of White House officials in the 1990s. During the Trump administration, White House officials did not survive in office at rates greater than past eras, demonstrating little support for the “Trump Effect.” However, politicians generally survived scandal more in the polarized era, hinting at the changing role of political scandals.

‘Watergate-ing’ Norman Mailer’s Marilyn: Life Writing in Cultural Context

ABSTRACTIn 1973, Norman Mailer published a work of creative nonfiction about the life of the actor Marilyn Monroe, entitled Marilyn: A Biography. Released amid a wave of American nostalgia for the 1950s and during the Watergate investigation, the book was upheld as evidence of a ‘witch-hunt’ Watergate culture. In this article, I will analyse the initial reception of Marilyn and its affective history. Situating Marilyn at the intersections of biography, New Journalism, and Watergate discourses demonstrates the important role historical context can play in analysis of celebrity biography. Considering Marilyn in its political, cultural, and literary context illuminates the ways in which the project’s destabilisation of truth aligned with New Journalist pursuits while clashing with Watergate era longings for stability, a collision which excited the ire of many of its initial critics and an early reception that continues to shape responses to the work to this day.

Django Unchained: Repurposing Western Film Music

The film music used in Quentin Tarantino’s 2012 film, Django Unchained signals a deliberate engagement with the aesthetics and politics of the Vietnam and Watergate era and the malignant effects of the era’s malaise on black cinema. The upward trajectory of Tarantino’s Django, a wholesome, self-confident, Southern Black Power hero, repudiates the discontent and despair depicted in films made between 1966 and 1974 and offers an optimistic (if anachronistic) counter-narrative to the grim political landscape of the era’s cinema and to the demise of the Blaxploitation genre. Tarantino’s repurposing of film music from the spaghetti western genre specifically is essential to his project of turning his neo-Blaxploitation hero into “the fastest gun in the South.”

Katherine A. Scott. Reining In the State: Civil Society and Congress in the Vietnam and Watergate Eras.

Katherine A. Scott. Reining In the State: Civil Society and Congress in the Vietnam and Watergate Eras.

Reining in the State: Civil Society and Congress in the Vietnam and Watergate Eras

Journal Article Reining in the State: Civil Society and Congress in the Vietnam and Watergate Eras Get access Katherine A. Scott. (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2013. xii, 233 pp. $34.95.) Journal of American History, Volume 100, Issue 4, March 2014, Pages 1292–1293, https://doi.org/10.1093/jahist/jau144 Published: 01 March 2014

Reining in the State: Civil Society and Congress in the Vietnam and Watergate Eras

Reining in the State: Civil Society and Congress in the Vietnam and Watergate Eras

Reining in the state: civil society and Congress in the Vietnam and Watergate eras

Reining in the state: civil society and Congress in the Vietnam and Watergate eras

NRJ Book Review: Watergate's Legacy and the Press: The Investigative Impulse

Jon Marshall, Watergate's Legacy and the Press: The Investigative Impulse (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2011). 313 pages, $24.95 (paperback).Review by Steve HallockThe U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development has wasted millions of dollars on stalled or abandoned projects and routinely failed to crack down on derelict developers or the local housing agencies that funded them, The Washington Post reported in mid-May of this year. Nationwide, the story continued, 700 projects awarded $400 million for housing for the poor have been idling for years.These findings were the result of a year-long investigation by The Post, whose report on the squandered taxpayer money stands as a welcome, but rare, example of the sort of investigative reporting that is the focus of Northwestern University lecturer Jon Marshall's road map to the history-and current state-of investigative reporting in the United States. And therein lies the primary value of this book. It offers a detailed, lavishly sourced chronological account of investigative reporting before and after the Watergate scandal, which Marshall offers up as the gold standard of investigative journalism.The title of the book is somewhat of a misnomer. The so-called legacy of the Watergate scandal reporting that brought down the Nixon administration in the early 1970s-a scandal to which Marshall devotes way too many pages detailing the events and reporting of a story that has been retold many times-doesn't even begin until well past the midway point of the book. This leads to one little problem: Just what is the legacy of this famed political scandal and its effect on the press? Was it the increased use of anonymous sources by a reporting corps eager to emulate the methods of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein? Was it the rise of investigative journalism that gave the national press the reputation of a take-no-prisoners arrogance that offended and drove away readers? Was it a boon to investigative techniques that led to a watchdog journalism that benefited the democracy? Or was it a neglect of journalistic duties in response to doubling down by government officials and presidential administrations on secrecy and the erection of impediments to the free flow of information? We get a hint that this last element was Marshall's aim early on, when he writes that each successive presidential administration following Watergate has looked for ways to better shield itself from prying reporters. Like the Nixon administration, the White House of George W. Bush strengthened the power of the executive branch as it responded to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and prepared for war in Iraq. Like Nixon Bush displayed open disdain toward the press and shrouded the workings of government in a veil of secrecy. In contrast with the Watergate era, however, the press response during much of Bush's time in office was more impotent than heroic.The legacy of this book is a bit of all of the above, actually, but the focus blurs somewhat in Marshall's methodical, impressive and ultimately successful attempt to provide a thorough accounting of the nation's long and impressive history of muckraking and enterprise reporting. But that also is this book's strength. It is a compilation-to the point nearly of annotated bibliography at times-of investigative enterprise that any student or instructor of journalism and its important watchdog role in this nation will find valuable and instructive. …

Political Scandal and the Politics of Exposure: From Watergate to Lewinsky and Beyond

Abstract The paper advances an interpretation of political scandal and its place in democratic politics, taking the scandals of the ‘Watergate era’ in American politics as its evidential basis. The interpretation focuses on an aspect of political scandal that has been neglected in existing treatments, namely the politically constructed rather than epistemologically simple nature of scandalous ‘exposure’. The career of the ‘smoking gun’ in the Watergate era provides illustration. The paper goes on to relate political scandal as both symptom and stimulus to trends in late-modern democratization concerning ‘hyperpolitics’ (political contestation at all stages of the decision-making process) and ‘metainformation’ (information about the providers of information). On this basis, the generalization of scandal politics as a typical mode of democratic politics is suggested.

The Jailing of a Journalist: Prosecuting the Press for Receiving Stolen Documents

In 1973, the FBI arrested investigative reporter Les Whitten and charged him with possession of stolen government documents. This jailing of a journalist during the Nixon administration was largely overshadowed by more famous cases involving the media during the Watergate era. But United States v. Whitten turned out to be an important victory for press freedom at a time when First Amendment rights were under siege by the government. The case would eventually inform two other important media law cases, help shape a third, and reinforce new government rules protecting journalistic privilege. Although more recent court decisions appear to be moving toward journalistic liability for receiving stolen documents, the impact of the historic Whitten case is arguably still being felt today.

First Amendment Guerillas: Formative Years of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press

Fueled by bitter disputes over the issuance of subpoenas to reporters and operating in the contentious climate of the Watergate Era, an innovative effort in 1970 to aggressively defend the interests of working journalists gave rise to the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. Governed by working reporters in Washington, the Committee confronted former President Richard Nixon when he attempted to remove documents from the public domain. Shifts in the political climate, deep divisions over a media response to Grenada, and a change in leadership style brought a retreat from “guerilla” tactics in the mid-1980s. The Committee remains a reliable defender of journalists' rights and a bridge between the working press and a First Amendment Bar created during this period. Feverish activity, inner tensions, and confrontations with both publishers and public officials mark the early years of the RCFP as a significant time in the history of the American press, and also reflect a time of high drama, high stakes, and zealous actors in American political and media history. “Basically, the idea was to fight back, and if you couldn't do it nicely, you did it through warfare. I'm the guerilla, and if you can't get it one way you can get it another. And that's what we did.” Jack C. Landau, executive director 1974–85, Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press.

The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978: The Role of Symbolic Politics

Since 1978, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) has governed United States intelligence gathering for national security purposes. Enacted in response to the Watergate–era civil rights violations and revelations of a Senate investigation headed by Senator Frank Church that other presidential administrations had authorized similar warrantless surveillance, FISA established a statutory framework for national security surveillance. Understanding FISA contributes to the study of criminal justice policymaking because law enforcement and intelligence communities view it as an important tool for combatting espionage and terrorism. This article examines the enactment of FISA from the perspective of symbolic politics.

Books: The Copy-Editing and Headline Handbook, the Wall Street Journal Guide to Business Style and Usage

* Barbara G. Ellis (2001). The Copy-- Editing and Headline Handbook. Cambridge, Mass.: Perseus Publishing. pp.338 * Paul R. Martin (2002). The Wall Street Journal Guide to Business Style and Usage. New York: Wall Street Journal Books. pp. 261 Of all the skills and knowledge that make up the repertoire necessary to be a good journalist, the least important - by far - has to be knowledge of news style. Yet knowing style is a prerequisite for any newsroom position and many other jobs in communications as well. And that is why teachers continue to teach it while more important skills and knowledge expected of journalists either cannot be taught - common sense and general knowledge - or, as with news judgment, must be gained from experience. Not so many years ago, in the pre-- Watergate era, The Associated Press Stylebook was a mere 52-page booklet. Today it includes a libel manual and more than 300 pages and seems to grow with each annual update. Just three years ago, the New York Times came out with a new edition of its Manual of Style and Usage. Previous versions had appeared in the '70s (use apostrophe before numerals in AP style) and the 80's (with apostrophe after numerals in New York Times style). The Washington Post, The Economist and others also have published stylebooks. Now comes the Wall Street Journal's Guide to Business Style and Usage. Does the world need another stylebook? The short answer is yes. But not this one. Like the other modern stylebooks, the Journal's stylebook is organized alphabetically. This makes perfect sense if you know what you want to look up. It also was necessary to change to an alphabetical organizational system as stylebooks grew in size. But an alphabetical system is a terrible approach for beginners learning the rudiments of style. Just the size of most stylebooks is intimidating to students. Asking them to learn from an alphabetized stylebook is like asking them to prepare for a test on the dictionary. For learners, the stylebook should be organized by topics covering general principles such as capitalization, punctuation, numerals, abbreviations and spelling. And that's the way my dog-eared, pre-Watergate AP stylebook is organized. Although the Journal's stylebook might not be the best for beginners, does it give veterans something different? Here, the short answer is no. Although some specialized business terms are defined (for example Ebitda - earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization) that aren't in the AP stylebook, there remains significant overlap with AP. Indeed, many of the entries match the AP entries word for word, or nearly so. There should be no surprise or plagiarism concern in this; after all, what more needs to be said - to pick an entry at random - about beside and besides than Beside means at the side of. Besides means in addition to. And much of the Journal's style guide is made up of such entries, not business-specific terminology. Even so, the book might be useful in a business news writing class. Perhaps in recognition that style is the least important skill for a journalist, Barbara Ellis begins her Copy-Editing and Headline Writing Handbook by focusing on headlines, and this is the strength of the book. Starting off with headlines is a novel approach and one that should be studied by others. Most copy editing books and workbooks (and I am guilty of this, too) begin with grammar and punctuation exercises. This is a sure turnoff for students and may be one of the reasons that so few look to careers in copy editing. I've often thought that an even more untraditional approach to teaching copy editing would be to start with layout. Many students are computer savvy enough - or want to be - to jump right in with QuarkXPress or Pagemaker. …

"That's Not What We Meant to Do": Reform and Its Unintended Consequences in Twentieth-Century America

Someone once remarked that Prohibition failed because no one realized how innately American it was to drink. A similar disjunction of expectations and results pervades this fascinating study of five key areas of modern public policy—welfare, civil rights, mental health, immigration, and campaign finance reform. In a series of short essays, Steven M. Gillon demonstrates how institutions, politics, and events transform laws in unintended ways. Circumstances change. A key component of welfare, designed to keep a mother at home with her children, became anachronistic and dysfunctional in a later era when mothers were expected to enter the labor force. Ideologies change. The faith in integration that propelled the deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill was tested in a later era when the mentally ill morphed into the homeless. Other branches of government alter congressional intent, as in the vigorous bureaucratic enforcement of the 1964 Civil Rights Act that led to affirmative action. Furthermore, sometimes things simply do not work out as planned. The 1965 immigration law contained a section that allowed family members of foreigners legally settled in this country to live in this country. That section brought far more people of Asian origins to America than the authors of the legislation anticipated. In a similar manner, campaign finance reform unfolded in ways that would have surprised its original congressional proponents in the Watergate era.

Popular Satisfaction with the Party System and Representative Democracy in the United States

There are a variety of explanations for diminished levels of popular support for American government, institutions, and leaders evident since the Watergate era. Prominent theories focus on the changing nature of US political culture or perceptions of economic conditions. A plausible alternative explanation is that citizens feel inadequately represented by agents of government, and that the linkages facilitating representation no longer function effectively. Although the role of political parties often is portrayed as declining, parties still have the potential to be meaningful conduits for citizen representation. The article examines explanations for public support or alienation from various dimensions of the political system, focusing on citizens' orientations toward political parties. In general, it finds a strong connection between citizens' partisanship and feelings about political parties and their support for the political regime and democratic processes.

¡Yo! , and: A Crime in the Neighborhood , and: Edouard Manet: Rebel in a Frock Coat , and: Love Warps the Mind a Little , and: Inventing Mark Twain: The Lives of Samuel Langhorne Clemens , and: Tropical Classical: Essays from Several Directions , and: The Perfect Storm: A True Story of Men Against the Sea , and: Celibates

? S ' emews^L 1 ;??/ by Julia Alvarez Algonquin, 309 pp., 1997, $18.95 Julia Alvarez' first two novels, How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents and In the Time of the Butterflies, explore with pathos and humor the political plight of two Dominican families, the Garcías and the Mirabals . ¡Yol is a less politically charged continuation of the Garcia saga, but the Garcías do find a spy of sorts in their midst: Yolanda García, more familiarly known as "Yo." Yo is a writer who uses her own family as fictional fodder. This, of course, causes the Garcías much distress and confusion; her sisters find themselves inadvertently quoting their characters, and her mother threatens to sue her. But Yo's encounters with her family are only a small part of the story. The novel, which spans Yo's life from her childhood to the present, is a collection of observations about Yo from family, friends, lovers, and even a stalker. The portrait that emerges is of a woman who carelessly plunges into several marriages , yet gingerly and patiently forges a complicated relationship with her stepdaughter. The Yo that is described in the first half of the novel is infuriating and ingratiating, honest in her writing but often dishonest in life. Unfortunately, Alvarez does not sustain this multidimensional characterization of Yo. Yo's encounters with her domestically abused landlady and an illiterate Dominican farmer are resolved too neatly; her ability to help them turn their lives completely around seems out of character for a woman whose own life is constantly in chaos. Such easy resolutions are also a somewhat contrived means of presenting Yo as a sympathetic character. Yet what makes Yo so engaging for the majority of the novel is that she isn't saintly; her artistic gift doesn't grant her moral authority over others. Also troubling is that Yo is the most static character in the novel. One of the strengths of Alvarez' previous works was her deft handling of many speakers whose points of view both reinforced and contradicted one another, resulting in stories which were at once personal and sweeping. In comparison, ¡Yo! is an entertaining read and an interesting examination of the personal toll writing takes on those who find their own lives fictionalized, but the novel ultimately lacks the lingering emotional impact of Alvarez' prior work. (KL) 206 · The Missouri Review A Crime in the Neighborhood by Suzanne Berne Algonquin, 1997, 285 pp., $17.95 This startling debut novel presents a wholesome neighborhood in Maryland as a microcosm of the Watergate Era. The protagonist, Marsha, is an eerily observant ten year old whose peculiar misinterpretations of the problems surrounding her are byproducts of this time of calamitous social change. Though the book's title primarily refers to the murder of a twelve-year-old boy from Marsha's presumably safe community, it also describes a multitude of other events that take place in the course of the novel: Marsha's father's affair with her eccentric aunt; his neglect of the family at a time when everything around them seems to be failing apart; and the scandals occurring right around the corner in Washington , D.C., which provide a backdrop for the story. A naive child surrounded by symbols of domestic and political turmoil, Marsha is overwhelmed by the question , "Why do people hurt each other?" Fascinated and frustrated with the confusing mechanics of pain, she records clues concerning the murder and other neighborhood "crimes" in a painstakingly detailed notebook. Recalling the start of this project, she remarks, "I had never realized our house contained so many damaged things. Soon it seemed I couldn't look at anything without finding something wrong with it." This statement foreshadows the paranoia with which Marsha comes to view her entire neighborhood, as she dedicates herself to monitoring the trivial activities of particular neighbors. The adults in this story, much like Marsha, are propelled by fierce determination and a lack of understanding . When news of the boy's murder breaks, several fathers establish a "Night Watch," in which they take turns patrolling the community in a futile search for evidence . Marsha's next door neighbor...

On the Politics Skowronek Makes

Although there is an enormous literature on presidential leadership, only a handful of books on the subject shape the terms of debate regarding the place of the presidency in the American political order. Edward Corwin's classic, The President: Office and Powers, written during the New Deal, and Arthur Schlesinger Jr.'s Imperial Presidency, written during the Watergate era, are examples of such constitutive texts. Each reconceptualized the understanding of presidential leadership and connected that understanding to problems in the political order as a whole: they were synoptic, as well as constitutive texts.

"Mainstream" Public Administration over Time: A Topical Content Analysis of Public Administration Review

This article focuses on the question, how have the theoretical and substantive concerns of the public administration community changed over time? in other words: What is mainstream public administration and how has it changed? To answer this question, we analyzed the contents of a sample of over 50 years of PAR articles. The Classification Scheme Content analysis presupposes the existence of a scheme of content categories for use in text classification. The task of distinguishing the appropriate category for a particular PAR article required identification of the salient attributes of that article and matching these attributes with the characteristic attributes of one of the content categories. Articles in the same category were presumed to have similar identifiable attributes. The idea behind this approach was to use established empirical methods to answer the research question by drawing inferences from the frequency with which PAR articles appeared in the various categories. The frequencies of articles in categories were presumed to reflect the relative emphasis placed by public administrators and academics on the corresponding activity areas. Likewise, changes in these frequencies over time were presumed to reflect corresponding changes in emphasis in the field. In addition, different people must classify the same article in the same way. It turned out that the pertinent categories presented themselves with notable clarity through examination of consistencies across introductory public administration textbooks; a more-or-less common classification scheme was used by textbook authors. Such categories offered a highly respectable approximation to administrative activity. Thus an article about public finance could be readily categorized differently, for example, from an article about human resources management or organizational theory. The introductory textbooks upon which the category scheme was based included Denhardt (1991), Henry (1989), Palumbo and Maynard-Moody (1991), Rosenbloom (1988), and Straussman (1990). Through a review of these texts, we clustered public administration interest and activity into 14 distinct categories. Table 1 presents abbreviated definitions of the topical categories derived from the texts reviewed. [TABULAR DATA 1 OMITTED] Expectations It was hypothesized that the emphasis given to the various categories in PAR would shift over the years. For example, we expected that the percentage of articles devoted to the category intergovernmental relations would be fairly limited during the 1940s and 1950s but would then blossom during the 1960s as intergovernmental programs expanded under the administration of Lyndon Johnson. Interest in intergovernmental relations was then expected to remain fairly high during the 1970s as block grants and revenue sharing appeared and as scholars wrote of an overloaded and ineffective system. Concern was expected to remain at a fairly high level during the early 1980s as debate about President Reagan's attempted devolution of federal programs to the states occurred. A different pattern might be expected concerning the number of articles dealing primarily with ethics in public administration. A concern with ethical issues in government might be viewed as a fairly recent phenomenon--reaching back to about the Watergate era. From an academic perspective, however, a significant concern with ethical issues in public administration is probably even more recent--a characteristic of the 1980s. The two categories, implementation and program evaluation/planning, were expected to exhibit similar patterns of interest. Interest in implementation essentially dates back only to Pressman and Wildavsky's book, Implementation (1973). The concern that they, and others, raised--that many government programs do not work--led legislative bodies and grantors to require that planning and evaluation be an integral part of most programs. …

The Limits of White House Image Control

Gerald R. Ford became president under the most unusual circumstances in United States history. Unelected, he ascended to the nation's highest office, never having sought that coveted position. In fact, he never sought to do more than to faithfully represent his constituents in Michigan's 5th Congressional District and perhaps to become the Speaker of the House. Before Richard M. Nixon chose him in October 1973 to be vice president, Ford had contemplated soon retiring from public life. Fate dealt Ford a different future and presidential scholars a unique administration to study. This article focuses on the early stage of Ford's press relations the euphoric post-Nixon honeymoon through the unpopular Nixon pardon -as seen through the eyes of key Ford White House media advisers. The author interviewed Ford's media advisers to develop insight into an important transitional period in the relationship between the presidency and the press. The interview data show how administration insiders, as well as the president, perceived and responded to the unique situation they found themselves in after the Nixon resignation. That context must be emphasized in any effort to understand Ford's press relations. As a number of studies show, the Watergate era was a water-

Political Finance and Political Reform: The Experience with State Income Tax Checkoffs

This article is a comparative analysis of state income tax checkoff programs adopted between 1973 and 1979 that grew out of the Watergate era and were intended to reform methods of political finance in state elections. The descriptive characteristics of these programs are examined, their economic performance, factors contributing to economic success and program type, and the political behavior of taxpayers choosing whether to exercise the checkoff option and, if so, which suboptions they choose. Finally, a reform model based on recent works is offered as a basis for judging the performance of tax checkoffs. It is suggested that the performance of most checkoff programs falls considerably short of the expectations of the model.